Don’t public fund religious indoctrination
LETTERS
In her Nov. 24 letter, Roliena Slingerland frames the issue of funding private religious schools that refuse to accept Alberta Education guidelines on protection of LGBT students as just a matter of money. She implies the 24 non-compliant schools (all religious) will close rather than accept human rights. That would put a severe financial burden on taxpayers, in her view, to accommodate their students (how many, really?) in public schools.
These Christian soldiers are learning, because religious doctrine is not even mentioned by this letter writer, in spite of it being the main reason for the very existence of these “private” schools she speaks of, as well as the reason they are running afoul of Alberta Education’s policies and laws!
Religious doctrine is the crux of the issue (pardon the pun). Slingerland and her fellow campaigners want to keep their young within the bubble of “faith-based education,” immune to realities that do not conform to their faith. Inside that bubble, gay students are perverts in conflict with their god. They should renounce their sinful inclinations, or at least pretend they do not have them so the fiction of compliance can be maintained.
They claim an alternate “divine” authority which challenges our merely human rule of law. Subsidizing their churches with tax exemptions, in support of freedom of religion, is never enough. They wish to defy history and re-impose church — their church, of course — over the state. Again, it’s only our pathetic, little human history…
But tell me, what does “faithbased” mathematics look like? Or “faith-based” versus science-based science? The only place this mythology of “faith” can legitimately be introduced in a public education setting is in “social studies” or “sociology,” both of which include the study of different phenomena that are characteristic of human societies. At some point, we need to phase out funding of religious indoctrination through private religious schools.
Patricia and Tony Pargeter Lethbridge