Muslim parents urged to keep kids in anti-homophobia classes
www.cbc.ca, CBC News, Nov 17 ’04

Since I believe that parents are responsible for how their children are educated, I find everything about this incident in November to be absolutely amazing.

Note that the same problem would apply if the reverse situation existed in which parents who believed in homosexuality were pressured to keep their children in a religious class that condemned homosexuality.

The Muslim parents asked that their children be excluded from these classes. They had to ask?!

The Toronto District School Board rejected the parents’ request. They rejected it?! What?!

They said it “would violate the rights of children with same-sex parents.” What?!  

No.

The school officials violated the real rights of the parents who do not want their children in these classes. The parents who are in turmoil are the ones placed in this predicament by the educational agenda.

To top it all off, both the Premier of Ontario Dalton McGuinty and the Education Minister Gerard Kennedy felt free to publicly instruct the parents on how they should feel about the classes and how they should feel about their children learning ideas they do not hear at home! Maybe they should resign from their positions of intimidation first before continuing with new careers in preaching. They can set up their own personal websites.

Unless all parents agree with the subject matter, the schools should not allow it to be taught in the classroom. Such topics should not be discussed in the public school system at all – because there will almost always be at least one parent – and in reality many – who do not agree. Controversial topics should not be in the public school system. Ontarians are forced to pay for the public school system and it should not be used to dump all over their beliefs. Period.

Why is this hard to understand for some people? Because they want to force conformity. They want to mould minds using tax-funded institutions. They want control. They are right, everyone else is wrong, and they have it all worked out for you and your children. They cannot tolerate attempting to persuade others of their point of view peacefully. Even less can they just let people disagree!

In fact this incident demonstrates how totally impossible it will be for many parents to keep their children in the public school system. The public school system in Ontario was always a mistake. It belongs to another time when we all thought we had the same beliefs. And now this old instrument of conformity is being charged up to new levels of invasiveness.

Is the world full of people with no sense? Yes. They cannot just let the parents solve the problem their own way. What kind of nerve do these officials have! Does this kind of action make for peace? Not at all.

The full bully-weight of the Ontario government was brought to bear on these parents. The Premier reveals himself as the Chief Social Engineer of Ontario with our personal thoughts and beliefs as his business.

Government and school officials apparently do not see their actions as they really are – intimidation and abuse of power. Somehow we have allowed them to entertain this false belief that they have the authority to shape the attitudes and minds of others’ children.

This type of interference by officials in the religious concerns of parents would have been totally unacceptable just a few years ago in a province where people where aware of their traditional freedoms. This behavior should remain unacceptable and everyone should condemn it. We are already in the midst of a new phase in our history where governments are testing the waters of societal control to see how far they can push us.

(Original Post)