The story of Dalton McGuinty’s attempt to bully schools and families into accepting his pro-gay agenda through the clandestine Safer Schools Act which purports to battle bullying but is really about normalizing homosexuality appears in the July issue of our paper.
On the law’s stated focus, supposedly bullying, the bill comes up short as it focuses on so-called homophobic bullying and does not mention the most common victims of bullying:
Dan Di Rocco, a former high school principal, testified before the Standing Committee on Social Policy on May 14, that studies show most bullying victims are bullied not because of sexual orientation but body shape and size.
Yet, supporters of Bill 13 always made mention of making schools welcoming for students who identify as homosexual. Education Minister Laurel Broten said, “This is about having schools where our students, if they draw a picture of their family and it has two moms in it or it has two dads, that they know that other pupils in that classroom understand and know that’s just as loving a family as theirs.”
Critics of the new law point out that it goes far beyond combating bullying as it pushes a radical agenda:
Jack Fonseca of Campaign Life Catholics said Bill 13 pushes a sexual agenda by promoting the “disputed six-gender theory” which states that gender is not necessarily connected to anatomy and that in addition to male and female there are also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirited, intersexed, and queer genders. He said this redefinition of gender is in both the preamble to Bill 13 and in the guiding documents in the Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy which will be codified in law as part of the bill.
Although the government and media’s focus was on the issue of Gay-Straight Alliances in Catholic schools, there are much larger implications to the official Catholic Church’s tepid fight against and eventual acquiescence to the law:
FCP leader Phil Lees told LifeSiteNews that the Catholic Church’s acceptance of Bill 13 makes it “more challenging” for other faith groups to become motivated to fight for the protection of religious liberties.
And if you think that this legislation only affects state-run schools, you are probably mistaken:
Although the Accepting Schools Act says it applies only to all publicly funded schools, Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, has suggested the bill could be applied to private schools. In her May 15 submission in support of the bill, Hall claimed that Ontario’s human rights code is the province’s “highest law,” and argued that “all schools-including public, Catholic and private-have a legal duty to provide students with an educational environment free from harassment and other forms of discrimination.”
