Azeem Mohammed, a 38-year-old stay-at-home dad from East York, is the school council chair at Thorncliffe Park Public School. It’s a volunteer position that he takes very seriously. Azeem and his wife, Sufia, are Muslims from Hyderabad, India. They left comfortable jobs overseas so their children could get a better education in Canada. Sufia teaches physiotherapy at a college in Scarborough. Azeem has two master’s degrees, but he stopped working three years ago to care for the kids—three girls and a boy, all under 10. The Mohammeds are active members of the Liberal party, and both voted for Kathleen Wynne in the last election. As they learned more about the impending sex ed curriculum, however, they began to have serious doubts.
On February 23, moments after Minister of Education Liz Sandals unveiled the curriculum at a Queen’s Park press conference, Azeem went online to read it for himself. He scrolled through 239 pages, looking for offensive content. Then he did a search. “I looked for one word: pleasure,” he explains. He discovered passages about understanding what gives you pleasure, the benefits of relationships, and how to make safe and healthy decisions about sexual activity. For Azeem, the very presence of the word was a deal-breaker. Why would a so-called educational document need to tell children about sexual pleasure? Why not just stick to the biological facts? The search revealed enough information to confirm his worst fears. “I got everything I was looking for,” he says. That’s when Azeem Mohammed became an anti–sex ed activist. (more...)
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