Pride flag debate shows fatal flaw in Catholic education

It was a debate with no winners.

On Monday, Waterloo Catholic school board trustees discussed flying a flag at their schools in June, which is Pride month.

Education director Loretta Notten told trustees that a design had already been chosen and a special flag was being produced.

But this is a Catholic board, tied to a religion that still sees gay sex as disordered. So the flag in question will not be the same rainbow Pride flag that you’ll notice everywhere else.

Instead, the board’s design depicts a Christ-like figure, looking down on people depicted in different colours. The slogan says, in part: “We are all wonderfully made.”

Very nice. Except that its universal message erases the specific experiences and identities of LGBTQ+ people — just as the response “All lives matter” has done to the statement “Black lives matter.”

Trustee Melanie Van Alphen said she was unhappy with the decision and the lack of wide consultation before making it.

There is already a flag for Pride month, “and it’s the rainbow flag,” she said. To use the Catholic board’s new design instead is “disrespectful and insulting.”

“I don’t think it represents Pride month, and I don’t think that’s acceptable,” she said.

At the meeting, Van Alphen made a motion to postpone display of the flag until a proper consultation, including students, staff and the LGTBQ+ community, could happen. But she didn’t receive support from other trustees.

And when another trustee, Greg Reitzel, said that Pride, to him, is “the deadliest of the deadly sins,” no one challenged him. Appalling.

A former Catholic trustee, Janek Jagiellowicz, took in the news with a sense of déjà vu.

“That’s the doublespeak they are very good at,” he said. “When you peel everything away, it’s not accepting the LGBTQ community for who they fundamentally are.”

Jagiellowicz served as a Catholic trustee from 2010 to 2014. He remembers when thenpremier Dalton McGuinty ordered all school boards to set up gay-straight alliances. These were student clubs created to support marginalized LGBTQ+ students.

The Waterloo Catholic board couldn’t even bring itself to use the word “gay,” he said. Instead the officials said “sexual minorities.”

“You were not allowed to call it a gay-straight alliance.”

The sense of oppression was so heavy that at one high school, a vice-principal who was lesbian did not feel comfortable to come out at work until four days before she retired, in 2015. She was 54.

It’s the same fatal flaw all across the province. Catholic boards receive public funding but do not fully embrace public values.

Two years ago, the Halton Catholic board finally allowed students to fund-raise for charities like the United Way and Canadian Cancer Society. Before then, fundraising for these groups had been forbidden because they supported practices the church is against, like contraception.

It took until 2019 for the Toronto Catholic board to finally agree that its code of conduct could ban discrimination based on gender identity and marriage status.

It all has a whiff of Andrew Scheer about it. The leader of the federal Conservative party, a devout Catholic, has said he advocates for the human rights of LGBTQ+ people, but he won’t attend a Pride parade. The Canadian people wouldn’t buy this mixed message. As a result, Scheer is on his way out as party leader.

Catholic school boards are on that same road.