The Halton Catholic District School Board serves 29,000 elementary and secondary school students in the municipalities of Oakville, Burlington, Milton and Halton Mills. It has enacted a policy to ban Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs from forming in their schools.
For those who aren’t familiar with GSAs, they’re support groups for queer students and their allies. A safe haven where students can talk openly, free of the pressures and ridicule they might encounter at home, in their community, or at school.
Mrs. Alice Anne LeMay, chair of the Halton Catholic District School Board defends the ban on such clubs. From the article in Xtra:
“We don’t have Nazi groups either,” rationalizes board chair Alice Anne LeMay. “Gay-straight alliances are banned because they are not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
“If a gay student requests a gay-straight alliance they would be denied,” she says flatly.
In other words, the Catholic church demonizes gays, and therefore so will her school board. To equate this kind of support group to something akin to Nazi-ism is sadly indicative of her overall views of that segment of the students under her care.
Michael Pautler, the education director of the school board noted:
“All students that attend school should be able to feel free of harassment and are protected from any forms of persecution or anything that makes them feel marginalized.”
Indeed they should Mr. Pautler. Yet it must be hard for a queer student not to feel marginalized, when their own school enacts policies to marginalize them. It must be hard to feel free of persecution and harassment, when their own school is headed by someone who believes that their very existence is flawed, and denies them the opportunity to create the one space where they would be free of harassment and persecution.
When you deny support groups to those who need them, what do you think happens? When those who need support don’t get it, what do you think happens? I’ll give you a hint: the suicide rate for gay teens is four times that of their straight counterparts. We’re talking lives here.
This is prejudice, pure and simple. And no tax dollars of mine should be supporting this kind of idiocy.
Shame on you Alice Anne LeMay.
Update January 17th: The Ottawa Catholic School Board also doesn’t allow Gay-Straight Alliance clubs. They learned from Halton’s public relations mistakes though. Instead of equating gays with Nazis, they said they don’t allow the clubs in name only “because the Assembly of Ontario Bishops — to whom school boards look for spiritual guidance — prefer a name that reflects a more general focus on equity and social justice.” That’s a really nice marketing spin.
Simple rhetorical question: are the groups to explicitly support LGBT students allowed? No. Why not? Because the Church doesn’t want them. They want to marginalize it’s purpose by incorporating issues, under the guise of equity and justice. Cognitive dissonance much?
Comments
3 responses to “Homophobia in an Ontario Catholic School Board”
This is why my parent’s property tax dollars go into the proper public system.
There should be an amendment to Ontario’s constitution that means the Catholic board either has to shit or get off the pot when it comes to religion or public funding.
The Jewish board is on it’s own, the Hindu board is on it’s own, there are multiple private schools that are not religion based, and they all have to abide by human rights (occasionally there are some that think they are above the law, Ashbury & Elmwood in Rockcliffe to name a pair) and are still allowed to make their own rules to a degree.
Write the principal says I, I’m sure we can get some people on board to call the school and tie up her time 8 – 5 right? 😛
Section 19 of the Ontario Human Rights Code effectively gives Catholic school boards a pass so that their non-fundamental denominational “rights” can trump fundamental equality rights whenever the two come into conflict. It states that “This Act shall not be construed to adversely affect any right or privilege respecting separate schools enjoyed by separate school boards or their supporters under the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Education Act. R.S.O. 1990.” In other words, Catholic school boards need not concern themselves with the human rights norms that apply to the rest of the civilized world – they are in a class all by themselves.
Homosexuals are just the latest in a long string of victims of this “special” status. Catholic school boards have an absolute and unfettered right to discriminate against non-Catholic students in admissions until grade 9, when “open access” is supposed to apply. Their right to discriminate against non-Catholic teachers in hiring and promotion applies at all grade levels. One third of the permanent, publicly funded teaching positions in Ontario are effectively closed to two-thirds of the population — the non-Catholics. Catholic school boards have also been successful in dismissing Catholic teachers who became pregnant out of wedlock, who are gay or transgendered, or who married in a non-Catholic ceremony – all serious departures from denominational standards.
Democratic governments should be religiously neutral, but ours effectively sanctions a particular faith. It is time for Ontario to follow the lead of the provinces that have rescinded denominational school rights and moved to a single school system equally accessible to all.
Help us fight this crap. See http://www.OneSchoolSystem.org.
[…] was originally an update to my previous post about homophobia in Halton, but I got pissed off enough that I thought it warranted it’s own post. The Ottawa Catholic […]