While the Christian Right in Canada has been able to slow down momentum in some areas, notably abortion rights, they have little success in really shaping public debate and setting the agenda. They react; they rarely initiate. This is what makes the sex education case so interesting.
The curriculum changes were apparently made public months ago, but few — including Premier Dalton McGuinty — took notice until McVety blasted the government and called for a province-wide protest. Suddenly it was front-page news. The premier and government were the ones reacting and on the defensive.
In policy analysis terms, McVety set the agenda and framed the debate, playing offence rather than defence. The media repeated McVety’s key points, such as how the new curriculum featured “instruction on the pleasures of masturbation” and “vaginal lubrication” and “anal intercourse.”
McVety successfully framed the issue as whether this was too much information at too young an age, as opposed to other narratives like promoting healthy sexuality, counteracting schoolyard misinformation, preventing teen pregnancy and STDs, etc.
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Charles McVety’s religious right wins victory in Ontario
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All of McVety’s talking points were dishonest and untruthful.
For that reason there is no victor–only losers.
Loser in chief is the Premier because he hadn’t read the report or been much apprised of its content.
Talk about being asleep at the switch; this takes the cake.
Why Queen’s Park wasn’t able to get on top of the disinformation is beyond comprehension but the fact that McVety seemed to be at QP nearly all last week seemed to show that he must have been lobbying or paying “courtesy calls” on various persons.
Canada Christian College has more political activism in its building than it does study of theology. It’s hardly Christian some of the things they teach.
It’s time to take away its licence.
It was only the good offices of Frank Klees that saw to it that the licence to grant degrees was instated in Ontario. To that time, CCC had used its Manitoba licence.
It’s time to seriously start examining the licences of these so-called colleges and revoking those that fail to live up to their mandates.
It’s also time for Ontario to get a new premier–one who does his homework.
Subject: Rekers, McVety and the Ontario sex-ed curriculum
Message: Am I the only one who finds it interesting that Charles
McVety’s campaign against Ontario’s new sex-ed curriculum began
shortly after the evangelical lobby group, American College of
Pediatrics, launched “Facts About Youth,” its own campaign against
tolerance for homosexuals in education
(http://factsaboutyouth.com/wp-content/uploads/Superintendent-LetterC_3.311.pdf)?
The ACP’s most prominent member, of course, is George Rekers, who was
just caught vacationing with a male prostitute. It would be funny if
it turned out that the religious-right’s latest closet-case was the
intellectual author of McVety’s anti-sex-ed campaign.
McVety is far outside of mainstream Christian thinking. I cannot defend him in any way since he emabarrasses me. I am a senior and I raised my children in Christian morality and mainstream Christian philosophy but I failed them by not giving them proper instruction as to what being Christian means. Even worse, I didn’t take them to Sunday services.
McVety represents the equivalent of the Muslim (our way or the highway) Jihadists. McVety takes upon himself the role of the final judgement. That is not his pervue as a Christian.
McVety’s type is mentioned in the Christian “New Testament”. He is a modern Pharisee. That is why he is a tiny minority in mainstream Christian thinking.
A true Christian accepts others failures as taught in the new promise explained in the New Testament. If someone wishes to blaspheme the church then let them have a go. It isn’t the mainstream church that suffers in the end.
If someone like Marci McDonald wishes to denigrate Christianity she ought to speak to McVety. If she wishes to denigrate Canada then she should speak to McVety.
If she wishes to talk to her audience then she should publish in The Toronto Star, or in Toronto’s Arts magazine called NOW which features Call Girls and explicit massage parlours in it’s advertisements.