Presentation on Bill 18 to the Standing Committee on Human Resources Room 255 Manitoba Legislative Building -- Saturday, September 7, 2013

As a parent and a grandparent, and as one with a keen interest in education with a bachelors degree in education from the University of Alberta, I am grateful for this opportunity to address the members of the Standing Committee that is presently considering The Public Schools Amendment Act for Safe and Inclusive Schools. You people are to be lauded and appreciated by all Manitobans for being willing to hear so many different presentations, and different, seemingly irreconcilable points of view, but in a spirit of goodwill and respect for all. Thank you very much for your patience, and your courtesy. I applaud you all. While we are discussing Bill 18, we know that it is not even as hot of a potato as the educationpolicy recommended by the Manitoba Teachers Society at their general meeting last May, as reported in the Winnipeg Free Press on May 27, 2013.

Page 1 headline:

Teachers support adding sexual-orientation themes to all curricula

What is now being demanded is that the province would reflect sexual orientation in all curricula. The resolution would call on the department of education to "ensure that same-sex families and LBGTTQ (lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, two-spirited, queer) people and themes are reflected in all curricula." 1 To put things into historical perspective, we all know that the sexual revolution, and the modern sex-ed movement began in the 1960s using Alfred Kinseys model of modern sexuality as a foundation. This mans personal sexual philosophy has been institutionalized within much of modern sex education, and now the pressure is on to extend this pansexual philosophy to all curricula in our schools. Today, all over North America, Kinseys worldview has given sanction to all sexual orientations, inclusive of all and exclusive of none. Referring to Kinseys research, Dr. Mary Calderone, the founder of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) stated that professionals who study children have affirmed the strong sexuality of the newborn. 2 Kinseys studies bore this out. 3

