Coercion in Canada

The facts of the case are a matter of public record. Linda Stone was suspended from the Durham (Ontario) District School Board for questioning the extreme, anti-family, transgender policy of the board. She was quoted by the National Post as saying: “I was a little disturbed to see that you would keep things private with the student and not let parents know.” But you cannot even be a “little disturbed” in this dystopian system.

And heaven help you if you try to show solidarity with the victims. Stone posted on Twitter a link to a testimony from Chloe Cole, a detransitioner who is suing hospitals for, in her words, “pushing her into medical mutilation.” Cole has emerged as an advocate for women who have been mutilated by the transgender cult. For calling attention to Cole, Stone was labelled “antitrans” and said to be perpetuating “harmful narratives around transgender people.” I guess the trustees couldn’t stand to hear the truth spoken by victims of their horrific policy. Their solution? Silence the women.

The text of the policy states that students “have a right to privacy. … [S]taff shall maintain privacy and confidentiality of trans students and will not disclose a student’s gender identity to the student’s parent/family/guardian, employees or other students without the student’s explicit prior consent and unless the student requests it.”

Let us be clear. “Student” here means minor children. So, the school system is, in effect, conspiring to break up families and subvert parental rights by allowing children to be propagandized endlessly by LBGT activists in the schools and then hiding their conversion to transgenderism from their parents. The policy is likely to have the effect of breaking the sacred bond between parents and children, which contributes to the breakup of families, thus contributing to a host of social pathologies.

Public education is based on a bond of trust between parents and educators. When schools indoctrinate children in a belief system that they know parents would not approve and then deliberately keep it secret from the parents, they cross a line and lose all trust. By doing this the administrators and teachers position themselves as enemies of the parents and lose the moral right to be educators.

We may look back on this point in history as the beginning of the complete unravelling of the public school system. Historians may point to this as the moment the dissolution of the public school system became inevitable. If you love public education, you should hate this policy.

As anger grows the inevitable backlash is developing. There won’t be enough politicians to protect the teachers’ unions from it. There won’t be enough money to pay settlements of the lawsuits launched by the detransitioners. And once schools have finished making themselves the enemies of parents, there won’t be any way to rebuild public confidence in the one institution that moms and dads thought they could trust.

A woman in our church ran for school board in the last election and she knew Linda Stone, so we invited Linda to speak to our adult Sunday school class. Stone agreed but pulled out at the last moment on the advice of her lawyer. She has applied for a judicial review of the decision to suspend her as a breach of her charter free speech rights. Stone received the most votes of any trustee in the recent election, but she was suspended by the board in defiance of the wishes of the voters, who knew her views before the election. We are going to find out if Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is worth the paper it is written on. But after the casual suspension of civil rights last February by the Trudeau government, I am very pessimistic. Democracy and free speech hang by a precarious thread in Canada right now.

The effect all this has had on our hitherto very apolitical church has been dramatic. The women in our Monday morning Bible study have started praying seriously about the need for school board reform. This group, which includes four former teachers, is extremely concerned and parents throughout the church are alarmed, as well they should be. We all know it is a spiritual battle.

Secularism is creating a moral and spiritual vacuum in Canada. When a nation rejects Christ and abandons God, people naively imagine that all the benefits of centuries of Christian influence will remain intact. But with the rise of irrational cults like transgenderism and their rapid capture of major institutions, secularism has created an opening to demonic influence. It turns out that the spiritual realm, like nature, abhors a vacuum.