Constantly reading about the bigoted nature of the richest Christian church on this planet, the Roman-Catholic church, can make a secular-humanist like myself sick and perhaps even resentful of Catholics themselves.
It’s as sure as it can be that when the McGuinty liberals drafted Bill 13 for the Ontario legislature they were the least focused on subverting or overruling Catholic teachings. However, since Catholics themselves openly refer to homosexuality as a disease and often look at LGBT individuals as socially and morally sick, would it be not right to prevent them from teaching this kind of hate message to future ?
The Catholic baby boomers cannot be helped. It would be very difficult to change a 50+ year old individual’s political inclinations and opinions about the world. But, in my opinion, we cannot allow the next generation to be infected with this kind of bullshit anti-toleration and hate-filled message: That gay people are sick, and need clerical help to remedy their condition!
I believe that the problem isn’t with Bill 13, which in fact looks to protect kids of all ethnicity, faith and sexual orientation from bullying, but with Catholic teaching itself. Unlike Bill 13, Catholic teaching isn’t all inclusive, as with all religions it’s extremely one-sided, providing rules and regulations for those of only the catholic faith. It’s also divisive, the “white folks only” kind of divisive. Let’s not forget that for a very long time Christianity, in particular in the United States, was forced upon individuals of other cultures, e.g. Native Americans and Blacks. The Catholics wish to repeat this pattern, they wish to remain exclusive and continue teaching their bigoted nonsense to future generations of children.
This whole controversy reminds me of a Richard Dawkins video I once watched, where professor Dawkins is confronting a priest in Dublin, Ireland on intolerance in Catholicism and its teaching to the next generation of Catholic children. The priest asked: “Richard, do you think parents have the right to teach children about their religious heritage?” A trick question, to which Richard Dawkins was forced to say yes.
However, if that question was posed to me, I would have answered it in the following manner:
No school, institution, or parent has the right to instill bigoted and hate producing teachings into children or other adults, regardless of the teachings’ source, whether religious, cultural, political or otherwise.
The private group of Catholic parents that are boycotting Bill 13, I read about these crackpots in this article, Anti-bullying bill subverts Catholic curriculum: group in the Holly Post, are using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian constitution, which gives their religion a privileged spot in Canadian culture, to make their case against Bill 13. They basically claim that Bill 13 is unconstitutional.
They couldn’t be further from the truth. Catholic teachings on LGBT are demonstrably unconstitutional ladies and gentlemen, but you don’t see LGBT individuals calling for the abolition of Catholicism, nor of their lobbies or the dismantling of their rapist clergy.
Perhaps the Christopher Hitchens video discussing the teachings of the Catholic church I posted at the beginning of this article will put things into perspective.