What scientific data tells us is that the new human cell formed at conception has all of the properties, the DNA, and the self-organizing power of a fully complete (albeit immature) human organism constituted to continue human development, growth and maturing seamlessly throughout embryogenesis, birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood all at different stages of the maturing of human life. 4 My point here is to say that right from the time of conception, how a child experiences life in the wombas friendly or hostiledoes create personality and character predispositions, propensities, inclinations and expectations. If there has been a warm, loving environment, the child is likely to expect the outside world to be the same. This produces a predisposition towards trust, openness, extroversion and self-confidence. If that environment has been hostile, the child will anticipate towards suspiciousness, distrust, and introversion, loneliness, becoming incommunicable and lacking in self-assertion. 5 What young children mostly need is the filling up of any love deficit from their past with a sex education that differentiates permanent love from sexual experience per se. Today, we have a great love deficit in our society, and so many cannot therefore differentiate love for their personhood separate from sexual experience which can so easily lead to exploitation and abuse. Children need to know the reality of true love that gives and does not take advantage of childhood innocence. I personally do not see how the school can ever replace the home in giving children the amount of individual, undistracted time, care and attention that children need to feel significant and valued before they sell their bodies cheaply to whoever will pay attention to them and show some affection, affection which too frequently becomes distorted and twisted. While children did not choose the environment in which they were raised, they do respond differently as to what they believe about themselves in spite of that environment where there is a love deficit, and this is why areas like sexual orientation are not quite the same as being Irish, but have a measure of subjectivity and unpredictability about them. With humans, we see that ones past does not necessarily define ones future. What one becomes may be disposed by conditions, but it is determined by decisions. 6 What I see developing in todays society is a militancy that is seeking to transform our society to a new moral code in which it is perfectly legitimate for a boy to make a decision to become a girl, or it is perfectly legitimate for a girl to make a decision to become a boy, and it is perfectly legitimate to change sexual orientations, with one exception. I am concerned that instead of teaching our children the true meaning of love, we seem to be sexualizing our children at an ever younger age. The question is, At what age are small children mature enough to decide that they want to form GSAs that promote all sexual orientations and gender identities? In this regard, it appears that Bill 18 in Manitoba goes even further than Bill 13
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in Ontario did in that Bill 13 applied to high schools but not to elementary or primary schools. Donn Short, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Manitoba must be pleased with this, as he has stated, I have argued elsewherethat cultural transformation must include and begin at the earliest grades. 7 So here are some of my concerns about Bill 18 as presently written: 1. It provides no minimum grade level to accommodate pupils who want to establish and lead activities and organizations that promotethe awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. 41(1.8) From this wording, I do not see anything that would hinder a group of grade one students to lead and to organize activities that are not so much about anti-bullying per se, as about promoting all sexual orientations and gender identities. 2. The ambiguous phrase all sexual orientations is not defined in this legislation, nor is it defined anywhere in Canadian law, and this ambiguity seems to be by design. Yet it opens the door to future court challenges down the road to consider any type of sexual activity as a human right. At the very least, it includes bi-sexuality as a human right, and that includes multiple sex partners, and we know something of the brokenness of trust in human relationships when multiple sex partners are involved. 3. While pupils of any grade are allowed to establish and lead these activities and organizations that promote all sexual orientations, there is no system of accountability in place here whenever student organizations go in directions that reveal the dark side of human nature. The need for some limitation of student expression was nowhere more evident than in yesterdays news story from the St. Marys University in Halifax that underlined that even university students need some mature supervision at times. These student-led chants have been going on for some years, but now that it was captured on camera, some participants run to their neutral corners once it comes out into the open that they were chanting Saint Marys boys, we like them young, and Y is for your sister...U is for underage, N is for no consent and I will not even mention the obscenities for the O and the G. The point is, that there has to be safeguards in place when student led activities run awry. If this is true for university students, who should be more mature than high school students and elementary students, surely these safeguards are needed for all pupils who are at different levels of maturity. While nothing in todays world is shocking anymore, I found it almost unbelievable that some young girls would say that they are not feminist,
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and that they find this type of language quite appropriate. How can youth like that lead an organization if they have no compass other than the writings of Alfred Kinsey? 4. When it comes to the bullying issues, it is clear that the definition of bullying is far too broad and subjective in order to be objectively enforced. When bullying includes behaviour which is intended to cause harm to another personsfeelings, self-esteem, and that need not be repeated behaviour, and may be direct or indirect, we see clearly how this can be misused if applied subjectively without greater objective criteria to clarify what was intended and what was heard. Now we have it on the public record that the Hon. Andrew Swan, our Minister of Justice, was very recently criticizing the bill proposed by the Hon. Jon Gerrard because his definition of bullying is too vague when it is worded just like Bill 18. Does anybody see a contradiction here? On this very basis, he should be voting against Bill 18 as worded. 5. Finally, I appeal to your conscience in applying the law of the land even-handedly. We know that when prayer was mandatory in our public schools, we now realize that it was not right to force prayer on everybody, so we came to have an opting out clause for those who did not choose to participate. Eventually, in most public schools, it became an issue, not of opting out, but of removing prayer from public schools altogether, and this has resulted in many people of faith preferring private schools which reflect their family values, while still continuing to pay taxes to the state. Even in todays world, I understand that there is an opting out permission to those students who, for reason of conscience, do not want to participate in Remembrance Day Services in the school. Our Premier has acknowledged the right for people to do this in the name of freedom of religion. My question is, Why is there no opting out clause in Bill 18 for private schools that reflect the faith values of the parents who send their children there? Would it not be respectful to honour the faith values of those who believe that there is a difference between human identity and human behaviour? When it comes to truly being inclusive and respecting one another, I wonder, Why the intransigence? Why the dogmatism? Why the inflexibility? As Christians, we believe that all human beings were created in the image of God, and this is what gives to all human beings dignity, value and worth, and yet because we do not agree with all forms of sexual behaviour, we are labelled bigots and bullies on that basis alone. Can we not disagree on this respectfully without imposing one moral belief system upon everybody, while respecting the rights of others to believe differently, and give them the option to opt out of a state-imposed morality that is not on the same foundation that our nation was founded upon according to the Canadian Charter preamble.
