The Politics of Homeschooling – Part II

Concluding thoughts on Bill C-13

In our previous article in this series, we presented the preamble to the Ontario government’s Bill C-13 and have read in it what appears to be an acknowledgment of Ontario’s “diverse” society. 

In our previous article in this series, we presented the preamble to the Ontario government’s Bill C-13 and have read in it what appears to be an acknowledgment of Ontario’s “diverse” society. Unfortunately, the Ontario government is only paying lip service to this plurality of values since it is in fact seeking to suppress the religious community in general, including adherents to Judeo-Christian faith and morals, in deference to a secular agenda. We would argue that, in the government’s eyes, the indoctrination of our children into the gay and lesbian lifestyle “suits the bill” regarding their sought after secular humanism, yielding in the long run a dumbed down homogenous society that would be admittedly easier to govern than a society capable of independent critical thinking. In any event, the government cannot boast of a “diverse society” and at the same time bully, stigmatize and attempt to suppress a segment of this diversity, namely, those who are people of faith.

We have also noted in our previous article that the preamble of Bill C-13 also made use of politically loaded words such as “homophobia,” a term so incongruous that some proponents of the gay agenda are now seeking to change it. In an article entitled Beyond “Homophobia”: Thinking About Sexual Prejudice and Stigma in the Twenty-First Century, Gregory M. Herek wrote the following:

Although homophobia’s invention and eventual integration into common speech marked a watershed in American society’s conceptualization of sexuality, both the word and the construct it signifies have significant limitations. Some of them, such as the term’s implicit theoretical assumptions, have been remarked upon frequently.

The term “homo” can, in terms of its Latin origin, refer to “man” or “mankind,” and as such is used in our term “homo sapiens.” From the Greek, the word can refer to “sameness,” and it is used in our language in such terms as “homogenized” milk, and of course, “homosexual.” Thus the term “homophobic” can literally be translated as “fear of sameness,” which, if such a fear existed, would make us convulse at the sight of two identical boxes of Corn Flakes on the grocery shelves should we be so unlucky as to suffer from this syndrome; opening a carton of eggs to make breakfast would be recklessness, let alone having matching chairs around the kitchen table. Of course, the term “phobia,” from the Greek phobos, means “fear”; it is a word used in the English language to denote an intense dread accompanied by negative physiological symptoms, acknowledged as irrational yet involuntary and uncontrollable by those who suffer from them. Thus, technically, the term “homophobia” leaves much to be desired from the point of view of proponents of the gay and lesbian agenda, but their search for a more appropriate term will be difficult since they cannot accurately define what is the exact nature of the distaste many people of faith have against the homosexual lifestyle. This is mainly because we are dealing with irreconcilable worldviews here; people who believe in God have a totally different concept regarding the meaning of existence than atheist do; for example, belief in objective morality and justice in an afterlife are things a theist may believe in that an atheist on the other hand will simply not perceive. This is the same problem that occurs in the abortion debate; one side states that “life is sacred,” and the other side does not recognize any meaning in the word “sacred.” And where there is no common ground, misunderstanding and distrust prevail, and the only option is to start hurling verbal ammunition. Thus, if the negative attitude regarding the gay and lesbian lifestyle comes from well informed and educated people who recognize the negative consequences of the gay lifestyle, and justifiably fear the “outcomes” of such acts regarding the wellbeing of society in general—much like the person that fears children playing ball in heavy traffic or soldiers setting up target practice alongside a busy sidewalk—coming up with a functional “label” will be difficult indeed. Terms such as “antisodomite” or “contrahomosexual” might be accurate designations to replace the term “homophobic,” but these words would not have the “stigmatizing” effect that proponents of the gay and lesbian agenda would want to cast upon those who do not approve of their lifestyle. The required term, whatever it would be, would require a sufficient negative connotation to successfully castigate its recipient. It is, in the end, an exercise in strategic name-calling, the words being the stones, arrows or lead flung at victims to achieve a deliberate and premeditated debilitating effect.

