Religious Freedom News from the Great White North

Two Canadian parents aiming to exempt their children from a state-run religious education program are  seeking recourse to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Ethics and Religious Culture curriculum, developed under Jean Charest’s government, is mandatory in both public and private schools, and replaces traditional religious education with a catechism on political correctness. One of the curriculum’s central ideas could otherwise hardly be found outside radical humanities departments and, as sociologist Joelle Querin puts it, it proposes that values taught by parents “are relative, and [students] are free to develop their own ethical life.” Except the values of parents who align with the Canadian government’s educational philosophy, of course. All this comes as the Quebecois are quite open on the question of religious education, with 76 percent saying parents should choose freely between Ethics and Religious Culture and alternative programs.

Besides striving to produce reactionary children and miserable parents, the Canadians have also brought a measure of sanity to their state curricula, with parental pressure pushing Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty to  scale back his proposed sex education program, which would have forced Catholic schools to teach the gospel of free love, including graphic how to’s for deviant sex acts and a radical redefining of gender and family structure. Sometimes the very existence of these debates makes one wonder if even our hallowed liberal democracies can come to believe that the formation of children’s moral compasses is a project entirely divorced from family life.