Education Ministry’s Descent into Madness

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Jan 2016

The Alberta Ministry of Education have gone bat-guano crazy.  Running around naked in the cold screaming their heads off crazy.  So escaped from their straight-jacket crazy that even American publications like National Review have noticed.

The geniuses at the Ministry of Education flunked biology class, and yet see themselves as superior to Sigmund Freud.  They are fascinated by sex, certain that they know how to treat it, and yet demonstrate that they know nothing about it.  The sex-education classes that the bureaucrats and the Minister took when they were students must have been lacking in something.  Or they benefited from the pass-them-anyway philosophy that still reigns in Alberta schools.

The present manifestation of Ministry madness is its newly released guidelines for respecting diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.  Due to the limitations of the English language for inclusiveness, the document immediately apologies for its own lack of inclusiveness in the terms it employs to cover differing “gender identities and gender expressions.”

The apology lies in the footnote on page 2, and contains this telling passage, “…differ in some way from the sex they were assigned at birth.” (Italics added).  Apparently, Ministry bureaucrats think that a baby’s gender is assigned at birth.  They think the doctor delivering the child made some kind of arbitrary decision.  This is not what is taught in biology class.

Babies are not assigned a gender at birth.  A baby becomes a boy or a girl at the moment of conception, when the chromosomes of the father are joined with those of the mother to form a new human being.  A boy possesses an XY chromosomal pair while a girl an XX pair.  Our physical reality is sealed at conception.

We are fated to be boy or girl, man or woman, a husband or a wife, a mom or a dad, at the moment we are conceived.  Besides possessing these invisible chromosomes, boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives, moms and dads possess certain perceptible physical differences which distinguish one from the other.  The Alberta Ministry of Education denies the significance of these physical differences.

The Alberta Ministry of Education thinks that what lies between the legs is insignificant compared to what lies between the ears.  They hold that what an individual thinks in his or her mind is consequential, while physical reality is not.  What one hallucinates is consequential, while actual reality may be harmful and certainly inconvenient, according to Ministry thinking.  The Ministry argues for insanity.

The Ministry is forcing its insane view of reality upon the school systems of Alberta.  The teachers and administrators of Alberta are now expected to play-pretend when faced with a student or staff member who identifies as ‘transsexual, gender fluid, gender diverse, agender, two-spirited, queer, or questioning.’

A boy who wants to be a girl will be allowed to use the girl’s washroom under the new guidelines.  The rights of actual girls to use the “girl’s” washroom without the presence of an anatomical male with sex issues are overridden by the need to provide for an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere for him with the sex issues.

Playing-pretend with certain students and staff extends to the use of the pronouns by which they expect to be addressed.  The English words, “he” and “she” are insufficiently inclusive, apparently, even for a he that wishes he was a she; and a student or staff may require that non-words “ze”, “zir’, or “hir” be employed in reference to him or her.  There is no guidance in the guidelines as to how these non-words are to be pronounced.

Boys who want to be girls will be allowed to dress as girls.  Specifically, school dress-codes and uniforms are not to imply that clothing such as skirts will be worn by one gender only.  The sheer incoherence of this madness is obvious.

If a boy really thinks he is a girl, then it is pointless to tell him that it’s okay for skirts to be worn by boys also.  He wears a skirt because he thinks he’s a girl!  Boys don’t wear skirts, girls do, and that is why he is wearing one!

But everybody knows that a lie is being told.  The boy knows he is a boy who only wants to play-pretend as a girl.  The Ministry knows too but instead of honesty requires that teachers and staff play along with this charade.

Physical reality is what it is regardless of what we think.  Alberta opts to hallucinate.

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Christians: Eat Dirt or be Destroyed: Alberta Minister of Education

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Jan 2016

A letter to Alberta Minister of Education, Mr. David  Eggen.

Mr. Eggen;

I write to you out of concern for the matters raised by His Excellency Bishop Fred Henry in his recent Pastoral Letter, “Totalitarianism in Alberta.”   In particular, I am concerned about the instructions issued by you in respect of measures intended to “foster a sense of belonging,” and to “respect diversity.”

Permit me to ask parenthetically, where is the respect for diversity in your imperial edict?

