Just when I thought I’d had enough of the media coverage of the ongoing debate around the Ontario Liberal government’s amended Bill-13 that will, if passed, require Catholic schools to support gay-straight alliance clubs, I came across Adam Radwanski’s article: “Politicians, not Catholics, deserve Ontario’s wrath for funding religious schools.” Radwanski presents an excellent argument for why the responsibility for resolving the issue belongs to
the men and women running the province, who prefer to tell religious leaders how they should change their moral code rather than tell them they no longer have any business advancing that code through publicly funded schools.
To most of the rest of the Western world, it would come as little surprise that Catholics in Ontario – the ones in senior positions within the church, at least – are uncomfortable telling kids that it’s okay to be gay. The surprise, rather, would be that Ontario still has a publicly funded Catholic school system beyond any point at which it’s reasonably needed or defensible as a minority right.
Regardless of how angry we, those of us who support the elimination of Catholic schools, get with Cardinal Thomas Collins’ pronouncements, it is time we focus our wrath and pressure on
The government [that] has thus far shown more inclination to try to make Catholicism palatable to the masses than tell Catholics to practice it on their own time
and on their own dime.