Last Sunday, a small crowd of maybe 100 people gathered at Queen’s Park to protest a de-facto ban on gay-straight alliance groups in Ontario’s Catholic schools. The issue had first come to a head earlier this year when Halton Region’s Catholic school board sought to formally ban the groups, in defiance of provincial equity guidelines. It gained further momentum when a group of students at a Mississauga school were prevented from forming a GSA.These events very publicly brought to light just how out of sync the Catholic school boards are with modern notions of sexuality and equality. More importantly, they have served to once again fuel public resentment of the existing school system, in which the province fully funds two streams: one for Catholics and one for everyone else. In my view, there is no coherent defence of the system. It is unfairly discriminatory, and we should abolish it immediately.
Not that doing so would really help gay students with their struggles inside the Catholic church. I’m not an expert on theology, but I attended Catholic schools for 15 years, from kindergarten to grade 13. I’m also a former altar boy, former Sunday-school teacher and former employee of the Catholic Youth Organization. Though I have parted ways with religion, my wife identifies as Catholic, my father is a lay minister in his parish, and my father-in-law has a PhD in religious studies and has published three books on Catholicism.
I could go on, but the point is that I’m conversant with the Vatican’s teachings on human sexuality. That being the case, let me start by making a very basic observation: There is no way to form a student group based on the idea that homosexual sex is natural and healthy, and also have that group conform to Catholic teaching. Those teachings are internally consistent and based on the fundamental premise that the primary purpose—and the sole acceptable expression—of sex is procreation. If you accept that premise as an absolute truth, then the rest of the faith’s sexual hang-ups (no condoms, no premarital intercourse, no abortion, no same-sex coupling) follows as obviously and inevitably as night follows day. And Catholics are required by their church to accept that premise as an absolute truth—it’s a fundamental, “infallible” teaching of the faith that’s not open to debate.
This may be unfortunate and wrong-headed. The idea may even be dangerous. But in a pluralistic society, we acknowledge that other people can hold crazy religious ideas and it’s no legal concern of ours. It only becomes a problem when you realize that the Catholic school boards in Ontario are agents of the government—they receive 100 per cent of their funding from provincial taxpayers. To most of us, the thought of our tax contributions being used to fund an institution that openly rejects homosexuality is unfortunate at best, repugnant at worst. But there’s an even more important truth here: Government has no business using public money to push a single religious agenda in any public school system. It runs entirely contrary to both the principles of diversity we proclaim and those of freedom of religion and equality we have enshrined in the constitution. So why are we doing it? Because as any Catholic would point out, the very existence of the Catholic school boards is enshrined in that same constitution.
There was a time when all education was religious education. The overwhelming majority of Ontarians (or Upper Canadians, as they were then known) were Protestant—that is, non-Catholic Christians—and everyone else but a handful of people were Catholic. The situation was almost exactly reversed in the territory that became Quebec. Public schools were often run by churches or church communities, and religious education was assumed to be a natural part of the curriculum.
In the British North America Act of 1867, a compromise was struck between Catholic Quebec and Protestant Ontario that enshrined a guarantee of minority religious education rights. In Ontario, this meant a guarantee that the Catholic minority would have its own school system. Every province that entered Confederation established a similar protection against discrimination for its own religious minorities.
In the intervening century and a half, as we’ve grown into a more diverse, pluralistic, free society, our public schools have wisely decided that religious education does not belong in classrooms paid for by governments. Our schools are for and open to everyone—paid for and managed democratically by everyone—and respecting the religious freedom of all citizens means not giving preference to some.
Which has led us to this strange situation in 2011 in which a constitutional guarantee meant to preserve the equality of a then-marginalized minority group—Catholics—has instead created a discriminatory system that grants them special privileges.
For teachers, this creates an especially distressing situation. Roughly one-third of all teaching jobs in Ontario are in the Catholic system; to qualify for them, teachers must prove they are practising Catholics. It isn’t even a case of separate-but-equal—those Catholic teachers have every opportunity to work in the public schools as well. We’ve given adherents to one religion a huge advantage in the market for government-funded jobs, a situation that recently led the United Nations to give Ontario a tongue-lashing.
The situation also gives Catholic or nominally Catholic families a greater range of educational options than anyone else. My own son goes to a Catholic school largely because we did research into the schools in our neighbourhood and found the local Catholic school to be the best educational option for him. (Because he’d been baptized, he qualified to go.) Non-Catholics in similar situations do not have the same options. If a Protestant or atheist or Muslim is not satisfied with the range of public school options in their area, they have pay tuition to send their kids off to a private school.
Now, you’ll hear defenders of the current discriminatory system say that the Catholic board is funded only by Catholic taxpayers who choose to direct their school taxes to the separate system. Not true: Catholic and public schools alike are funded by general provincial revenues, and the amount of funding each school gets is determined for both systems by a per-pupil formula set by the province. But even if it were true, it would be grossly unjust. Those who send their children to private schools aren’t exempt from paying taxes to fund the public system, just as those who drive are not exempted from paying taxes to support transit capital costs.