You inform the various school boards that you expect them to address their responsibilities as they relate to the LGBTQ community.  What would those responsibilities be?  A school board is formed for the education of children, and their responsibilities are to the children, their parents, and the taxpayers.  I don’t see where an “LGBTQ community” enters into it.

I see in Section 16.1 of the Alberta Schools Act that you have had inserted a requirement for the creation of school clubs intended to foster pleasant-sounding objectives: anti-bullying clubs, and a club named either “Gay-Straight Alliance” or “Queer-Straight Alliance.”

That those currently fashionable names were inserted into an Act of Provincial Parliament is odd.  They point unmistakably at their origin: the fascist wing of the LGBTQ community, the community to which, you hold, the School Boards of Alberta have a particular responsibility.

One has to recur to the re-education camps of the Chinese Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to discover the origin of this brutal technique of forcing changes in cultural outlook upon a reluctant society.  After great damage, it ultimately didn’t work in China because people became fed up with both the extremism of the method and the absurdity of its content.  No amount of chanting, brow-beating, threats, and bribery could make black into white.  Facts are stubborn things, as Winston Churchill once said.  Drive off nature and she returns at a gallop is a wise saying attributable to the French.

I get it that the LGBTQ community has brow-beaten the Alberta government into submission, and that LGBTQ activities are to be promoted with the force of government behind them.  Do you really think that the exercise of brute political power to foster the social and political aims of the LGBTQ community is going to promote tolerance, diversity, and understanding?  Do you really think that a tactic of “love me, or else!” is going to achieve the aim of social acceptance?

I think the opposite: that the reaction to your brutal methods will create conditions worse than the present disease.  Your overreach will itself become the issue.

Do not be surprised if you find few straight people in one of these clubs.  What straight kid would want it known that he or she belongs to a Queer-Straight Alliance?  The first question the kid will be asked is which end of the Alliance does he or she belong to?  What adult would get involved in supervising such a club, perhaps one with a predatory intent?  What would one of these clubs do, engage in group hugs?  How often would they meet, and what would they organize that is not exclusively gay or queer?  (These clubs are supposed to be alliances with straight kids, remember!)  How, in the absence of straight kids, does an “alliance” develop?

If you want to conduct a social experiment on public school children, then do so.  But remember, it is an experiment, requiring skilled observation and quantitation of observable variables.  If you aren’t doing this, then you aren’t serious.  I see nowhere in your pronouncements or in the Act a requirement for measurement to determine whether or not the aims of Section 16.1 are being met by the means stipulated.  So you aren’t serious.

Let’s be serious.  You must respect the rights of the Catholic community.  This community should be left out of your precious social experiment.  In the first place, if you are going to conduct a social experiment, then you are going to need a control group, and the Catholic community, through Bishop Henry, has volunteered to be it.

The Catholic church has been in the education business since the fall of the Roman Empire.  Some of the greatest minds that mankind has ever produced have over the past two millennia developed Catholic teaching as we know it today.  Have you ever heard of St. Augustine?  The greatest philosopher since Aristotle was Thomas Aquinas, who was a Dominican monk and taught in the Sorbonne in Paris in the 13^th century.  Have you ever heard of scholasticism, or of scholastic education?  Did you think the phrase, “scholastic education” was just an empty expansion of the word “education”?

Do you think that after hearing confessions for two thousand years the Catholic Church has no understanding of the human condition?  Do you think the Catholic Church doesn’t know right from wrong?

Do you think the Catholic Church has no rational basis at all for believing what it does?  Have you ever heard of Natural Law?  Have you ever heard of the Jesuits?  The intellectual weight behind the teaching of the Catholic church is something few understand, and no one from the fascist wing of the LGBTQ community wants it to be understood.

As Bishop Henry mentioned in his pastoral letter, the your attempt to normalize LGBTQ behaviours and foist that moral position upon Catholic schools runs contrary to the Loyola case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada last year.  While that decision rested largely on freedom of religion grounds, an unspoken basis of the decision was the embarrassing contrast between the course on ethics and tolerance imposed by Quebec and the intellectual soil it would have encountered at Loyola, a good Jesuit school.

Catholic ethics simply cannot be taught from a neutral perspective (if such a place exists) because Thomas Aquinas rationally demonstrated those ethics in his works on natural law and ethics.  It makes no sense to speak of a neutral perspective concerning something that is rationally demonstrated.  One can choose to be rational and accept the proven point, or be irrational.

