Catholic Civil Rights League unhappy with Education Ministry

By Laureen McMahon

Making Space, Giving Voice, a draft document released last September by the B.C. Ministry of Education outlining how teachers should teach diversity and social justice in schools, is drawing a highly critical response from the Catholic Civil Rights League.

CCRL director Sean Murphy has charged that the ministry manual, as it stands, will "transform state schools into instruments for ideological instruction."

In his rebuttal argument, Making Sense of Making Space, Giving Voice, Murphy laments the latest fallout from the Corren Agreement, signed secretly between two homosexual activists and the Ministry of Education in 2006, aimed, he says, at making the curriculum more gay-friendly.

The new guidelines, designed to fulfil the Corren Agreement, said Murphy, will force students to participate in "queer positive" classes and lessons "even over the objection of their parents."

A ministry-imposed imperative to discuss diversity in all subjects and in every public school classroom means that, in many cases, children and families will find their religious and moral values questioned. Time to teach the core curriculum will be inevitably reduced, Murphy added.

Students are in danger of being taught the "moral and social acceptability of any and all sexual lifestyles presented to them," and being confronted with a kaleidoscopic mix of "identities" and "orientations," Murphy suggested.

The CCRL has released Resist, Counter, and Protest, available to all those concerned with how social diversity and social justice will be taught in provincial schools. The materials can be accessed at the CCRL web site: www.ccrl.ca.

"What the League has done is provide parents and other interested people with solid, reasonable information that they can rely upon as a basis for taking action to oppose the agreement," Murphy said. "If they choose to do that ... I think they can have an impact."

The CCRL said it will collaborate with other groups to develop strategies that concerned parents can employ to passively and actively resist, counter, and protest instruction methods recommended in the teachers' manual.

The Ministry of Education reports that that feedback on the teaching guide remains under review.

Catholic Independent Schools of the Vancouver Archdiocese are not affected, as they operate under an independent agreement recognizing their right to teach curriculum from a faith-based perspective.