A Teacher Blogs

#Pride4Michael I haven’t been asked to lead any marches at Pride this year and, frankly, I doubt that’s ever likely to happen! Michael Coren I was wrong June 28, 2014 Toronto Pride 2013 / Photo by Gordon Nore Across Canada many communities are preparing for Pride celebrations sometime this summer. Toronto's celebration will close on Stonewall Sunday -- the last Sunday of June, marking the riots that began in the wee hours Sunday, June 28th, 1969.  It caps a weekend that includes the *Trans March on Friday evening, and Saturday's Dyke March, now in its twenty-first year. All of this comes at the end of a nine-day festival. Michael Coren's I was wrong   column came out on the day of the Dyke March at WorldPride Toronto , on Saturday, June 28th, 2014. This year, as it so happens, Toronto's big Sunday Pride parade comes on -- you guessed it -- June 28th. Since the publication of that column, Michael has been vilified by some people of faith ...

The Toronto Star editorial of Friday, May 1st, 2015, Ontario must stay the course on sex education , marks the second time recently that a major media outlet has called out Charles McVety on his fear mongering over the 2015 Ontario Health & Physical Education curriculum. The first was when author and broadcaster Michael Coren made a hearty meal of the evangelist on CBC's Power and Politics .  Here's what The Star had to say: Meanwhile, anti-sex education monger Charles McVety, leader of the Institute of Canadian Values, is twisting the curriculum’s new focus on “consent” by saying that “teachers will be forced to teach little children how to give permission for that child to engage in sex.” The curriculum actually teaches kids how to say “no” and to understand the concept of consent before engaging in sex. McVety is no newcomer to the anti-sex ed camp. He so successfully whipped up opposition to the curriculum when it was first proposed in 2010 that Wynne’s ...

I spent the early evening going through blogs and tweets and news reports about today's sex ed protest at Queen's Park. It was a sickening show of anger and yelling and whole cloth fabrication. This "We Say No!" and "Our Children! Our Choice!" chanting is the adult equivalent of sticking fingers in ones ears and saying, "I can't hear you." I'm now beyond caring about the frustration and confusion about the changes to the curriculum. The document has been out for weeks. It can be read. Michael Coren read it and pronounced it far from treacherous or doctrinaire. There were some images today that were both disturbing and telling. From CHCH News video : They were loud and some of them were angry, “I’m a bible believing man, and I believe God made us male and female for a start off so I don’t want any lesbian teaching my grandchildren how to behave.” And this: Broke my heart to see so many kids used as props today at the anti-...

In recent years I've watched journalist and author Michael Coren truly evolve before my eyes. A devout Catholic and social conservative, he has, in the last months,  recanted his beliefs on same sex relationships and the LGBTQ communities. More recently, he's called for cessation of hostilities over the 2010 Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum , which sat on a shelf for five years, and was recently... finally... released.  I've blogged a little about Mr Coren's broadcasts on the former Sun News Network. From early discussions with Dr Teresa Pierre of Parents as First Educators in 2010 ; to the genesis of the Ben Levin grooming document conspiracy, which surfaced on the network in 2013; and into speculation about the most recent iteration of the document -- it seemed to me that Mr Coren himself had become impatient, and perhaps a tad embarrassed, about the intellectual descent of the conversation. Today he broke ranks with fellow Sun News alu...

When Kathleen Wynne was first sworn in as Premier of Ontario on January 23, 2013, she had already indicated plans to re-introduce the 2010 Health Curriculum, which her predecessor, former Premier Dalton McGuinty, had withdrawn . Following her party's return to majority status in June of 2014, the only question was when. That answer in the late fall of 2014, with Premier Wynne and Education Minister Liz Sandals promising to have the updated sexual health components online for September 2015. How did the original curriculum get killed, and how did it take five years to make a return? Here's the backstory. As I previously blogged here , in April 2010, the Ontario government -- led by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty -- launched an ill-fated revision to the 1998 Health and Physical Education document. I say, "ill-fated," because the Premier would withdraw the curriculum within two days, later replacing it with an interim document -- minus content deemed too controversi...