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.
Cam
Again, if they can keep gays hidden then it is easy to dehumanize us. Why do you think the bigots used to fight so hard to keep blacks out of schools here? You can’t dehumanize somebody to others when people interact with them every day.
The funny thing is, those religions are the first people to jump up and scream discrimination at the drop of a hat when they don’t get their way.
arbiter
@Cam – You are absolutely right. And I’ve never seen a group that so vehemently opposes education–even to the minor degree of telling children such people exist–than those conservative/Christian/whatevers that oppose gay rights. I guess if you keep your head firmly planted up your a– then you’ll always be sure to have the same view! But it’s a very psychologically manipulative strategy… some serial killers even dehumanize their victims so they can do what they do. Remember, “It put the lotion on its skin…?”
“It” being the operative word.
Jim
Wow. Encouraging people to look beyond stereotypes is indoctrination? Amazing.
Atlas
I do sort of feel a “test” was the wrong way to go about this, but otherwise congratulations to Ms. Sousa. More religious educators should be like her.
David Gervais
Qweerty readers will be pleased to know that http://rightsideup.ca/2011/07/24/catholic-educators-must-decide-which-master-to-serve/ has a link on their page back to this page.