Sex curriculum has Catholics at crossroads
Constitutional debate likely if both sides can’t compromise on principles, ideologies
We may have finally come to the moment when publicly funded Catholic education in this province faces its defining existential crisis.
As my colleague Janet French revealed Monday, Catholic school districts across Alberta have been working on their own distinct sexual-education curriculum, one steeped deeply in traditional Catholic teachings.
Not that they admitted as much when French asked them earlier this year. In fact, they point-blank denied it. But when French filed an access to information request with Alberta Education she received documents which detail plans by the Council of Catholic School Superintendents and the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association to come up with a unique “human sexuality” curriculum. The final version is expected to be complete in three weeks.
To be blunt, nothing in the draft proposal should shock anyone who knows anything about Catholic teachings.
Catholic school boards, said the letter, will in no way accept any provincial curriculum that “promotes a contraceptive culture.” Nor will they recommend using condoms to prevent sexually transmitted infections. Condoms, said the letter, prevent “total” giving in sex.
Catholic schools, said the document, cannot teach anything positive about masturbation because it is “not part of God’s natural order.”
Oral sex? Anal sex? They’re equally forbidden, even to married heterosexual couples, because they waste seed and make sex about something other than procreation. Any sexual acts not aimed directly at creating life, said the document “miss the mark.”
Nor, said the proposal, can Catholic schools endorse artificial reproductive technologies, because children only come “as a gift from God.”
Even teaching about consent is problematic.
“Legal consent is important,” reads the document. “But we guard against a reductionist view of our human sexuality that consent is the most important factor in decision-making.”
And that’s all before we even get to more thorny issues about homosexuality. The document insists that Catholics love and respect people with what it calls “same-sex inclinations.”
Perpetual chastity, it said, is the only option for people with “same-sex attraction.” Anything else would defy “God’s natural order.”
It’s a statement that puts far more emphasis on doctrine than science. It might as well be subtitled, “Every sperm is sacred.”
Once French broke the story, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook filled up with all kinds of people expressing all kinds of outrage.
CORE TEACHINGS
But seriously. What did people expect? These are core Catholic teachings, even if many contemporary Canadian Catholics choose to ignore them.
Even though Pope Francis has suggested the Catholic Church would do better to focus on moral and social justice issues beyond sex and sexuality, traditional church teachings remain a huge part of Catholic religious and cultural identity.
Of course, Alberta Catholic educators, under the thumbs of their bishops and archbishops, aren’t going to sign off on a modern, equitable, science-based sex-ed curriculum. They can’t.
Until now, Catholic schools have largely gotten around the sex-ed requirements in the current curriculum by focusing on the mechanics of reproduction, and stressing the moral dangers of anything other than married, reproductive sex. What they fear now is that the new curriculum will be much more detailed and harder to skirt around. We’ve come to a crossroads. Catholic boards and bishops simply won’t accept the kind of sex-education curriculum the province is now creating.
At the same time, Education Minister David Eggen cannot allow a publicly funded separate school system to teach discriminatory doctrine in lieu of science.
It sometimes seems Catholic school boards and superintendents are hell-bent on undermining public support for their own publicly funded school system. They have to know that no education minister, much less a New Democratic one, could sign off on the kind of wholesale curriculum they’re proposing.
They have to know this will inflame public opinion among people who question the need for parallel public school systems.
But by the same token, Eggen had to know a wholesale rewrite of the sex ed curriculum would inspire just this kind of response from the Catholic educational establishment.
Two ethical codes, two world views, in head-on collision. A collision that might lead to a political and constitutional crisis.
Catholic education isn’t private. It’s public, and fully publicly funded. And it’s written into Alberta’s founding legislation and into the Constitution. It would take a constitutional amendment to change that. No provincial government to date has had the political will or the guts for that fight.
If neither side can compromise its principles or its ideologies? Then, like it or not, that constitutional debate may be thrust upon us, once and for all.