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Another thing to remember when trying to equate all these objects of bullying and discrimination is that they are not all the same.
GSAs have been singled out by the Catholic School Board because unlike race, body image or nerdiness, it challenges church dogma, and in some places the law.
They are so threatened by them that they banned rainbows, for heaven sakes
And Mr Tea, the fact that some kids wouldn't think of joining such a group is even more reason for some brave people to stand up and do so - to make it clear there is no us and them when it comes to support and tolerance.
While I agree this is true in Canada today, interracial couples (generally a white person with a non-white person) were (and are in the state of Kentucky) banned from certain churches. It was, in fact, illegal for interracial couples to marry until a short while ago (around the 1960s).
This is why being an ally is so important. This is why GSAs matter. Because whoever's in the target zone, you could be next. And you know, because it's the right and just and equitable thing to do.
The issue is not bullying. The issue is the right to organize.
Actually, the more specific real issue in this thread is the stance of publicly funded Catholic school boards who refuse to have the word "gay" appear in any recognized aspect of school life, because of the dicta of the Vatican. There are lots of school boards and university administrations don't give student bodies full and unlicensed freedom to organize clubs and call them whatever they want. But few of them say:
"Ok, Jews can have a club, because the law forces us to let them - but you can't use 'Jewish' in the name because Jewishness is contrary to the moral code that we follow."
Replace "Jews" by African-Canadians or women or disabled, and you get a feeling for what's going on here.
On the other hand, the right to organize isn't absolute. If students want to organize a "Students for Hitler" club, we'd all agree to say no. If they wanted to organize a "Students for the Criminalization of all Abortion", I would fully support the school board saying "NEVER". Not everyone would.
So, the issue here really is, the homophobic anti-human stance of the Catholic Church and more specifically, the attempts of some of its devotees to attack human rights in the public sphere.
More than enough reasons why people should once and for all burn their altar boy outfits.
@ Maysie #33
True, thanks. I remember reading that unbelievable story.
As you point out, There are some organizations which do whatever the fuck they want when their power is unchecked (right up to murder). What is more surprising is the degree to which governments and people sometimes let them get away with it, because religious dogma is somehow thought to trump everything.
Trinity Western University "won" (actually they lost, in part, but more about that later) a case at the Supreme Court of Canada some years ago regarding their failure to properly prepare teachers for the public school system.
Seems that they were teaching their students in the education program that homosexuality is evil (a sin), queers are evil, etc. The matter came up in the context of the BC College of Teachers insisting that these students take their 5th year at SFU as part of their professional preparedness to become teachers. Anyway, TWU won at the SCC. The court at the time was only "grudgingly prepared to acknowledge the rights of homosexuals" (Thomas Berger) and, as has been noted upthread, if the issue were Jews or Afro-Canadians or women there would be no debate among the Justices. The Court decided that since the BCCT hadn't provided examples where these unprepared TWU teachers were a menace to children (whatever) , therefore TWU could "prepare" their students for the full 5 years without a year at SFU.
The good part of the ruling was that the religious bigots (TWU, the Catholics, and all the rest of the misogynistic, misanthropic lot) lost when it comes to carving out a space where their offensive views are "protected" by virtue of being their "religious" views. Berger: "... TWU, the Evangelical Free Church and the Roman Catholic Bishops had failed in the attempt to carve out of section 15 a zone of immunity for their religious beliefs." And that was the good part of the SCC ruling. Thomas Berger wrote a very good piece explaining why the court made a mistake in regard to the rest of it.
One aspect of the Court ruling worth noting was the line that they drew between belief and conduct. Canadians can have the most despicable beliefs and the state is fine with that as long as they don't act on those beliefs. But the court made a mistake in replacing concerns about professional preparedness of teachers with demands for proof of harm to children and let "freedom of religion" trump equality rights in the Charter.
The ruling took place at a time when sexual orientation had only recently been added to the list of protected criteria in the law. And the judges, whatever their "progressive" credentials, are a conservative lot.
See Duelling Charter Rights in Berger, One Man's Justice: A Life in the Law
Here is the horrendous Supreme Court decision referenced above by ikosmos.
