2.26.2015

Save the CBC TV ad rejected by CBC

This ad was rejected for broadcast on CBC.  The non-profit group, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, have created an ad highly critical of Stephen Harper's government.

Will we ever see it on television?  

Please share it widely. 


The Man Behind The Desk EN - 60 sec from Friends of Canadian Broadcasting on Vimeo.
http://www.friends.ca/freethecbc/ -- Take action now to free the CBC from political interference!

2.25.2015

"It Gets Better", and some don't make it out of the dungeon.

Me at 8 years. I made it.
Many don't.
I am pleased the Ontario government is going to implement the new health and physical education curriculum. As I stated in this post, it's long overdue and very much needed.  Dammit Janet does a good piece here.

I have been passionate about this since I was a kid in high school, trying to figure my way forward. I knew I was different from grade three or four. I didn't know why or how I was different, or if there was something wrong with me. Teachers never said anything in school about differences. You learned from your friends and peers. We were taught how babies were made and how to avoid Venereal Disease and you didn't want to be called Fag or Homo.

That was it. So in grade ten, I found myself in the library of my high school practically alone. It needed to be that way, you couldn't be caught looking up something like homosexuality. I've told the story of the beating and taunting I was subject too in high school, you can see that here. I mention it as it was after the beating when I was sure I must be a homo.

In the library I checked the shelves. Nothing said "Want to find out if you're a fag?" I was scared. I finally pulled out a huge dictionary. I looked up homosexuality. It confirmed my friends and peers taunts. I was a pervert. It was freaky to read that. It was a low point. Yet somehow I came around to thinking it couldn't be true. I wasn't a bad person. I still never talked to anyone about it. You couldn't.




And this all came flooding back to me when I heard Graham Moore who won Best Adapted Screenplay for "The Imitation Game". His words could have saved me a lot of grief. And a lot of lost lives.

I am very excited the Ontario Government has brought in such an important and life saving curriculum.

So many like me didn't make it, so many struggled much more, some still live with the scars. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, from high school, no less. 

The carnage of the system can be explained no better than through Canuck Attitude blogger, Bruce. Bruce was a victim,  This is what he had to say about the "It Gets Better" project. 
Bruce said ...  "As much as I'm impressed and heartened by Dan
Bruce making bread on a visit to my farm
Savage's It Gets Better Project and the incredible response it has generated, I can't shake the feeling that all we are doing is patting kids on the head and sending them back to the dungeons while telling them to be patient. I'm sorry, but that's still a kind of tacit approval of bullying."
 
Bruce was a victim of our school system, three decades after leaving it. His life experience, an experience not unlike many other gay men.  Some make it too see, "It Gets Better", and some don't make it out of the dungeon.

The new curriculum the Ontario government is bringing in this September will go a long way to eliminating the dungeon and cases of culturally induced PTSD. 

2.23.2015

It's Education, Not Dirty Talk

Ontario will get it's long awaited revamp to the "health and physical education curriculum for grades 1 - 12. The changes are long overdue and expected to be well received by most in Ontario. I am very pleased to see these changes. Kudos Premier Wynne.

The Minister of Education, Liz Sandals vowed this morning that this will be the curriculum ...


The minister promising not to back down is a good one and you might think it weird for a minister to make such a comment. Well, she had too. The last time the Liberals introduced changes to this curriculum, they backed down when a small group of evangelical and conservative politicians made a big noise.
The media will be telling us of the groundswell of opposition to these changes. They will be wrong. I suspect an overwhelming majority of folks in Ontario still support these changes, even if its five years after first proposed.

Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star gets it ...
"It's not dirty talk," Regg Cohn
No, it’s not dirty talk — just straight talk on sex, sexting, body parts, consent, mental health, and other life (or life-saving) skills for girls and boys. The idea is for teachers to inoculate students against the ways of the world before they surf the world wild web on their own.
and this
Opponents claim they don’t oppose sex education, just that parents should teach it at home — which sounds suspiciously like a home-schooling recipe for unravelling any class-based curriculum. And assumes that kids would cheerfully absorb parental lectures on the perils of oral sex (or that teenagers heed their parents about anything).
Some of the more opportunistic politicians from the Official Opposition say they support sex-ed, they just want more parental involvement — or as leadership candidate Monte McNaughton argues, while boasting of his credentials as the father of an 18-month-old — parents should “be at the table.”
Apparently it’s not enough that the government consulted hundreds of experts, educators, and religious bodies, reached out to parents from the more than 4,000 elementary schools across Ontario, have massive support from teachers and their unions in all school boards, and that public opinion polls show more than 9 in 10 parents are broadly supportive. 
There will be many complaints from the few about a lack of consultation, They will be wrong again. Just remember the noise is only deafening because it is amplified.

PressProgress does a good job of taking apart the case made by Campaign Pro Life in this link

Pro-life group fears “gay agenda” will plant ideas in the minds of Ontario's school kids

The New Curriculum can be found here 
Regg Cohn's article here
And the noise makers (Lifesite, Campaign Life Coalition )