If the Ontario sex ed protests are going to fizzle, they haven’t yet

A demonstrator holds up a sign while gathering with others in front of Queen's Park
to protest against Ontario's new sex education curriculum

The anti-sex-ed protest centred on Thorncliffe Park’s Muslim community may be fizzling. On Tuesday there were roughly 700 absentees at Thorncliffe Park Public School, or about half of projected enrolment; on Wednesday that was down to “only” 432, or about 30 per cent.

Parents made quite a spectacle of their protest, mass-homeschooling youngsters in a nearby park, and the Thorncliffe Parents Association (TPA) Facebook page exhorts parents to stay the course. But one post seems to give the game away: “We are not sending our children in public school for the whole month of September until the curriculum is taken back and parental rights are respected.”

A Toronto District School Board spokesman says there has been no decline in enrolment at Thorncliffe Park, suggesting there has been no mass principled exodus. The same is true at boards province-wide, the National Post reported this week. Still, the community has certainly demonstrated this is no fleeting tantrum. This is genuine conscientious objection, and it isn’t just limited to those who haven’t a clue what’s in the curriculum.

A list of objections on the website of the Canadian Families Alliance, of which the TPA is a member, quotes directly from the document. Among other things, it thinks teaching about gender fluidity causes gender fluidity; it doesn’t think teachers should be telling students that masturbation is “something that many people do and find pleasurable”; and it thinks telling students that “some (families) have two mothers or two fathers” “normalize(s) homosexual family structures and homosexual ‘marriage’,” which it does. That’s the point.  (more...)

If the Ontario sex ed protests are going to fizzle, they haven’t yet