Secularism is rationally incoherent.  Secularism is a religion of anti-religion.  The secular assertion that one religion is pretty much of the same value as another is simply false on the basis of Thomist analysis.  Moreover, to say that because one religion has pretty much the same value as another requires that one ought to be tolerant of other religions is a non-sequitor.  Students in a Jesuit school would quickly pick up on that.

The objective of the Quebec provincial course was to inculcate the idea that other religions and ethical traditions were deserving of respect and tolerance.  It does so by laying down dogmatically the secular notion of moral and ethical relativism.  Thomists can reach a conclusion approximating respect and tolerance without falling into the error, as the secular course must, of saying that the ancient Hindu practice of Suttee, and the Muslim tradition of genital mutilation are things to be accepted rather than abhorred.

You cannot rationally impose views of moral relativism upon Catholic students.  They will either react negatively because they hate the obvious lie and the implicit assumption that they are stupid, or they will cease to be Catholic.  And you can’t expect a Catholic Board in good faith to handle such dynamite.

The basis of imposing Gay-Straight Alliances and Queer-Straight Alliances upon schools was to cure society of “homophobia.”  This was the cure demanded by the fascist wing of the LGBTQ community.  Do you really think it is going to work?  Do you really think the abnormal can be normalized by instruction?  The very words, “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer” are names of things that deviate from the norm!  That norm is heterosexuality.  Without heterosexuality the human species would not carry on to the next generation.  So there is a real difference between LGBTQ and normal human beings.  This difference cannot be hidden or denied.  It has been recognized throughout human history.  And you think your experts can change the unchangeable, hide the unhideable, gloss over a profound difference by means of provincially imposed clubs and courses on arbitrary, chop-logic ethics?  What is the point of attempting such absurdity except as a salve to the fascist elements of the LGBTQ community?  Kids are smarter than you think they are.

The reason why the fascist wing of the LGBTQ community required the imposition of Article 16.1 of the Schools Act was to force Catholic and other Christian institutions to eat dirt, or be destroyed.  You are acting as their agent.

You must stop.  You must find a way to leave the Catholic Schools alone, free to teach in their in own way, a way that has over 1,500 years of experience behind it and has had some of the finest minds ever born develop its doctrines.

Justice requires that equals be treated equally and unequals be treated unequally.  In respect of humanity, an LGBTQ person is as equal in the eyes of God as a normal person is.  The Catholic church teaches this.  Inequality in respect of sexuality cannot be taught as being equal when it is a fact of nature that they are not.  And Catholic teaching is attuned to the facts of nature.  The content of the teaching you seek to impose is not completely attuned to the facts of nature.

For that reason, you must stop.

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Bishop Henry Calls out Totalitarians at Alberta's Ministry of Education

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Jan 2016

http://www.calgarydiocese.ca/messages-from-the-bishop/1367-pastoral-letter.html

Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary diocese released the pastoral letter at the above link.  This letter was published this Sunday in all the bulletins of the Roman Catholic Churches of Calgary diocese.  The Bishop denounces the Alberta Ministry of Education for its totalitarianism for the imposition of Gay-Straight Alliances and Queer-Straight Alliances upon the Catholic School System of Alberta despite the Loyola Ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada and that much of what the Ministry is trying to impose is either met by current policy or runs clean contrary to Catholic teaching.  Bishop Henry's language was both bracing and refreshing.

Before most of his flock could read his letter, the Calgary Sun had already dug up the usual fascist opponents of free speech and freedom of religion, in particular those drawn from the LBGTQ community. and published their demands for an apology from the Bishop for his "harmful and hateful rhetoric."  The article appears on page 4 of the Saturday, January 16, 2016 edition.

The article drags up one Kris Wells, who is the University of Alberta's director of sexual minority studies and services.  I assume Kris is female; but regardless, where Kris comes from gender identity is purely a social construct and therefore I am entitled to assign a sex to Kris, and female it is.  Kris comes from one of those "studies" faculties, which means what is taught as fact is really opinion, and highly tendentious opinion at that.

The Sun also dragged up the mother of a transgender boy, that is a male who wishes he was female.  She goes unnamed, but she complains about her plight.  She thinks her son should be allowed to use the girl's washroom, or else he might kill himself, or something.  She also purports to know more about the Catholic faith than His Excellency.

