Sex ed shouldn’t be political issue

Only a monomaniac would argue that Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum was a major factor in last week’s provincial election. It mattered to some people, but certainly didn’t swing the overall vote.

Yet its repeal was one of the first things Doug Ford promised to follow through on after he won. Hardly a surprise, in that in politics there are always debts to pay, and impressions to make. In other words, a number of people worked very hard to make sure the Progressive Conservatives triumphed, and they need to be rewarded.

Doug Ford isn’t a particularly religious man of course, but he wants to display his alleged toughness and his links to “the people,” and striking at a curriculum that has been lied about, and held up as a symbol of the elites at their worst, is perfect optics. Bluster and bombast in one well-rehearsed sound bite.

Within moments of the election results being announced, the conservative Christian firebrand Charles McVety tweeted that “Premier Doug Ford Majority Government. Praise God who heard our prayers and delivered victory for the sake of our children.”

Let’s hope God has some good libel lawyers! McVety is one of the most hysterical opponents of the curriculum, and due to his extremism has long been on the fringes of Ontario politics. That changed with Doug Ford, who invited the President of Canada Christian College to be his guest at the first televised leaders’ debate. Then there is the former Tory candidate Tanya Granic Allen. She stated last week that, “parents expect the repeal of the Wynne sex-ed by September.” By “parents” she means the small number of hardliners in her organization. While Granic Allen was fired as a PC candidate due to a number of hideous comments, she was at the celebration party for Ford on Thursday evening. That’s hardly the behaviour of someone who is angry at the party leadership.

Indeed, it was noticed that when Granic Allen was summarily dismissed as a potential Tory MPP, she and her allies remained surprisingly quiet, and even defended Ford. The link between Ford and the woman whose supporters propelled him to the party’s leadership is clearly not over.

Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition, joined in the chorus following the election, with: “We remain optimistic that Premier Doug Ford will uphold his campaign promises to repeal and replace Kathleen Wynne’s radical sex-ed curriculum as an ‘early priority’ in his administration.” In other words, it’s a perfect populist conservative storm. Ford will appear strong, honest, and even holy, to his supporters; will provoke teachers and liberals; outrage experts; and claim he’s simply carrying out his electoral promises.

It’s also significant that many of those leading the charge against the curriculum are on the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. The infamous clergy sexual-abuse crisis within Catholicism, which is still to be fully exposed, was dependent on children being ignorant of sex, unable to name sexual acts, and on the fog of confusion and fear around sexuality that Catholicism has long enforced in its teaching and formation.

Catholic leaders not only created and then defended a patriarchal, secretive, and sexually guilt-ridden environment where abuse could flourish, but accused and condemned those victims brave enough to come forward. That this same church’s most vociferous activists should now roar against modern and liberating teaching around sexuality is little short of scandalous.

Removing Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum would lead to children being less informed and aware in areas of sex and sexuality, and more likely to become victims of abuse. It will diminish their selfconfidence, restore and even create more ambiguity, and destroy so much good that has been achieved in the past three years.

Children deserve better than to be play things in the soiled hands of single-issue fanatics and ill-informed politicians. The curriculum is balanced and appropriate, parents were consulted, groups dealing with abuse and child health contributed, and no single bureaucrat was responsible for it. Too many people have spread too many falsehoods about all this, and God forgive them for it. This subject should be above and beyond party politics, and let’s hope that everybody concerned remembers that in the weeks to come. Michael Coren is a Toronto writer and the author of Epiphany: A Christian's Change of Heart & Mind over Same-Sex Marriage.