The sole dissent, by Mme Justice L'Heureux-Dubé, makes a refreshing contrast with the dinosaur logic of the majority, who actually ruled that a ban by the phony Christian "teachers' college" on homosexual behaviour on the part of students did not necessarily discriminate against homosexual students (yeah, I said dinosaur logic). She commented:
Thanks for this reference, ikosmos. It shows how far we've come, and how far we haven't.
THe fact is that people then were just as intelligent and perceptive as we are now. And it hardly matters that we are talking about decades past rather than about Roman times (when people were also just as intelligent and perceptive, and in some ways moreso).
I'm not getting my back up about heaping scorn on opinions of the past, any more than I get outraged about Tommy Douglas refering to homosexuality as a sickness, as part of an argument for decriminalizing it.
But I do think distancing ourselves from those actions is a mistake and a pointless exercise, and a denial of our own limited perspective. That is what mainstream-thinking people came up with at that time. Before we go distancing ourselves from those decisions perhaps we should consider how our actions will look in 50 years or so.
I would hope they have the compassion to realise that their (hopefully) greater insight was built on our learning process.
Er, Smith, that's eloquent, but the Supreme Court decision was not "decades past" It was decade past. Canada's ban on "homosexual behaviour" was repealed in 1969. These judges just happened to have a mental fart in 2001. L'Heureux-Dubé got it right, as did the B.C. Court of Appeal. The important issue is that today, there are still publicly-funded educational authorities poisoning young minds and humiliating and marginalizing children on the basis of their sexual orientation.
That notwithstanding, Unionist, we have no call to get high and mighty. Time makes no difference at all.
Look around you . Have we really learned anything? I could just as easily lay out an argument that we are way more fucking stupid than people were 60 or 100 years ago. At least they had the good sense to realize where their food and water came from.
The issue in this particular ruling, among others, is that if this had been a case of other protected criteria being violated then the justices would not have ruled the way they did. If TWU was teaching their prospective teachers that Jews were the cause of all that's wrong in "Western Civilization", or that women are inferior and belong barefood and pregnant in the kitchen, or that Africans are a mentally inferior race, there's no doubt that their ruling would have been different and they would not have waited for "evidence of harm" from such odious views before putting the boots to TWU (and insisting that part of the education of the prospective teachers be at SFU where such monstrous views are not supported by that institution).
The Province of BC has recently abolished the professional body for teachers, the BC College of Teachers (BCCT), and replaced it with a puppet organization to better represent THEIR odious views. The current Premier of BC Christy Clark was Education Obersturmführer, or Minister, in charge of attacking teachers around the time of the SCC ruling. In any case, the recent change has basically stopped BC teachers from being a self-regulating and therefore professional organization. It is important in this case because it was the BCCT that was involved in the SCC case that I've mentioned here in the credentialing issues around TWU.
Would such a case even come up now, what with the gutting of the BCCT? Who knows?
"At least they had the good sense to realize where their food and water came from."
Good goddess, the appeal to naturalism... this is always a fun one. Living in an age where half of us don't have to farm, (and, oh, by the by, we have much better food safety standards thanks to people writing 100 or so years ago, like Upton Sinclair) does not make us a less virtuous society, despite the easy deep ecological classism.
Yes, we should use less pesticides and fossil fuels in our farming, favour renewables and focus on reclaiming land, and there are perverse incentives that cause what would be, in purely utilitarian terms, diseconomies of scale, but Gwynne Dyer is right: Ditching the industrialization of farming would be an even bigger catastrophe than we are currently facing wrt global warming.
And my water comes treated with alum, chlorine and flouride, and filtered through sand and charcoal, (Yes, the city runs a huge Brita, I see no reason I should duplicate their work) as does most clean fresh water able to serve a significant population from the North Saskatchewan, fed by rainfall and the Columbia ice field, which is on pace to last about a century if we face a precambrian climate and if we haven't got solar powered desalination by then, we truly have failed to handle ourselves as a type 0.7 society. I don't even want to get into the misogyny frequently presenting itself in appeals to naturalism and fear of a pink planet, as though a world where 75% were female-identifed would be noticeably worse (or better on any metric other than my dating prospects) than a world where 51% are now.
Okay, if you don't think your food and water is a problem, let me put it terms that might be easier to relate to.