As my wife says, show me a mother of a transgendered child and I'll show you a mother who really, really, really wanted a child of the opposite sex.

Also dragged up was one Ian Butterman, a Catholic teacher who was fired for having a sex change operation several years ago and has not been picked up by the public board.

A large cacophony of stinking fish heard all round the world.

I've had it up to here with PC fascism whose only arguments are to say "shut up," and "you are evil." I'm sick and tired of the kowtowing to the sick and the wicked.  That would be the LBGTQ community and its fascist allies in government.  Some of this might appear in the piece below, submitted to the Calgary Sun.

I supposed Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary should tell the LGBTQ fascists to go ‘eff themselves, except, being a holy man, that is precisely what he would advise against.

The ignorance of these LGBTQ fascists is astonishing, but not surprising.  LGBTQ behaviours are not just contrary to the strictures of the Bible, but they run clean contrary to Natural Law as well, and Natural Law is not grounded in religion.  Hence Kris Wells, University of Alberta’s director of “sexual minority studies and services” should betake herself to the philosophy department and learn something that constitutes actual knowledge.

Not just the philosophy department, but a trip to the History department wouldn’t hurt either.  To say that Bishop Henry’s “fanatical comments increasingly demonstrate how out of touch he is with the modern reality faced by youth,” is to somehow believe that the world began in the middle of the 20^th century.  Today’s youth have it easy compared with the realities faced by youth in any previous era.  Never mind the “dangerous environment” created by Bishop Henry, how about the dangers to freedom of speech and religion that fascists like Wells and the Alberta Ministry of Education are busy perpetrating?

Also quoted in the story is an Edmonton mother of a transgender child.  Bishop Henry “hasn’t been around a transgender person, and he hasn’t been around transgender youth…you tell me that it’s as easy as being pretending (sic) to be a bird when you have your seventeen-year-old child asking you to end her life.”  She said her seven-year-old daughter was born a boy, wasn’t given the option of using the girls’ washroom, even though it’s the gender she identifies with.

Well, mom, what about the rights of actual girls to use the “girl’s” washroom without the presence of an anatomical male with sex issues?  You think a “transgendered child” is being helped by going along with their game of play-pretend?  They have profound psychological issues, and playing-pretend is not a route to the cure.

Mom also went on saying “this has nothing to do with Catholic teachings  This has nothing to do with the Catholic faith.”

Well, I would take Bishop Henry’s word on the matter of Catholic teaching over mom’s, but there is a large catalog of Natural Law that buttresses Bishop Henry’s views.

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of all this PC fascism.  The PC fascists should shut their own faces.  The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion.  LGBTQ fascists threaten the former and the Alberta Ministry of Education threatens the latter.  In fact, the Ministry of Education are a threat to a realist view of the world.

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Worshipping the Same God

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Jan 2016

“Christians and Muslims worship the same God,” said a professor at a Chicago area Christian college.  Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins accused the college of trying to fire her for comments she made concerning her beliefs and those of Islam. 

Hawkins was quoted as saying, “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book…And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”  Professor Hawkins was photographed wearing a hijab which she said was a sign of her solidarity with Muslims, whom she felt were persecuted in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting and the terror attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Mali.  Hawkins told reporters last month that her actions were “motived by a desire to live out my faith.”

Wheaton College said it placed Hawkins on administrative leave in December because of theological statements “that seem inconsistent with Wheaton College’s doctrinal convictions, which she voluntarily agreed to support and uphold when she entered into an employment agreement with the college.”

The liberal arts college upholds the principles of Evangelical Christianity.  Hawkins has worked for the college for nine years.

Analysis:

If Professor Hawkins worked at a Catholic college, she might be able to get away with her proclamations and demonstrations of solidarity with Islamism.  However, most Protestant faiths, to the extent that they consider the matter at all, regard Allah as an idol.  The God of Christian Protestantism is no idol.  As is shown through Natural Theology He must exist.  Consequently, on the Protestant view, it is impossible for Christians and Muslims to worship the same God.  Professor Hawkins must be wrong, on the Protestant view.

It is quite true that the position of the Roman Catholic Church is that Muslims and Christians in the generic sense of monotheism worship the same God.  However, no close, serious analysis of the issue, as the Catholic Church is capable of, has been forthcoming from the Vatican to validate the veracity of that position.  For example, by ‘same’ the Church does not specify whether it is same in the sense of numerically, specifically, or generically.

