The Stelmach government in Alberta, when it introduced Bill 44 to amend the province’s Human Rights Act, thought it could make great hay out of a new section establishing “parental rights,” which would let parents yank their kids from classes which touched on religion or sexual orientation (whoops… so much for gay rights…). It might just have been a sop to social conservatives to justify putting sexual orientation into human rights protection (something required by Supreme Court verdicts), but some wag in the premier’s office thought it could be more. Stelmach and the minister who introduced the bill, Lindsay Blackett, even suggested that evolution would qualify as a religious matter. Then they read their bill, and admitted that maybe it didn’t. Either way, the issue threatens to twist the Christian right agenda into some pretty complicated knots.

If “religion” was going to be defined in the broad Gary Goodyear-ian sense, then it wasn’t hard to imagine what sort of trouble could result from this legislation: sexists objecting to women’s equality, atheist parents with kids in Catholic schools, or just “legal and administrative chaos.” In retrospect it’s not surprising that the government decided to cut its losses and get out of the “evolution is religion” game before things got out of control.

Even if evolution was out of the picture, though, “parental rights” – and by implication family authority – is near and dear to the religious right, so it wasn’t surprising to see a swarm of enthusiastic endorsements from that sector. The Canada Family Action Coalition is now in the game, for example. Equipping Christians has also leaped to the government’s defence.

There is, however, a deep irony here. The parental rights law is being introduced via the Human Rights Act, so presumably it would be enforced – if necessary – by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The Chumir Foundation, to its credit, has opposed the amendment for this reason. However, the Christian right is going to run smack into a wall on this issue.

The Human Rights Commissions first attracted the ire of the religious right on gay rights issues, and many organizations have more recently hitched their wagons to Ezra Levant’s public relations crusade against the Commissions. With the fallout from Shakedown, it actually looked like the anti-HRC battle was beginning to make some gains. The Commissions haven’t been totally discredited yet, but they’re probably closer than ever before. And now the religious right might have to defend the Commissions, after all!

Just this morning, Catholic right-writer Raymond de Souza was expounding on the “abuses” of the Commissions in the National Post. He also points the way to a factless but possibly effective way out of this problem for the religious right: he advances the rather paranoid notion that on the basis of “parental rights” the Alberta Human Rights Commission might be pushed by gay activists or other evil-doers into “radicalizing the curriculum.”

Cross-posted at Birchbark Bible.