Missing the Point on Forced Sex-Ed
Opinion piece by Neil Dykstra (writing for www.NoApologies.ca): There has been much outrage from social conservatives over the past few weeks over Ontario’s proposed changes to the delivery of sexual education in schools. Enough, it seems, to force premier Dalton McGuinty to back down and reconsider. McGuinty’s about-face was cause for rejoicing among those of us who cherish family values. Unfortunately, too few of us recognize the real and present danger that underlies this expansion of sex-ed.
Despite this setback, the government of Ontario will return with a sexual educational program that is essentially the same, only with some of the rough edges filed off. Ten years from now, the program will be even more explicit and offensive than what was proposed last year. Every child in the province will be forced to learn, in graphic detail, about anal sex, oral sex, and homosexuality at the tender age of six.
If it is the sexual content that makes your blood boil, you’re missing the point, and can be numbered with those who are not looking past this hollow victory. The most grotesque agenda that is endangering the hearts and minds of our children is not some graphic sex-ed program, it’s not an Ethics and Religious Culture course in Quebec, it’s not Social Justice 12 in BC, nor is it the infusion of the gay agenda into the BC curriculum as mandated by the Human Rights Tribunal-enforced Corren Agreement. While all of these are disgusting incidents of indoctrination in its own right, they pale in comparison to the vehicle that enables all of these…
The Ministry of Education.
As long as your provincial Ministry of Education maintains its power to compel your children to learn anything, the fight will never end until it is inevitably lost. Until the phrases in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child that mandate compulsory school systems are struck out of existence, your child’s mind remains the property of the state. While parents continue to abdicate the only remaining opportunities still allowed by the government in favor of state-run daycare and education programs, your allies will slowly dwindle.
A cursory mention in UN documents to a prior right for parental choice is so insignificant that it is routinely ignored. It was opposed at its inception by the Roosevelt administration, which aligned with communist and socialist governments around the world to have this clause removed. Fresh with the memory of Nazi indoctrination in mandatory Hitler Youth programs, responsible governments of the world insisted on some limit to the compulsory powers of government education systems.
Though they succeeded in including the parental rights clause, they nevertheless failed to ensure that a repeat of Nazi Germany’s mandatory school system would never happen. Today, German parents who attempt to home-school are arrested and their children apprehended by the state; the United States has even granted refugee status on religious grounds to parents who flee that country for that reason.
It is readily apparent that Canada is heading in the same direction. Courses and topics on increasingly controversial subjects are becoming mandatory, sometimes upon the order of quasi-judicial bodies accountable to no-one. Policies that enable parents to pull their children from such material are being steadily overridden. The only province to enshrine such a policy in law, Alberta, is under extreme pressure by teachers’ unions to repeal it. These are the underlying battles, tough as they are, that must be fought before any semblance of safety can be felt.
A focus on small victories like McGuinty’s about-face is only a distraction. It’s a small step back in a headlong rush to the precipice.
Neil Dykstra lives in Langley, BC and works in the pharmaceutical industry. A graduate from Trinity Western University, he leads a local chapter of the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA). He takes particular interest in matters relating to freedom of religion and expression.