Were the Pope to declare for the Protestant position, there is no telling the fate of Christians who live in Muslim lands.  There may be evangelical, political, and practical reasons for the Roman Catholic Church to hold the position it does, and it would be unprofitable to develop an intellectually rigorous study in support of the position.

Islam denies the divinity of Jesus, though it recognizes Him as a prophet.  The theological purpose of Jesus’s mission on earth remains a mystery to Islamic scholarship.  And Islamic scholarship finds no reason to solve that mystery, partially because they believe that Mohammed was right and there is no need; and partially because it could be dangerous to investigate.

In short, the actual reason that Jesus’s mission on earth remains an unexplored mystery to Islamic scholarship is that Islamic scholarship is not serious scholarship.  Islam having rejected Hellenic reasoning and with it the Law of Non-contradiction, Islamic scholarship lacks the tools - as it lacks the inclination - to find out why Jesus was put on earth by God, as they recognize He was.

Islamic scholarship would have to address the fact that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead.  His crucifixion was a public event, and the fact of his resurrection was a public fact, testified to by many witnesses and accounted in the bible.  The facts of Jesus’s ministry on earth and especially of his resurrection were never recanted by any witnesses even as some of them were tortured to death.

All these facts and events being public, there is more certitude in the resurrection of Jesus than there is in Mohammed being dictated the sentences of the Koran by an angel, which were entirely private events, witnessed by no one.

Given the death pact that exists among Muslims for apostasy, it would be too dangerous for a Muslim to reason his way to a discovery of Jesus’s mission on earth even if he had the intellectual tools to do so.  Nevertheless, it remains a cowardly stain on Islamic scholarship for its failure seriously to reconcile the facts of Jesus Christ with their beliefs concerning Mohammed.

My own view concerning whether or not Muslims and Christians worship the same God differs from that of Protestantism and from main-line Roman Catholic teaching.  On the basis of what Muslims say about Allah, I have demonstrated that the being Muslims worship as Allah cannot be the creator of the universe.  The God of Christianity, on the other hand, is the creator of the universe.  The two beings cannot be the same numerically or specifically, unless the Muslims are mistaken in what they say about Allah.

Muslims, like Christians, are monotheists, holding that there is only one God.  From that perspective, Christians and Muslims are in agreement, and if one is prepared to ignore a lot of details it could be held in a general and attenuated sense that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, as the Roman Catholic Church officially holds.

I am not prepared to ignore those details.  Specifically, when I investigated who Allah was, I found an unmistakeable parallel between the devil that tempted Jesus in the desert and the angel that spoke the sentences of the Koran to Mohammed.  I reached the tentative conclusion that the angel who called himself Gabriel was in fact the devil, and the Allah whom Mohammed and Muslims were to worship was the self-same devil.  The reward the devil offered Jesus was rejected; that same reward was offered Mohammed and his followers and they took it.  Islam is correct that there is only one God, but the being they worship isn’t it.

Much evil is seen in Islam, and much evil has been done for the sake of Islam.  By their work ye shall know them.  The practical testimony of the spread and practices of Islam seem to confirm there is more devil in Islam than God.

Regardless of whether this position is tenable or not, one cannot hold that Christians and Muslims worship numerically or specifically the same God because Christians worship perfect goodness and Muslims (by their own admission) do not.

Professor Hawkins is factually wrong in saying that, like her, Muslims are people “of the book.”  Muslims are not people “of the book.”  The people “of the book” are Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians.  The expression “people of the book” was an Islamic invention to differentiate people whose religious beliefs, while monotheist, were antecedent to Islam, and were now superseded.  Being monotheist spared Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians some of the rigors of not being Muslim that were not spared pagans and polytheists.

As an adherent of Evangelicalism, which she is supposed to be as a professor at Wheaton College, Professor Hawkins is wrong to hold that Christians and Muslims worship the same God because, on the Protestant, view they do not.

Professor Hawkins might be able to get away with wearing a hijab and saying things in solidarity with Islam for a while at a Roman Catholic institution, though I suspect not for long.  For before long we will likely hear that Professor Hawkins has fallen so in love with Islam that she converted to that faith.

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