Parents Protest New Course

Over 800 Vancouver protesters gathered this week to protest a new grade 12 course entitled “Social Justice.” The course will include a unit that focuses on gay role models, sparking fears that children province-wide will turn gay. The horror.

Murray Coren, who was granted a role as a consultant on the curriculum, was forced to state the obvious:

There was no information about gay or lesbian people [when I went to school], and having gone through that system for 13 years, it didn’t make me straight. So I don’t know how information about gay and lesbian people is going to turn anyone queer.

The protesters, for some reason, aren’t buying it, and presented a petition with over 14,000 signatures demanding that the government do the ultra ambiguous: “to defend and to preserve parental and children’s rights” and “to stop selling out to special interest groups.”

The kicker: the course is an elective.

• Protesters rally against gay and lesbian issues course [CBC News]
• Gay couple has too much say over lessons: petitioners [Vancouver Sun]