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Professor Donn Short lays out the confrontation as being between rights claims grounded in sexual orientation, on the one hand, and religion-based claims on the otherin short, taking on God. 8 I realize that individuals like Donn Short would see those of us who believe in a personal Creator as dinosaurs, and if this is the case, he is quite justified in his conclusion that Quite simply, freedom of religious expression needs to be a little less freeReligion-based claims must not be at the expense of the exclusion and oppression of sexual orientation claims. 9 In the name of fairness, however, I would respectfully suggest that this dichotomy between religion-based claims and rights claims grounded in sexual orientation is really a confrontation between two faiths, two belief assumptions, one on the premise that there is a personal Creator who designed us, and the other on the premise that there is no personal Creator, but that we are but the product of the impersonal forces of Nature which are believed to be a closed circle, and therefore they challenge the faith assumption and premise that there is a personal God! Neither the view that human life has a supernatural origin, or the view that nature is a closed circle, and that everything has a natural cause, can be proven scientifically. Therefore, both views are based on a faith premise. I put it to you that the God that our founding fathers in Canada believed in was a Deity that respects human freewill, and does not force belief. An original Personality can explain freewill, something that science and natural law cannot explain. On this premise, the Canadian Bill of Rights (1960) states that the Parliament of Canada, affirming that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions; Affirming also that men and institutions remain free only when freedom is founded upon respect for moral and spiritual values and the rule of law 10 Similarly, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) begins with those historic words, that whereas Canada was founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of God, and on that foundation identifies the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression 11 Honourable members of the Standing Committee that is considering Bill 18, I appeal to you that this founding principle of the Canadian nation laid the foundation for what is no doubt one of the greatest and freest nations in history, and yet that foundation is now being undermined by another foundation, a foundation that is based upon the sand of state-initiated rights, rather than on the inalienable rights of a created and a transcendent order that was the vision of our founding
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fathers, and which elevated Canada to become one of the great democracies of the world. My understanding of a personal God is of One who loves all people whom He has created in His image as persons with freewill, and who wants to flow through human caregivers who meet the emotional needs of children, rather than sexualizing them at an early age, leaving them even more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse whenever sexuality is not the servant to a true and a permanent love. It is the lack of a permanent love in our homes that drives children, at a younger and younger age, to seek sexual experience in order to try to find love, many times to end up more hurt, more confused, and more broken every time that trust is shattered. Love is a spiritual, eternal quality, and does not lend itself to coercive legislation that imposes a monogamous state belief over the consciences and hearts of citizens who want to respect the rights of others to believe differently. As far as I can see, Donn Short has no mechanism for the healing of emotional hurt other than state-issued law and top-down legislation. 12 This curbs the personal freedom of conscience, thought, belief, opinion and expression for all non-violent beliefs that disagree with his worldview. The state is a compulsory society, based on social contract, whereas all churches are voluntarily based on conviction. People of faith and of conscience are quite willing to pay taxes, and faithbased communities like Steinbach pay more than their fair share of taxes while being one of the most charitable communities in all of Canada. This community has hugely contributed to a stronger Manitoba, a stronger Canada. The Mennonites know what it is to be persecuted, and are a peaceful people who are not in favour of any kind of bullying, and should be allowed to practise their faith in peace. Never forget that faith and belief go far deeper into the human psyche than state and external legislation can ever do. Thank you for your time and your attention.

Teachers support adding sexual-orientation themes to all curricula, Nick Martin, The Winnipeg Free Press, May, 27, 2013, page 1.
2

Dr. Mary Calderone, founder of SIECUS (1964), quoted by Dr. Miriam Grossman, MD, July 16, 2013, http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/07/10408/
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http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/2010/10/tables_30_31_32.html See Appendix 1.

When Does Human Life Begin? A Scientific Perspective, by Dr. Maureen L. Condic, Senior Fellow, Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person, White Paper, Volume 1, Number 1, October 2008, page 7. http://bdfund.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wi_whitepaper_life_print.pdf
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Dr. Thomas Verny, M.D. and John Kelly, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, Dell Publishing, http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Life-Unborn-Child/dp/0440505658
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Viktor E. Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning, http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2782.Viktor_E_Frankl The one thing you cant take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of ones freedoms is to choose ones attitude in any given circumstance.
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Associate Professor Donn Short, Queering Schools, BSAs and the Law, pages 5, 10. http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/files/shorts-taking-on-god.pdf
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Associate Professor Donn Short, ibid., page 2. Associate Professor Donn Short, ibid., page 3. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-12.3/page-1.html See Appendix 2. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html See Appendix 3. Associate Professor Donn Short, ibid., page 9.

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