POP QUIZ

Ontario Catholic School Gives Students LGB Test, Conservative Heads Explode

In April 2009, the Ontario government launched the Equity and Inclusion Education (EIE) strategy, a plan that requires the province’s publicly-funded schools to develop curriculums that teach about different social, cultural, and economic backgrounds as well as genders, gender identities,and sexual orientations.

So in the spirit of EIE, Cathy Sousa—a ninth grade teacher at Resurrection Catholic Secondary School in Kitchener, Ontario—gave her students a test that asked them to define words like “homophobia” and “bisexual” and to label true/false statements like, “Gay males and lesbian females are overly sexual” and “Gay people are very different from straight people.” She marked students wrong for agreeing to such stereotypical statements.

That’s when some conservative heads exploded.

To be honest, the only people whose heads we know exploded for certain are a Coptic Orthodox priest who told Canadian parents to their 4,000 kids out of Catholic schools for becoming too liberal and Camilla Gunnarson of RightSideUp.com, a blog devoted to Catholic issues and “Return[ing] Our Nation to Pre-1967 Moral Borders.” Ahh-huh.

She got a hold of a test copy and said, “Quite clearly this is a poor attempt to communicate the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. More accurately, this is a form of indoctrination whereby students come away with the belief that homosexual relationships are equal to heterosexual relationships. Have our teachers become social engineers?”

What we love though is that this test came from a Catholic educator, not some secular, big-city, liberal teacher with a huge rainbow-colored chip on her shoulder. As we’ve explained recently, discussing the existence of LGBT identities doesn’t “create” queer students; it merely lets students know that such people exist.

Apparently some people are opposed to acknowledging our existence, like it’s some sort of “forbidden knowledge.”

You can take a peek at the actual test on the next page for yourself.

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