Two weeks after a Toronto area school board voted against allowing Pride flags to be flown outside of its schools, a new petition wants to prevent Pride-related flags and posters from being displayed indoors.
CitizenGo, an online activism and petition-hosting platform, started the petition on Saturday. It calls on the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board to ban Pride from inside school buildings for the same reasons the board voted against flying the flags from flag poles earlier in the month.
Trustees who supported the motion to ban the flag cited the need for Catholic schools to avoid promoting ideologies that violate Catholic doctrine and remain politically neutral.
The report said school staff, particularly at St. Sophia’s Catholic Primary School in Mississauga and St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School, have decided to “fight back” by hanging Pride-related flags and posters inside the classroom instead.
“Flags and other items associated with observance days are permitted to be displayed inside schools and facilities for the duration of the observance period,” Bruce Campbell, general manager of communications for DPCDSB, told True North in an email.
“This may include items related to observance days such as Italian Heritage Day, Portuguese Heritage Day…Pride Month and a diverse range of other observances. These items may be displayed within schools and facilities for the duration of the observance period.”
Gregory Tomchyshyn, a CitizenGo campaigner, told True North that parents expect their children to learn basics and Catholic values when they are sent to a Catholic school, not to celebrate Pride.
“The Pride flags represent an ideology that is directly opposed to the whole idea of Catholic education,” he said. “It’s really hard to say this is Catholic schooling when you’re promoting values and beliefs that are contrary to the Catholic Church.”
Advocates for the use of Pride flags often cite the need to make children feel welcome no matter who they are. But Tomchyshyn questioned why the use of this particular flag, which opposes Christian teachings, is necessary.
“The beliefs and values of Catholic teachings are the recognition that everyone is valuable just for being created in God’s image,” he said. “Why do we need pandering to and having special favours be done for a radical minority that wants to control what your kids learn in school?”
He said everyone is included in God’s love. He likened celebrating what the Catholic Church teaches to be sin for the sake of inclusion to celebrating drug use in the name of making a drug addict feel included.
“The most loving action for that person is to try to stop them from making those bad decisions,” he said. “You don’t want people to sin because that puts their soul at risk. You don’t affirm a person’s actions that cause harm to themselves and to others.”
The petition also states that tax dollars should not be used for “political engineering.”
“(Pride) is inherently political by its very nature because it’s trying to change the values and beliefs of people, and by doing so, forcing their beliefs upon others,” Tomchyshyn said.
He said parents send their children to school to teach them skills they need to succeed in life but instead are faced with indoctrination, which, in this case, he says is against the values of parents.
“Parents and families know what values to teach their kids. It should not be another third party or another institution telling their kids, ‘You must believe in this, and by the way, don’t tell your parents,”’ he said.
He said flying Pride flags inside the schools is “more sinister” than when they were threatened to be flown on a flag pole. Parents will only know about “what’s going on” if they go into their children’s schools and see “all this stuff being taught inside.”