What a school program in Toronto and a sexuality conference in Guelph have to do with the recently concluded Beijing Conference on Women.

For years, The Interim and Campaign Life Coalition have maintained that a general moral breakdown is largely responsible for the continuing increase in the number of abortions. Three recent manifestations of that breakdown are special cause for alarm.

In the Oakville Beaver for August 25, veteran pro-life activist Ken Campbell protested against a new school program for homosexuals. The Toronto Board of Education is providing special teaching for gay and lesbian dropouts, with gay and lesbian teachers, at a well-known homosexual centre, the Metropolitan Community Church. Campbell calls it an outrage to have a tax-funded school, under the provincial Ministry of Education, promoting homosexual culture.

According to the Toronto Board, many homosexual students have been hounded out of school by other students who teased and mocked them. The new program is regarded as a transitional one, aimed at getting the students back on track academically. The label given it, however, is certainly enough to make Campbell see red: it is called the Triangle Program, after the pink triangle worn by gay activists.

Jews, Muslims, and non-Catholic Christians cannot receive funding to start their own schools, Campbell points out, so making an exception for homosexuals is completely unfair. In fact it would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

An even more striking example of moral breakdown is the annual conference on “Understanding Sexual Diversity,” sponsored by the University of Guelph. It is the largest event of its kind in North America. Jakki Jeffs of Alliance for Life has already given us her own graphic descriptions, both in print and verbally, of her own encounters with the people who run this bizarre circus. She soon found out that marriage and the family are almost forbidden subjects for the people in charge, whereas almost every kind of sexual activity outside of normal intercourse is presented as model behaviour.

In a recent bulletin, Focus on the Family, the organization sponsored by American radio evangelist Dr. James C. Dobson, described its experiences at the 1994 and 1995 Guelph conferences. A year ago, three volunteers displayed Focus materials, and reported that quite a few health-care workers stopped at their booth, intrigued by their fresh approach and the availability of material promoting abstinence. This year they applied again, planning a bigger display, but no reply was forthcoming. When a terse letter did come in mid-May (the meeting was to take place in June), it said that Focus on the Family did not comply with the university’s policy on gender and sexual harassment, and therefore they would not be welcome at the conference.

The statement of the university’s policy was most instructive: The general principles that influence the choice of speakers and exhibitors include a positive approach to human sexuality, support for gender equality, respect for cultural diversity, endorsement of freedom of reproductive choice for women, and acceptance of gay and lesbian people.

“Freedom of reproductive choice,” of course, is a euphemism for abortion. The sex experts at the conference can produce a list of twenty-one different ways to secure sexual gratification without actually having heterosexual intercourse. The list includes many of the perversions engaged in by Paul Bernardo, and a few even he did not attempt. As the university implies, one should not discriminate—except of course against the Christian moral tradition upon which this country is based.

Focus on the Family’s preliminary assessment of the Beijing Conference, made in August, was also both interesting and disturbing: “It will represent the most radical, atheistic and anti-family crusade in the history of the world, and your own government is pulling the strings and supporting a disproportionate share of the costs.

The extremists who are preparing for and promoting this conference are a million miles outside the North American mainstream, and yet they will be speaking in Beijing with the authority of the United States and Canadian governments.” It is a mystery, the report adds, how such enormous threats to our spiritual and cultural heritage could have slithered into our midst without due notice or alarm. “Every good and perfect gift from the hand of the Creator will be mocked an vilified by many of the delegates.”

As the report points out, the situation in China continues to be shocking—not only repression of human (and reproductive) rights, but the execution of prisoners for the purpose of cannibalizing their bodies and selling their organs on the black market, and the use of aborted human fetuses for food.

The official UN document prepared for Beijing, the report says, was written by a virtual who’s who of radical feminists. “And the Canadian contingent at the preparatory conference in Beijing,” it adds, “was actually more radical in pushing the feminist/lesbian agenda than most.” The primary objective there will be the same as that in Cairo: “That conference was designed to promote safe-sex ideology, condom usage and ‘reproductive rights’ (i.e., free and unrestricted access to abortion) in every nation of the world.”

If Ken Campbell was shocked at the promotion of homosexuality in Toronto schools, all of us ought to be shocked at the fact that a publicly supported university can endorse almost every kind of sexual perversity and suppress those trying to uphold traditional Christian and Canadian values. And we ought to be shocked at our government’s support for an international campaign to promote contraception, sterilization, and abortion.

Three types of public organization—a school board, a university, the federal government itself—are all making brazen attacks on our traditional concept of the common good. And they are getting away with it. When will the “silent majority” of Canadians wake up and become vocal?