From Terrible Depths, used with permission:
Religious Right Alert and Slap Upside the Head have in the past couple weeks been covering some surprisingly petty social conservative policies of Ed Stelmach’s government, like the official statement that the government is not going to recognize public-sector employees’ same-sex spouses as legally married because it believes gay people shouldn’t have that right. Now, however, it’s getting even more bizarre. And I thought creationism was just something that Americans had to worry about.
Years behind everyone else, the provincial government is only now getting around to passing an amendment to the Human Rights Act to protect sexual orientation from discrimination. Culture minister Lindsay Blackett offered the odd explanation that the move is being done to promote tourism and that much of the Conservative caucus was opposed to the move altogether. (Despite the fact that according to the Supreme Court the province has no choice in the matter anyways.) So, a compromise was reached. A particularly Orwellian one.
You see, in the midst of the bill that would grant equality to gay people is a clause that would require schools to give parents advance notice, and an opportunity to pull their kids out of the classroom, if any of the following topics will be discussed (see text of Bill 44 here):
- Religion
- Sexuality
- Sexual Orientation
It should go without saying that if your sexual orientation is something that can’t be discriminated against, it doesn’t make sense to say that parents are going to be allowed to yank their kids from a school classroom where the issue is just being discussed. Using a human rights bill to chill classroom discussion of sexual orientation is pretty Orwellian, and pretty terrible.
In the title of this post, I mentioned creationism. I did that deliberately. You might think that this list of parental rights is irrelevant – science is still science, after all, and not religion. The Albertan government, however, does not agree. Blackett in fact has specifically stated that, at least under his interpretation of the law, “parents would have the right to opt out of evolution classes.”
Are there connections between the religious right and the Stelmach government in Alberta?
[...] Albertan controversy, which has been discussed previously on this site as well as at other blogs, is being covered regularly by Big City Lib, who writes that the Stelmach [...]
“Years behind everyone else, the provincial government is only now getting around to passing an amendment to the Human Rights Act to protect sexual orientation from discrimination….
You see, in the midst of the bill that would grant equality to gay people….”
Wait a minute. Wouldn’t protecting sexual orientation from discrimination equally grant equality to pederast people? Why would you stress the equality of one sexual orientation and not another?
Are you for equality and an end to discrimination or are you not?
And, if a teacher was teaching the equality of pederasty, would you or would you not be in favour of exercising your authority as a parent to opt out of such misguided instruction?
Yeah Richard, you go sir, wow such honesty. By the way, don’t get too excited now, as I believe pedophilia is still quite rightly illegal.