John Tory, when he was leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative party during the last election, famously recognized this injustice and tried, in his way, to resolve it. He proposed eliminating the discrimination against other religions by extending public funding to all religious school systems. This policy became a millstone for him—his opponents, including Dalton McGuinty, said that the principle of diversity in our society meant all our children should come together in one public-school system to meet in the classroom. There was an unsavoury tinge of anti-Muslim scaremongering to some of the opposition to the Tory plan, but the general principle was sound. Religious tolerance doesn’t mean publicly promoting all religions. It means publicly promoting none.
Except, of course, no one—not McGuinty, not anyone else—was willing to extend that logic to its natural conclusion: that the status quo is more unjust than the proposed alternative. Other provinces have already recognized this imbalance and eliminated their public funding for separate religious schools. Newfoundland and Quebec did so by referendum, Manitoba by a simple act of the provincial legislature.
We should do the same. If the provincial government announced a five-year phase-out of public funding for Catholic school boards, those boards could see how many of their students were attached enough to religious education to pay tuition. If it were too few to support the number of schools they operate now, they could sell their surplus schools to the public school board with minimal disruption. Catholic schools would still have a huge advantage over other religious schools in the form of their century-and-a-half legacy of publicly funded buildings and institutions. But we as a province would no longer be actively discriminating against teachers and students who are not Catholic. And we would no longer face absurd headlines about theology being used to justify open discrimination against gays and lesbians in our public-school systems.
In the British North America Act of 1867, a compromise was struck between Catholic Quebec and Protestant Ontario that enshrined a guarantee of minority religious education rights. In Ontario, this meant a guarantee that the Catholic minority would have its own school system. Every province that entered Confederation established a similar protection against discrimination for its own religious minorities.
In the intervening century and a half, as we’ve grown into a more diverse, pluralistic, free society, our public schools have wisely decided that religious education does not belong in classrooms paid for by governments. Our schools are for and open to everyone—paid for and managed democratically by everyone—and respecting the religious freedom of all citizens means not giving preference to some.
Which has led us to this strange situation in 2011 in which a constitutional guarantee meant to preserve the equality of a then-marginalized minority group—Catholics—has instead created a discriminatory system that grants them special privileges.
For teachers, this creates an especially distressing situation. Roughly one-third of all teaching jobs in Ontario are in the Catholic system; to qualify for them, teachers must prove they are practising Catholics. It isn’t even a case of separate-but-equal—those Catholic teachers have every opportunity to work in the public schools as well. We’ve given adherents to one religion a huge advantage in the market for government-funded jobs, a situation that recently led the United Nations to give Ontario a tongue-lashing.
The situation also gives Catholic or nominally Catholic families a greater range of educational options than anyone else. My own son goes to a Catholic school largely because we did research into the schools in our neighbourhood and found the local Catholic school to be the best educational option for him. (Because he’d been baptized, he qualified to go.) Non-Catholics in similar situations do not have the same options. If a Protestant or atheist or Muslim is not satisfied with the range of public school options in their area, they have pay tuition to send their kids off to a private school.
Now, you’ll hear defenders of the current discriminatory system say that the Catholic board is funded only by Catholic taxpayers who choose to direct their school taxes to the separate system. Not true: Catholic and public schools alike are funded by general provincial revenues, and the amount of funding each school gets is determined for both systems by a per-pupil formula set by the province. But even if it were true, it would be grossly unjust. Those who send their children to private schools aren’t exempt from paying taxes to fund the public system, just as those who drive are not exempted from paying taxes to support transit capital costs.
John Tory, when he was leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative party during the last election, famously recognized this injustice and tried, in his way, to resolve it. He proposed eliminating the discrimination against other religions by extending public funding to all religious school systems. This policy became a millstone for him—his opponents, including Dalton McGuinty, said that the principle of diversity in our society meant all our children should come together in one public-school system to meet in the classroom. There was an unsavoury tinge of anti-Muslim scaremongering to some of the opposition to the Tory plan, but the general principle was sound. Religious tolerance doesn’t mean publicly promoting all religions. It means publicly promoting none.
Except, of course, no one—not McGuinty, not anyone else—was willing to extend that logic to its natural conclusion: that the status quo is more unjust than the proposed alternative. Other provinces have already recognized this imbalance and eliminated their public funding for separate religious schools. Newfoundland and Quebec did so by referendum, Manitoba by a simple act of the provincial legislature.
We should do the same. If the provincial government announced a five-year phase-out of public funding for Catholic school boards, those boards could see how many of their students were attached enough to religious education to pay tuition. If it were too few to support the number of schools they operate now, they could sell their surplus schools to the public school board with minimal disruption. Catholic schools would still have a huge advantage over other religious schools in the form of their century-and-a-half legacy of publicly funded buildings and institutions. But we as a province would no longer be actively discriminating against teachers and students who are not Catholic. And we would no longer face absurd headlines about theology being used to justify open discrimination against gays and lesbians in our public-school systems.
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Source: Grid TO
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