Classic pattern: Dissenter speaks. Dissenter slammed. Dissenter branded, vilified, stigmatized. Dissenter apologizes.
The opinion-mongers warily adjust their opinion, which coincidentally guards their reputation. The tumbrils of the very most advanced correct thought move on toward the revolutionary guillotine.
Or the burning stake, or the gibbet, or dare one say the cross?
Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld was verbally mugged by the socially enlightened, who could teach the medieval church a thing or two.
There has always been an element of indoctrination in education. As Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao well knew, and exploited.
Bullying is bad and in worst cases merits punishment.
Neufeld was bullied for his view of the SOGI 123 curriculum that teaches gender inclusiveness and sexual practices – starting in kindergarten. Yes, K-12.
The undersigned considers Neufeld’s politely expressed opinion much too leftish.
First, human sexuality stuff shouldn’t be taught anywhere in public schools – let alone, reprehensibly, to tiny kids. It’s for adult manipulators’ interests, not for the kids.
Children are the most conservative people on earth. “What is a Family?” a pro-SOGI heading asks. Kids of five shouldn’t be burdened with such a question. Let children be children.
Second, it’s part of the wider confiscation of childhood by the pedagogues and of the professionalization of parenting generally. Adjectives fail me in expressing revulsion toward imposition of this Big State/experts-know-best conformity.
A conformity, not incidentally, not only imposed on the children, not only on parents reluctant to challenge those shaping their loved ones’ lives (and grades), but on the already harried teachers themselves.
The latter may be privately repelled but carefully quiet about the gospel according to the Ministry of Thought – er, Education – and the socialist-dominated B.C. Teachers’ Federation, the eagerly enabling school trustees and their association, and the media with our vested interest in the tantalizingly new and breathtakingly controversial (I’m living off the avails of this hyperventilating right now).
Both North Vancouver and West Vancouver trustees voted unanimously for the SOGI 123 project, joining dozens of others in B.C.
Now here is a vital question: Are teachers, under the SOGI 123 curriculum, as well as under current sex instruction, to introduce and generate discussion – and at what grade level – regarding the well-established dangers of sexually transmitted disease, especially regarding men having unprotected sex with men?
To the cutting-edge “inclusive” zealots of SOGI and such, humbling words from the great Oscar Wilde: “Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.”
• • •
Theatre West Van keeps a steady financial course by staging mainly sure-fire classics, and in a better world with a less-crowded schedule the undersigned would have happily attended a performance, followed by a judicious brief review, when Dial M for Murder opened last month at the Kay Meek. Go see for yourself, tonight, tomorrow night, or Nov. 8-11, or better still all of them.
• • •
Stealing over the border in disguise into North Vancouver, I delighted in Centennial Theatre’s innovative play/pie/pint matinee performance by The Beauty Shop Dolls: Amanda Williamson, Nadia von Hahn and Sara Walters – who would have been called “three lovely songstresses … easy on the eyes” in the bad old days of the heterosexual male patriarchy, which is the era of their 1920s-’60s repertoire.
Tears came to the eyes for life and loves past, for wartime melodies and the hardships of rationing – yes, war was hell in Canada, think of us on Remembrance Day, like me helping beat Hitler by selling my mother’s fudge up and down the streets to buy war stamps – but were staunched by the engaging performances followed by the pie and the pint. What a very good idea, and good chow after the noon-hour program.
• • •
Since it was a private talk, I’m not at liberty to identify the man who gave me this wonderful closer.
Except to say he is a prominent Vancouver architect and builder of some outstanding West Vancouver small, intimate developments.
Keep that in mind, in light of this area’s bloated property costs.
I asked after his health. “Me? I’m reasonably fine, although I do have an appointment next Monday at Mountain View Cemetery to pick out my plot, just in case … (I turned 70 last week).
“I might add, at $22,500 for a two-foot-by-six-foot plot, the cost per square foot is about double what I am charging for my new homes!”
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