Sad day for religious freedom in Canada

The Drummondville parents lost big time in today's Supreme Court of Canada decision.  The mandatory nature of Quebec's mandatory Ethics and Religious Culture program was upheld and parents do not have a right on religious freedom or conscience grounds to exempt their children from the course.

Here's a link to today's decision:

LifeSiteNews.com was first out of the gate with reaction.  Here's an excerpt.  

“Exposing children to a comprehensive presentation of various religions without forcing the children to join them does not constitute an indoctrination of students that would infringe the freedom of religion of L and J,” the justices wrote in the majority decision.

The high court’s ruling, released at 9:45 Friday morning, comes in the case of S.L. et al. v. Commission scolare des Chênes et al., which involved a Catholic family who took their school board to court after it refused to grant their child an exemption from the province’s controversial ethics and religious culture course (ERC).
The course, which seeks to present the spectrum of world religions and lifestyle choices from a “neutral” stance, was introduced by the province in 2008 and has been widely criticized by the religious and a-religious alike. Moral conservatives and people of faith have criticized its relativistic approach to moral issues, teaching even at the earliest grades, for instance, that homosexuality is a normal choice for family life.
Despite provincial legislation allowing for exemptions from school curriculum, the Ministry of Education has turned down over 1,700 requests, and had even moved to impose the course on private schools and homeschoolers.
Critics warned that a ruling against the family would have frightening consequences for parental authority and risked emboldening provincial governments across the country as they move to impose their own versions of “diversity” education.
The Supreme Court said the parents failed to establish that the course infringed on their ability to pass their faith on to their children.
“Although the sincerity of a person’s belief that a religious practice must be observed is relevant to whether the person’s right to freedom of religion is at issue, an infringement of this right cannot be established without objective proof of an interference with the observance of that practice,” the Supreme Court justices wrote. “It is not enough for a person to say that his or her rights have been infringed.  The person must prove the infringement on a balance of probabilities.”