January 17, 2014
What’s in a Word: Queering Children and the Classroom
A response to OISE action plan
A response to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education's action plan, "Building Bridges: Queer Families in Early Childhood Education."
If a people can be made to accept and promote a blatant and transparent lie, and be coerced to call it ‘truth,’ not only have they been humiliated and stripped of their dignity, they are subjects of a totalitarian order. Now for almost all of us, if a friend or family member has a baby, our first question is usually, “is it a girl or a boy?”, and then we typically ask how mom and dad are doing. Yet such normal, everyday language is now anathema to many cultural elites and curriculum crafters in Canada, where the terms ‘boys and girls’ and ‘mom and dad’ are increasingly regarded as manifestations of ‘injustice,’ expressed by people who are located in homophobic and heterosexist ‘discourses’ linked to religious and outmoded moral and cultural beliefs.
In my weekly buffeting in the eye of the culture storm, a veritable social vortex to match our weather system, there are always some stories and events which not only still surprise but cause moral revulsion. This week was no different as news broke concerning OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) which is responsible for teaching and training Ontario’s public school teachers. Their new action plan for helping teachers “queer” classroom spaces, is called, ‘Building Bridges: Queer Families in Early Childhood Education.’ It tells teachers (and thereby society) that children should be exposed to so-called LGBTQ ‘families’ starting at age two. This is allegedly in the interest of ‘social justice’ so that young children are trained to ‘accept difference.’ The teaching aids include a picture of a ‘family tree’ that spreads to include the entire litany of the new ‘gender identities’ and sexual predilections being imposed on our society in the name of tolerance and LGBTTIQQ2SA persons. Opposition to this agenda is regarded by OISE as bigotry and mental illness. Now call me a bluff old traditionalist, but this is surely proof-positive that our state educational establishment has gone stark raving mad; or worse still, has become not only a facilitator but a deliberate purveyor of malignant propaganda designed to re-program children still in diapers.
When asked to appear for a TV interview on the subject and registering my concerns, my debate opponent declared that OISE was merely trying to prevent harm and bullying in the classroom – his picture must surely now appear next to the word naivety in the online English dictionary (and that is the kindly way to describe him)! As well as being told to bring in “queer” individuals to the classroom to participate in programs with young children, either as volunteers or hired staff, teachers are told to drop such language as mom and dad, or husband and wife and replace them with, ‘partner’ and ‘parents.’ Teachers in Toronto have told me that they have been asked to stop using the terms boys and girls in the classroom altogether, and should simply say, ‘students.’ To reinforce the queering of reality for children as young as two, teachers are being told to introduce lots of queer stories that attempt to normalize the bizarre pagan world of human androgyny and sexual chaos. Apparently this is preventing harm, not causing it! Of course, ‘harm’ goes undefined by the apologists for OISE.
Briefly stated, harm in their view, is the promotion of a biblical understanding of humanity, family, marriage and sexuality. These basic building blocks of civilization, the realities undergirding Judeo-Christian culture, are regarded as a form of mental illness. This is increasingly believed quite simply because the religion and god of our land has changed.
The two clearest markers of culture (which inescapably externalize religion) are law and education. Both are in revolution against Christianity in the West; law and education are inescapably religious, they are not neutral and so this redefining of reality in the classroom has nothing to do with bullying. Today’s state education is about the indoctrination of children into idolatry and it begins with manipulating language and the meaning of words. If THE WORD is denied in education (the Word who made, sustains and governs all things), man replaces him and endeavors to reconstruct life and the social order in terms of his lying word. By this substitute word he seeks to reduce creational, social and moral norms to ‘social construction’ and language games. This means that all the apparently normative distinctions between boy and girl, mom and dad, husband and wife, are nothing more than artificial cultural constructs and products of language – they are not ‘real’ or basic to creation and can therefore be replaced by ‘gender fluidity’.
For these educators, at bottom, all reality is one, a doctrine they derive from evolution. This is why the ideal human being is androgynous in paganism. Social justice in education thus means equalization and the removal of all ‘illusory’ distinctions based on biblical truth and morality. By ‘queering’ the classroom from toddlers to university undergraduates, the goal of this great ‘social experiment’ is the destruction of the family, the church and all notions of biblical distinctions derived from them. OISE knows there can be no social revolution without first a sexual revolution; the libertine Marxist state, a humanistic utopia, cannot emerge until these biblical commitments have been eroded and cast aside.
We may well ask, what’s in a word? God created by His Word and man in rebellion is trying to remake the world by his autonomous word. God’s Word cannot be defeated and lasts forever – OISE’s project is then a futile one in the grand scheme. But Christians can play no part in the promotion of sin, evil and idolatry, least of all amongst the young and most vulnerable. There are temporal and eternal consequences for our children and society for participation in evil. Isaiah declared, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” (Isa. 5:20). It is time we Christians were more than empty words … get your sons and daughters out of the public education system and refuse to allow pagan elites to experiment on your children, after all, they belong to God.