24 Jan 12
The Accepting Schools Act is presently in Bill form before the legislature of Ontario, and consists of amendments to the Education Act that concern bullying and other matters. Among the list of provisions is the mandating of the creation of so-called Gay-Straight alliances in schools.
In respect of bullying, the Act contains a definition of bullying. It also requires Boards to have policies that promote certain goals, to include promoting a positive climate that is inclusive and accepting and promoting the prevention of bullying. The Boards will be required to use surveys to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of Board policies related to these goals. It mandates the creation of a “Bullying Awareness and Prevention Week.”
Most controversial is the requirement that Boards support pupils who want to establish and lead activities or organizations “that promote gender equity, anti-racism, the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people with disabilities or the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.”
Therein is the crux of this legislation, the creation of the gay-straight alliance clubs.
The curious aspect of this legislation is that it was created in response to what was said to be the bullying of allegedly gay youths by other youths, and the response amounts to a bullying of Boards and the public in general by the government to promote and in effect to normalize homosexuality and similar instances of what I called ‘biological confusion.”
The legislation sets out the target group that is to benefit from this effort at making communities and schools more equitable and inclusive: LGBTTIQ. This acronym stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, two-spirited, intersexed, queer, and questioning. In a previous posting I explained what all of these terms meant and observed that the common element among them is what I called biological confusion. By biological confusion is meant that the animal instinct for reproduction in these individuals is misdirected by an unnatural sexual appetite, or that they suffer crippling psychological problems that render reproduction for them nearly impossible.
Let’s begin with a pertinent analysis of the general issue: bullying. Bullying is not new. Bullying is a learned human behavior. Bullying behavior is expressed in an individual only sometimes and usually only against particular persons or simply another person. A person may be known as a bully because he exhibits bullying behavior to an unusual degree, but no one is a bully to everyone else. Bullying has been an act of human behavior since man descended from the trees, and I suspect dominance behavior in the lower animals can be categorized as a kind of bullying. In the sociological behavior of a group, the dominant members of a group may collectively act in a bullying fashion against a member of the group who does not meet group expectations. Bullying is a kind of behavior so varied that you cannot isolate what bullying really is with a precise, legal definition.
The legislation sets out a definition of bullying, limiting it to the conduct of a pupil, that merely names certain acts that occur with a particular intent and in a particular context. Thus it is that the government of Ontario can enact legislation that bullies school boards into accepting its prescriptions without violating the Act’s definition of bullying.
Because bullying behavior seems to arise spontaneously and seems to correspond with dominance behavior exhibited by the lower animals, the belief that with enough attention and disapprobation an act of law can banish bullying behavior among school children seems as absurd as trying to banish laughter, joking, and playing among children with similar means – and that too has been tried throughout the ages without permanent success!
The anti-bullying cause is the latest secular fashion du jour. In the chop-logic of secular liberal moralizing, anti-bullying has been fastened upon as the moral imperfection that can be fixed with the application of enough social and legal ministrations. Perhaps the cause will disappear as a fashion once the legislation is passed. The problem of bullying will persist, however, as the bill seems to understand, even as a moral cause anti-bullying disappears from the secular radar.
How much law has been passed and social pressure been applied in the 1960s to overcome the problem of gender inequality and to eradicate racism? At least two generations have come into being since the revolution of the 1960s, and yet there in the legislation is the provision to combat gender inequality and promote anti-racism. Either these provisions are present as the expression of an old legislative reflex, or that gender inequality and racism are still problems in Ontario schools. Since the bill is directed at adolescents of 2012, after all this time the existence of gender inequality and racism in them must reflect some deep-seated condition of the human psyche, as bullying is.
Nevertheless, the gem, buried deep in the bill, that won’t disappear, is the mandate to create gay-straight alliance clubs.
Nothing is controversial about creating groups to advocate against gender inequality and racism. Today, it is an exercise in tedium to so advocate. The incongruity of creating a gay-straight alliance club as if it were no different from an anti-racism group is what causes alarm in the Catholic Church, Separate School Boards, and other Boards founded on Christian principles. It is one thing to advocate that women are equal to men, and blacks are equal to whites; but it is another to advocate that homosexuality is equal to heterosexuality.
Society and humanity do not benefit from homosexuality as they do from heterosexuality. Without heterosexuality society and humanity would cease to exist after one generation. In general, society and humanity do not benefit from biological confusion. Therefore society and humanity need to distinguish between the protection of those who suffer biological confusion and the outright advocacy or normalization of biological confusion as such. In Christian churches this difference is observed in the distinction between the sin and the sinner. The Christian abhorrence against acts of biological confusion serves the cause of the preservation of society and humanity.
One weakness of the legislation concerning the bullying of members of the LGBTTIQ group is that it assumes that the formation of gay-straight alliance clubs is the only solution possible to prevent bullying of that group. There is no proof of that, and there is no provision in the legislation to allow the attempt of other means of achieving that aim.
Another weakness is that it seems to ignore the potential for the use of those clubs by sexual predators, or conveniently as a meeting place to arrange for sexual liaison.
The most obvious weakness is that it serves as a basis for advocating the normalization of biological confusion. Gay-straight alliance clubs are equated with clubs that advocate the normalization of beliefs in gender equality and racial equality, but the causes of gender and racial equality are different in kind from the cause of equating biological confusion with heterosexuality. (Since we’re discussing inclusion here and named groups, to limit the clubs to gays and straights, the LBTTIQ portion of the biologically confused is seemingly left to shift for itself in these clubs.)
It is one thing to accept in the sense of tolerating biological confusion; another to normalize it. The contemplation of the problem of biological confusion led in this case to moral confusion.
In Canada, there are such things as the Constitution Act and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The attempt by the government of Ontario to enforce a provision that is squarely against the religious beliefs of some Christian Churches may fall afoul of the Charter Rights of those Christians, and of Section 93 of the Constitution Act which establishes the right of Separate Schools for members of the Catholic community of Ontario.
The Catholic Church has decided views about acts of biological confusion, which it regards as morally abhorrent. The Catholic community sees the legislation as morally confused because it fails to distinguish between sin and sinner. It is quite proper in the Catholic Church to advocate for love of the sinner while abhorring the sin; it is another matter to conflate sin with sinner, as the legislation seems to. With two thousand years of experience in matters of love of God and love of neighbour, and with some of the finest minds humanity ever produced writing Catholic doctrine, the wisdom of the Catholic Church in this matter is not to be gainsaid or tritely ignored or dismissed. The Catholic wisdom on the matter deserves a rational response from those who disagree.
Ontario may see the spectacle of a Roman Catholic premier, Dalton McGuinty, bullying the Separate School system into accepting gay-straight alliances.
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