As we have noted in Part I of this essay, “homophobia” is one such term formulated to label and stigmatize people, and governments are now using this word as part of their verbal ammunition; we can safely conclude that this name-calling on the part of the drafters of Bill C-13 is aimed for the most part at devout and conservative adherents of the Judeo-Christian faith. This demographic segment of the Ontario population is being bullied by its government in deference to a smaller segment who wants to be affirmed in their sexual practices, and want to promote these practices to our youth and indoctrinate them into their lifestyle by means of the GSAs.

If bullying, only bullying, and nothing but bullying were the issue, we would have a worthy cause here. There are many known instances of bullying that has led to suicide, but only a portion of this bullying was related to issues of sexual orientation. Therefore, the answer to bullying activity is to address bullying itself. If bullying were indeed the issue, then the government would mandate laws that address bullying, institute networks to report instances of bullying, and the perpetrators of bullying would be severely reprimanded for their behaviour, regardless of whether the bullying was targeted against “race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, family status or disability.” Severe legal consequences are very efficient to curb drunk-driving infractions, and similar methods could apply to bullying as well. For example, ones bullying activities could be included in their school records and this information made available to future employers. If only bullying were the issue, there would be no need for GSAs, which is a totally different issue. One must ask “why would bullies join such a club in the first place? How would such a club cause them to cease being bullies?” It’s the same old fallacious diversion as the so-called gun laws; why would a criminal volunteer to register his or her guns? The only demographic group that would comply with such laws are law-abiding citizens. The only students that would attend a GSA club would be those who are curious or insecure about their sexual identity, and perhaps those who want to “experiment” or appear more “hip” and “open minded.” The purpose of the GSA club is more similar to the ceramics club; meet people and make friends as you increase your knowledge and gain experience, you’ll obtain resources and materials as well as schedules of workshop events, and opportunities to network with others and discover a new world of activities as you become part of a new community of like-minded people with shared interests. It is indoctrination pure and simple into an alternative and, from the point of view of traditional Judeo-Christians and other faith groups, immoral lifestyle.

Now, if the targets of bullying were the issue, then we’d need more than GSA clubs and the three other token alliances suggested in the bill; we’d need, for the sake of perfect impartiality, alliance clubs that address “race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, family status or disability,” and place each of these on a equal basis. And even this would not suffice, since bullying activities can be aimed at anyone because of certain subtle character traits, or because one is fashion challenged, or many other reasons that are very difficult to discern. Again, when dealing with drunk drivers, you do not go for the victims, who can be anyone; rather, you go for the perpetrators, the drunk drivers themselves. Deal with the cause and there would be no victims. The reason Bill C-13 does not address alliance clubs for all targets of bullying is because the targets of bullying are not the issue, neither is bullying in and of itself as we have established, but rather the creation of a vehicle whereby the indoctrination of adolescents into the gay and lesbian lifestyle is facilitated and made socially acceptable in order to further the higher cause of secular humanism. Again, this was achieved by means of the Hegelian dialectic mentioned in our last article. The issue of bullying, although laudable in and of itself is merely a diversionary tactic in Bill C-13.

If you think the Ontario government showed originality in conceiving this bill, please watch this episode of the Vortex from Church Militant TV and you’ll realize that Bill C-13 is merely the outcome of an international “copy and paste” procedure on the part of more sinister components of world politics which we will address in later articles, whose agenda is being “stuck” into state and provincial educational acts everywhere, not only Ontario’s educational act. When one steps back far enough to view the entire socio-political landscape, the secularization of society and population control appears to be the true motives of the socio-political puppet masters.

 

 Now for the sake of contrast, let’s now look at how bullying and homosexuality would be addressed in a Catholic separate school milieu. Obviously, Catholic school curricula would include instructions that align with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, that is, if they could remain truly Catholic which is questionable when they receive funds from a government with a secular agenda. Nevertheless, the Church’s teachings are unambiguous and they are clearly laid out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism has this to say about our relation with our fellow man; man is…

Created in the image of the one God and equally endowed with rational souls, all men have the same nature and the same origin. Redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, all are called to participate in the same divine beatitude: all therefore enjoy an equal dignity [CCC 1934]. The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it [CCC 1935].

When the Catechism speaks of “all men,” this includes people with same sex attraction. Of these, the Catechism states,

They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These people are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition” [CCC 2358].

