Jun 10
29
Should Quebec return tax dollars received from all Christians?
National Post – June 28, 2010
Religious people are taxpayers too
By Charles Lewis
Yesterday, the Post editorial board contended that Montreal’s Loyola High School should not have the right to opt out of a Quebec government-sponsored ethics and religion program – despite a court ruling allowing it to do so – because it receives public funds.
The argument seems fair on the surface: The assumption is that as a religious school, Loyola is somehow outside the public sphere and therefore should be grateful for whatever public support it gets. But what the editorial fails to recognize is that public money does not mean secular money.
Funds that end up in the government’s coffers come from all sorts of people, including religious people, who pay taxes like everyone else. Why should those religious taxpayers be beholden to non-religious taxpayers?
There is an increasingly common notion in our society that religious people need to stand in a corner and behave; that their stake in society is somewhere on the fringe and the “rest” of society occupies some sane middle ground.
Read the complete article here.
National Post – June 28, 2010
Editorial: Loyola’s good fight
In 2008, the Quebec government introduced a grade-school course titled “Ethics and Religious Culture” (ECR), to replace the religion courses previously offered by the province’s schools. Compulsory in all public and private institutions, ECR presents all religions on a morally relativistic footing, and devotes considerable weight to the history of liberal social movements.
The introduction of ECR generated opposition among parents who saw it as an exercise in social engineering. Two court challenges were launched, one involving the public school system, which failed, and one involving the private system, which was decided earlier this month in Montreal.
The case dates back to March, 2008, when Loyola High School, a private Catholic boys’ school in Montreal, asked the Quebec government for an exemption from ECR. Loyola wished to teach an equivalent program from a Catholic perspective, in order to be true to its Jesuit mandate. The government denied the school’s request on the grounds that its program was confessional, and thus inherently incompatible with the secular ECR. Loyola took the matter to court.
In a 63-page judgment, Justice Gerard Dugre of the Quebec Superior Court held that the government’s refusal to exempt Loyola from the course was “totalitarian” and unconstitutional. The judge decried the province’s decision as a breach of freedom of religion, guaranteed by the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
We applaud this decision. Educators don’t have to be agnostic to teach ethics and the beliefs of the world’s major religions. To explicitly preclude teaching ECR from a confessional perspective, as the judge points out, directly contradicts one of the goals of the course: to respect diversity of belief and the different means of achieving the same ends.
At the same time, we concede that a democratically elected provincial government has the right to supervise school curricula — especially when taxpayer money is on the line. In Quebec, even private schools benefit from substantial government funding: The government pays 60% of the cost per student that it would in the public system.
Read the complete article here.