At least they would have good sense to know how to get their cars started in -30 with no electricity.
My point was that we may have more information than people back then in some things, and we may, thanks to them, have a more reformed society in some things.
But we are no more intelligent. I seriously doubt we are more compassionate. And in many ways we are far more dependent on our society, and far less connected to the things which keep us alive.
But you can agree or not. This is as far enough off-topic as I care to go.
Water, water everywhere, but what's the thread about?
Catholic hate groups?
It's about a month late, by my watch.
From the Are You Fucking Kidding Me?!?! files:
Gay-Straight Alliances Become Respecting Differences clubs.
Hooray, Leanne Iskander!
And, Ontario Catholic School Trustees' Association? I'll give you a club.
Has anyone considered or initiated legal action on this issue?
I do know there was a legal challenge initiated against the whole idea of a catholic board... which in my mind is even better than going after them one issue at a time. The problem is the board itself shouldn't be legal.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/13/ontario-woman-launches-legal-challenge-to-catholic-schools-taxpayer-funding/
Mr. Tea, I see nobody has provided a suffient rebutle to your comments, so I will. You raise some valid observations about Gay Straight Alliances, even if, officially, they're there for all different minorities, but your main point is off.
No, you're missing the fundamental reason Catholic schools don't want these Gay Straight Alliances to be called Gay Straight Alliances. They don't want it named at such because of thoughtfulness and reflection, rather it's the homophobic and archaic doctrine of the Catholic church. That's exactly why it's being framed as religious rights versus freedom of expression - because that's exactly what it is. Should their religion be more relevant than what's actually relevant - today and now.
I agree and recongize your observations about the mere notion of a Gay Straight Alliance of not being inclusive enough, and sexuality isn't the exclusive area for bullying in schools. But, that does not justify baning the formation or naming of these clubs as such. Especially if you're using xenophobic mythology to back it up.
Furthermore, remember, I don't just have to argue this from a philosophical perspective - I can argue this from a legal one, since in Ontario Catholic Schools are... the government. They recieve public funding and are subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It could be argued that prohibiting Gay Straight Alliances is unconstitutional (freedom of expression, no discrimination against gays, for example). So there's a legal qualme here along with the philsophical and moral.
Yay!
College asked to investigate Catholic principal who banned gay-straight alliance
.
Welcome Nationhood and thank you for your incredibly lucid and perceptive summing up of the issue. I sincerely hope that you'll continue to post at babble.
Just wondering, but did anyone here go to a Catholic School in Ontario? I did.
I went to Catholic School in Alberta. Sex education was awful, and I definitely learned that I don't like catholicism, or organized religion in general, from it, and honestly, LGBT kids were invisible in both systems in my day... now there are trans kids at the aforementioned catholic high schools. I take this as a measure of progress, Bill 44's home schooling lite or no.
I don't remember much about Sex Education, other than we learned it all in Elementary School, I only remember having one class on it in high school, and that was in religion class. The only things I can really remember learning about were "how babies are made" and something about STD/STIs. I can only ever remember one of my teachers talking about being gay, and he seemed to act like he was fine with it. He also said it was okay if we didn't wait until we were married to have sex, just so long as we waited until we were ready. Granted, I only graduated from there a few years ago, I'm not sure what it would be like their now to be LGBT, but their were certainly a few students there who were and didn't try to hide it.
Ontario tightens Bill 13 so school boards can't reject GSAs
I doubt we've heard the last of this. The Catholic school boards can take the case to court and they stand a good chance of winning.
A key precedent here with many common factors is the case of Trinity Western University v. British Columbia College of Teachers about a decade ago. Because TWU expressly taught that homosexuality was sinful (etc.), its teacher education graduates were not certified by the BC College of Teachers because of the discriminatory nature of the school's teachings. The lower courts ruled in favour of the BCCT decision but the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of Trinity Western and said that the religious freedom charter rights overruled the human rights issue of the school's anti-gay beliefs.
The decision can be read in full here: http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2001/2001scc31/2001scc31.html
It was not unanimous, and Justice L’Heureux‑Dubé's dissenting opinion is also of interest.
So we may see an Ontario reprise. The negative publicity ensuing could help erode support for funding Catholic schools with tax dollars.