This is clear enough, but for added emphasis, we will quote Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College and King’s College, and a philosopher and author, taken from a recent interview:

When charity embraces even the one who is evil for the sake of love, although it doesn’t embrace the evil, the very ugliness of the one that is embraced elicits greater beauty in the one who embraces him. If you love the sinner even more because of his or her need or his or her sin as God does to us, that is the most beautiful thing in the world; that is what a Saint does.

What this boils down to is that a student properly educated in the Catholic school system by devout Catholic teachers would be taught respect for all humans, and also learns to discern between a person and an act. Catholics must admonish the sinner in love. And that is an absolutely valid alternative to the GSAs proposed by Bill C-13 to address the issue of the bullying of people with same sex attraction. People properly instructed in the Christian faith would not be compelled to bully another human being for any reason.

We have stated above that the term “homophobia” leaves much to be desired from the point of view of active proponents of the gay and lesbian agendas, and a new label would be difficult to formulate since they cannot accurately define the exact nature of the distaste many people of faith have against the homosexual lifestyle. But now that we have defined the Catholic distinction between a person and an act, one can see that calling a devout Christian a “homophobe” completely misses the mark. There is no fear in love. Despite the affirmation by the Church that all human beings created in the image of God are to be loved and treated with respect, proponents of the gay and lesbian agenda will nevertheless still cry “hate speech” and hurl invectives that include such words as “homophobic,” or whatever new term will be invented to replace it, not because they are slandered as persons, but because it condemns their lifestyle. They will insist that you cannot make a distinction between tolerating persons and tolerating ideas, because, in their words “if you don’t tolerate our ideas, you don’t tolerate us; we are our ideas, we are our values, and we are our lifestyle.” We don’t have the time to pursue that fallacy, so lets just pose the question, would I be tolerated if my lifestyle included blasting rock music after midnight from my patio speakers, if I considered my dumping my used motor oil, radiator antifreeze and other toxic chemicals along the back lane a good idea since it controls the weeds, and if I considered my watching pornography on a large screen TV set by an uncurtained window in plain view of the neighbours’ children a value since I have a right to do whatever I want in my own house? Where do you draw the line on that slippery slope of societal decadence? But such are the ways of homosexual activists.

Expanding on the Christian formula “love the sinner, hate the sin,” Peter Kreeft states the following in his talk entitled Can a Catholic be a Liberal?:

We have to love sinners more than we do and we have to hate sins more than we do. These two confusions between license and liberty and tolerating persons and tolerating ideas came about through the same source; sex! No one will justify licence to kill, nuclear terrorism, insider trading, oil spills and smoking. But if it has to do with sex, it’s okay.

Indeed, many will agree that abortion, gay marriage, pornography, radical feminism and government mandates such as Bill C-13 are hot issues today, and I’m sure most will also concur that sex is somehow linked to these issues.

It is not in the interest of the government and its ministry of education to have our schools express to our children that there is a clear distinction between a person and an act, and that it is possible to love and not malign a person created in the image of God, yet hate the act that is leading he or she to their own destruction, just as it is possible to love a sibling but hate the drug habit which has just placed he or she in the hospital. Short of a miracle, there will be no mandate to teach our children such “critical” distinctions in an up-and-coming ministry of education bill. Notice that the term “discernment,” which is not a positive trait in a homogenous society, is not included as an admirable quality for our youth in their verbiage.

In these concluding remarks on Bill C-13, we have focused a great deal on the term “homophobia”; this is because, as mentioned above, it is a politically charged word. We’ll say it again; governments use words much like armies use ammunition, except that, unlike armies, governments aim their ammunition at their own citizens. And according to the man we have quoted much in this article, Peter Kreeft, successful dictators such as Hitler, Stalin or Mao Tse-Tung have subdued populations by destroying their vocabulary; Kreeft states…

In order to kill a lot of people, you first have to kill language. You have to give them the “big lie”; you have to tell them “you’re a liberal.” If you control the words, you control thoughts. Thoughts are like people, they need houses to live in, and the words are houses. And if there is no house to live in, the thought dies. So if you control the words, you control the thoughts, if you control the thoughts, you control the actions, and if you control the actions, you control the future. That is the three-fold formula of the Italian communist philosopher Gramsci, who said, “communism will never win in the ballot box, it will never win on the battle field, but it will win in the classroom!

