The signboard outside the Gosford, New South Wales, Anglican church read:
鈥淒ear Christians,
Some People Are Gay.
Get Over It.
Love, God.鈥�
My cousin Fran, with whom I grew up and who later became one of Australia鈥檚 pre-eminent published poets, posted a picture of the sign on her Facebook page.
Fran lived her early life in Gosford the way that good Catholic girls are supposed to. She married, had children, but then in later life came to terms with her own sexual identity and began living a second life on her own terms.
She remains close to her former husband and her children, but lives with another woman.
School life cannot have been easy for my cousin. None of the rest of us who played together as children and then later spent our weekends on the beach, or water skiing and barbecuing, had any insight into her struggle.
Nor can school life be easy for the kids among B.C.鈥檚 520,000 public school population who are either questioning their own sexual orientation or sexual identity or who have already come to terms with it as being different from the majority of their classmates.
Teaching acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) students is a hot-button issue in public education, but needs to be part of the curriculum in 91原创 schools, say two anti-bullying experts, after the suicide of 15-year-old Ottawa teen Jamie Hubley.
James McNinch, the dean of education at the University of Regina, has studied how gender and sexual identity are treated in schools.
He says support programs for LGBT students are 鈥渉it and miss,鈥� and this is a major concern because the majority of bullying in schools is centred on homophobic attitudes.
A number of B.C. school districts are treading lightly and carefully into the issue by formulating policies that inevitably will offend somebody.
As with any debate involving the public education system and LGBT issues, the potential for conflict between the human rights of LGBT people and the religious freedom rights of parents, both of which are protected under the 91原创 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, has created significant controversy.
Both religious media and conservative mainstream newspaper editorials (most notably the National Post) have raised concerns about the role of public education in all this.
Religious belief draws the proverbial 鈥渓ine in the sand鈥� for some parents, who take issue with school programming that they see as going beyond tolerance and anti-bullying and amounting to promotion.
The Toronto School Board is on record with a particularly hard-nosed response to these concerns, and Christian parents wanting to opt out of the Toronto Public School Board鈥檚 curriculum-wide inclusion of gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual issues are being told to like it or lump it.
鈥淲e cannot accommodate discrimination,鈥� said Ken Jeffers, co-ordinator of gender-based violence prevention with the board. 鈥淚f a parent says: 鈥榃e don鈥檛 like gays and lesbians and we don鈥檛 want our child to learn anything about them,鈥� that would be, under our policies, and under Ontario Human Rights legislation, discriminatory.鈥�
No tip-toeing around it there.
Last May, the Toronto District School Board and Egale Canada partnered to host Canada鈥檚 First National Gay-Straight Alliance Summit for secondary-school students.
The curriculum of public schools in British Columbia takes a less direct path, but some curriculum guides are being amended to incorporate LGBT topics.
A ministry-approved four-credit Grade 12 elective course, Social Justice, seeks to shed light on a variety of contemporary social issues faced by young adults.
After half a lifetime of inner conflict, my cousin Fran, in her senior years, has come to peace with her own sexual identity. As she wrote in her poem Autumn Courtyard:
鈥淟ike a breath-tossed paper crane
emerging from shadow
dawn turns the corner into day.鈥�
听
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
