Nov 12
30
On a recent CBC podcast of “The Current” with Anna Maria Tremonti, I listened to her rabid attack on home-schoolers, followed by a CBC-produced “skit” that further exposed this identifiable group to hatred and contempt.
Ms. Tremonti was conducting “interviews” (heavily weighted with her own bias) around the recent announcement that Alberta had agreed to drop the contentious inclusion of Human Rights legislation in its approach to home-schooling in the province.
As she interrogated Paul Faris, head of the Home School Legal Defense Association, she repeatedly pressed him to specify what subjects could be negatively impacted by the application of Alberta’s Human Rights Act in a home-schooling setting. She was not satisfied with his response that it could be “anything”. No doubt, hoping to force him to say something negative about homosexuality or other sexual orientation issues, she kept up the attack until she heard the word “history” which suddenly invigorated her probing. Over the course of the interview and bringing in a couple of other voices decidedly unfriendly to home-schoolers, she attempted to connect today’s home-schoolers and their possible approach to history with Alberta’s much-ballyhooed Jim Keegstra (a public-school teacher in the ‘80s who is said to have taught his students that the Holocaust was a myth).
In this bait-and-switch, Ms. Tremonti exposed her narrow bias and selective interpretation of “human rights”. She asserted, for instance, that the teaching of history has to do with hard facts, not opinion. Which facts? And by whose judgment are facts established beyond the scope of opinion? What about historical facts like the names of the first man and first woman in the human race? What about the Exodus of over three million Israelites from their slave-holding adopted home of Egypt? What about the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ 2,000 years ago? Are these things even talked about in the public school system or are students in that system being given a sterilised version of history, devoid of some of history’s most poignant facts? How about recent history? How about the ongoing Holocaust of Canadian babies through taxpayer-funded abortion? After all, three and a half million have died in Canada in the last 40 years. Although the controllers of information (like the CBC) are trying their best to hide these facts and figures from Canadians, these are still facts that can be proven today. If public schools will not teach high school students the facts of life and death in Canada today, should not parents at least have the right to do so in their own homes? What about the numbers and the significance of prolife protestors gathered in Ottawa each year? CBC has historically tried to ignore these types of events or to spin them but home-schooling parents have a right to tell their kids the truth about history, even including current events. In attempting to link home-schoolers to Holocaust-deniers, Ms. Tremonti needs to be sure that she and her CBC colleagues aren’t modern-day Holocaust-deniers themselves or Exodus-deniers.
What about the fact that practicing homosexual men have a lifespan 20 years shorter than that of heterosexuals? That’s a fact not taught in public high school and a fact that does not support the current popular theory that homosexuality is a benign lifestyle choice. Would Ms. Tremonti prefer that home-schooling parents not be allowed to disclose this provable fact to malleable minds?
What about Jesus’ claim that He is “the Way, the Truth and the Life”, and that “no man can come to the Father” except through Him? Christians regard this as a fact but it doesn’t quite fit with the humanist, multicultural idea that there are “many paths to truth”.
Ms. Tremonti returned several times to attacking home-schoolers’ rights to teach their own children by referring to the small percentage of the population they represent. She asked Jacquie Hansen, VP of the Canadian School Boards Association, “Doesn’t it bother you that a group representing only 1.3% of the population could impact legislation?” To her credit, Jacquie Hansen stood up for “diversity” in the broadest sense—that Albertan parents should be allowed to hold opinions and pass them on to their children, even if those ideas are not shared by a majority of Albertans. In fact, she defended (very well) parental rights, correctly declaring parents to be the “first educators” of their children.
I wonder if Ms. Tremonti has ever used the same logic (about the majority in society being imposed upon by the minority) when comparing the lopsided results of lobbying done by the small percentage of homosexuals and lesbians in Canada?…or the infinitesimal percentage of transgendered people compared to the general population, a group now pressing for special rights that would trump the privacy and security of women and girls in public washrooms? Has she ever complained that their aggressive advocacy could negatively and unfairly impact the lives of the vast majority of heterosexual Canadians?
At the end of the interviews, the ebullient (does that have something to do with “bullying”?) Ms. Tremonti cut off the closing comments of Jacquie Hansen but then informed the listeners to the podcast that they are in for a “final word” on the question of home-schooling. Then at taxpayers’ expense, we are subjected to a very rude fictional satire of an imaginary home school. The home-schooling parent/teacher is made to look stupid, angry, frustrated, incompetent, mentally-abusive and immoral. Her teenage son is portrayed as bored, disrespectful and doomed to failure in life unless he can escape the prison of home school. This segment is so arrogant, rude and unfair that in a just society, CBC should be making public apologies to all home-schoolers and offering the public some real facts about the high success rates of home-schoolers, their academic achievements (statistically speaking), their maturity levels, social adjustment, creativity and entrepreneurship, etc. However, we can’t call Canada a “just society” while it allows the killing of 100,000 innocent human beings every year nor can we expect fair treatment from the self-appointed social engineers at CBC.
I just ask you readers to do your own fact-checking. CBC has long functioned as a thermostat rather than as a thermometer and interviews like this one are not intended to inform but to influence. Congratulations to the parents of Alberta who have won a rare victory and “Thank you!” to the Alberta government which has made a wise and timely concession to justice, common sense and the God-given role of parents. Shame on CBC for their nasty attempt to find fault with those who have not accepted them the sole arbiters of truth.
Well written! Thank you Mr. Taylor.