Note that Peter Kreeft is speaking here of Antonio Gramsci, a founding member  and a leader of the Communist Party of Italy; Gramsci’s ideas on education had much common ground with the notion of “education” as theorize and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire, whom we have addressed in part I, when discussing “critical consciousness,” a term used by the drafters of Bill C-13. Communism is at the root of these ideas.

Granting the government the premise that bullying is a problem, we would point out that bullying is part and parcel of a school milieu that, as we shall see, has other negative aspects, including pressure to be indoctrinated into the “drug milieu,” the “alcohol milieu,” the “tobacco milieu,” the “foul language milieu,” the “liberal sex milieu,” The “gang milieu,” the “crime milieu” and the “conformist milieu.” We will address these in a future article, but for the most part, attendance in a traditional school system is indoctrination into these evils of society. The public school system is by nature inefficient; it is a system where children are sorted by age rather than intelligence, aptitude and talents, and tossed together to learn the same things at the same pace, the brightest having to lag at the pace of the slowest. As a form of education, it is extremely inefficient, but as a form of indoctrination into the “workplace milieu,” and socio-political conditioning, the public school system is extremely efficient, and is the reason why governments have and still make it mandatory for children to attend. The public school system is the epicentre of social engineering; it is the antithesis of a milieu that would inspire in a child an individualistic mind-set and independent values and beliefs. In the ongoing battle for the souls of your children, your adversaries are the advocates of a Brave New World of secular humanism and moral relativism; the school is the theatre of war and the GSA club is only one of many strategic game plans. And the “bullying scam” is but one of the diversionary tactics.

We have talked about the “public school system,” but are our Catholic schools any better? Unfortunately, despite the fact that Catholic schools offer a better education overall, the negative milieus that plague public school education also plague the Catholic schools, and of course, the government imposed GSAs affect Catholic schools also. Our featured document for this article, from the Catholic Register, is entitled Wily McGuinty’s Orwellian law scorns Church over Bill 13, and is written by Western University Professor Emeritus Ian Hunter. In this article, he states:

If this is the beginning of a Liberal campaign to defund Catholic education, McGuinty will hear no opposition from me. Anything authentically Catholic about the separate school system disappeared a long time ago. All that can be said about Catholic schools is that they provide a slightly better quality of education that the public system. But then again, it’s small praise: how could they not?

We totally agree; until we have truly private and separate Catholic schools that are totally independent of the government, which would probably make the cost of education prohibitive for devout Catholics, homeschooling seems to be the only answer.

If Bill C-13 truly reflected the beliefs and values of all citizens of Ontario, it would recognize our belief that our children should be provided with the temporal and eternal benefits of that comes with having well formed consciences and be introduced to and instructed in the fundamental principles of our faith, which will in turn motivate them to become “individuals” that will positively impact the “diverse society of Ontario,” rather than “dumbed down cookie cut” citizens. It would also include our belief that there should be action taken on making our schools and communities more “equitable” and “inclusive” also for those who wish to conduct Bible studies, prayer sessions, including the Rosary, and for Pro-Life and other such youth group activities. But this is not the case. Unfortunately, as Christians, we must submit to our governments, but also keep in mind that never in the days of the Roman persecutions did truly faithful Christians offer a pinch of incense to the gods of Rome. Rather, they chose martyrdom. Likewise, we do not need to conform to the ways of the world. We shouldn’t have to “de-program” our children when they return from school. We have options. We believe that homeschooling is a very viable alternative to public schooling. The international declarations on human rights, as well as the Canadian declaration on human rights state that the parents have the primary responsibility and right of educating their children in a manner that reflects their beliefs. This is why we have devoted a section of our web site to issues regarding homeschooling, and will be offering many resources to help homeschooling parents. Home is still the place where our children are relatively safe from big brother’s tentacles. So if you are a homeschooler, the government’s GSA mandate will not apply to you. So far that is.

Having discussed Bill C-13 as an example of “why to homeschool,” in our next article, we will shift the focus of our discussion of politics and homeschooling to what is perhaps another storm that looms on the horizon of the Christian faithful, the attempt on the part of governments to make homeschooling illegal. This is in fact the case in some countries on this planet.

all494 our values, and we