Dec 12
5
These Aren’t the Activists You’re Looking For: Tom Bartlett
By Tom Bartlett
I remember cringing when the Waterloo School Superintendent, Gregg Bereznick insisted that school personnel were in fact “co-parents.” The context for such “fatal attraction” level hubris was in connection with the strip searching of a father and apprehension of his children after his school authorities eyeballed his daughter’s school drawing of a gun. The way things are trending, we might find ourselves revelling in the nostalgia of a day when parents still enjoyed coequal status with these public school revolutionaries.
A recent court case determined that parents had no right to learn about what was said in a presentation given in front of an assembly at Parkside Public Secondary School in Dundas. To give some context, the lecturer has a background as a youth worship leader at a synagogue and an expert in Old Testament Scripture. I know many are now railing against the disregard for a mythical “separation of church and state,” but you have yet to hear…the rest of the story.
The speaker, Laura Wolfson, also identifies as a lesbian and her objective was to disabuse students of the notion of biblical opposition to homosexuality. According to this eminent scholar, condemnation of homosexuality is as passé as admonitions against getting drunk or disregard for the Sabbath. As one unacquainted with the scriptural endorsement to sleep off a Sabbath day bender, her claim that God no longer disavows homosexuality is apparently a subjective inference she derives from the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. I guess the part where God says he is never changing is also, ironically, outdated.
Leaving aside the speciousness of this assertion, when did a public school podium become a confessional granting privacy on a par with an exchange between a client-lawyer or abortionist and his soon-to-be-former mother? The cynic in me suggests the sub rosa treatment is merely a ploy to avoid scrutiny because such social agendas thrive when schools are like mushroom farms (where children are kept in the dark and fed excrement).
This reminds me of a mandatory training at a former job. It was added without prior notice or explanation; but we were assured attendance was mandatory to receive credit. The final day involved a presentation by a lesbian team who referred to specious and disproven Kinsey statistics and sharing how Children’s Aid Societies would be promoting the homosexual agenda to teens. A highlight was a precious little exercise where attendees were tasked to generate a list of derogatory terms for homosexuals. We discovered we were unenlightened about the creative use of pejoratives as we could only muster 4 or 5. The list grew threefold once the leaders added their odious contributions. Apparently it is instructive to know that lesbian activists have a gift for such vernacular.
For anyone who has recently had occasion to enter a C.A.S. office in the G.T.A. will know it is like walking into a G.L.B.T. recruitment centre. This is fitting in that we were informed it is their policy to out homosexual clients to their family regardless of the child’s wishes. This is what passes for promoting tolerance in our present climate.
This episode also harkens back to the recent Chik-fil-A “flap.” The owner of this unabashedly Christian based company had shared his personal opposition to same sex marriage. In the ensuing controversy, mayors of Boston, San Francisco and Chicago suffered a minor setback when they learned they did not have the authority to bar a private business from setting up shop in their cities for the crime of holding the majority view on a social issue.
These and countless other stories taken together are important for a number of reasons:
1) Parents are losing their authority, businesses are under attack, and churches are losing their freedom of expression, and employees risk lawsuits or loss of their jobs for holding values out of step with secular humanist ideologies. Keep in mind, these are the people who assure us that they hold to moral relativism and deny there is “absolute truth.”
2) People in positions of authority are more than happy to abuse those freedoms both because they feel entitled to and believe they can get away with it; leading to the most disturbing fact of all…
3) The left is silent to the stripping away of these rights and freedoms. Either the stories don’t even get reported, or the response is, at best, a shrug – at worst, a denial that there is any problem.
Any who claim support for the old axiom, “I may not agree with you say, but I will fight to death for your right to say it,” is a myth. I’ve had exchanges with them and there is never enough evidence that our rights and freedoms are evaporating. Thank goodness we have God on our side as He is the only ally we have.