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 13th 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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