McGuinty: Catholic schools will use the word ‘gay’

TORONTO, Ontario, December 20, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Premier Dalton McGuinty presses forward with his controversial “anti-bullying” bill, he is invoking his Catholic faith to justify his effort to impose “gay” clubs on the province’s Catholic schools in violation of Catholic teaching. The premier has been emphatically using the homosexual activist preferred term “gay” (see video) and its current association with the broad homosexual sub-culture or lifestyle.

“I fully expect that Catholic kids are going to use the word ‘gay,”’ McGuinty told reporters earlier this month, after emphasizing that the anti-bullying bill requires schools to allow students to set up gay-straight alliances, though not necessarily under that name.

“I fully expect that Catholic teachers are going to use the word gay, and as a Catholic premier of Ontario I’m going to be talking about gay kids,” he added.

McGuinty’s “Accepting Schools Act”, which was tabled Nov. 30th and is undergoing second reading, seeks to impose tougher consequences, including expulsion, for “bullying and hate-motivated actions,” with a special emphasis on “sexual orientation”.

The bill, which comes as part of the Premier’s ongoing effort to reform the province’s “attitudes” on homosexuality, would require schools to support students who want to “establish and lead … organizations with the name gay-straight alliance or another name.”

The measure has been slammed by religious groups who say it is a direct threat to family values and religious freedom.  At a press conference earlier this month organized by Tory MPP Frank Klees, Jewish, Muslim, Evangelical, and Catholic leaders gathered to make that point.

Charles McVety of the Institute for Canadian Values said McGuinty is using bullying as a façade to push his “radical sex education agenda.”

“To force, especially Christian classrooms or schools, to have homosexual clubs would of course be an affront to their family values,” McVety said.

“This legislation proposes that children be indoctrinated to reject their parents’ faith and their parents’ family values, and that’s an affront,” said Rabbi Mendel Kaplan of Chabad Flamingo Synagogue in Toronto.

Jack Fonseca of Campaign Life Catholic said that rather than combating bullying, the bill is actually “about forcing Catholic schools to accept curriculum which undermines Catholic morality on marriage and sexuality.”

“It is about using the classroom as a vehicle to indoctrinate children into embracing a new sexual revolution, pushed by the activist-groups to whom Dalton McGuinty is beholden,” Fonseca explained.

Dr. Rondo Thomas, executive director of the Evangelical Association, warned about a particularly concerning passage of the bill that bars individuals and groups from using school space unless they are “consistent with the code of conduct.”

Noting that hundreds of Evangelical churches rent school auditoriums for Sunday worship, Thomas said, “The government must not attempt to control worship services under the guise of an ever changing code of conduct.”

“When preaching and teaching the scriptures there will be passages that will speak to issues of sexuality that are spoken by God that no man has the authority to eliminate or revoke or change,” he continued.  “In such cases the pastor could possibly be in breach of the proposed legislation, thus limiting religious freedom.”

Education Minister Laurel Broten has dismissed the religious groups’ concerns as “homophobic.”

She told high school students in Guelph this week that the government hopes their focus on changing children’s attitudes will in turn lead to children then educating their parents.

Regarding gay clubs, the “anti-bullying” bill would enact in law a government policy, which McGuinty revealed at the Toronto Gay Pride parade in July, that all publicly-funded schools in the province must allow student-run homosexual support groups.

The Ministry of Education has told LifeSiteNews that such groups cannot help homosexually-inclined students “reform their sexuality.”

While many in the Catholic establishment have supported such groups, Canada’s Catholic bishops have been clear that in such situations silence about the Church’s teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts is gravely dangerous.  “Avoidance of difficult questions or watering down the Church’s teaching is always a disservice,” the bishops wrote in June.  “Such attitudes could lead young people into grave moral danger.”

To respectfully present your views to the Bishops of Ontario they may be contacted here.

To contact your MPP to express your view see here.