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Political withdrawal

Posted by saedigh at 08:39 AM on October 02, 2007

I received my voter registration card for the province of Ontario in the mail a couple of days ago. It's the first time I've ever gotten a card, and not had to register at the poll, and here I am with nowhere to use it. Anyway, it was also the first I'd heard that we were having an election, so I decided to head on over to Google News to find out what was going on.
The first article I found told of the upcoming election... and Referendum! What? Was Ontario declaring itself the third solitude? Why hadn't I heard of that down here? It was only after clicking on the sensational headline that I realized the referendum was about electoral reform. How boring. But then, down at the bottom of the page, under related news items, was something really intriguing: the proposal to do away with state-funded religious institutions in Ontario, i.e., finally getting rid of the Catholic school boards. I was shocked. Not because people were proposing that separate schools no longer receive government funds, but for two other reasons: that it wasn't seen as a more important election issue than electoral reform, and because of the amount of resistance there was to it.
Now, I understand that Catholics are currently the largest religious group in Canada. Hell, even I used to be counted among their number. But I also know that their numbers are declining, and that in Ontario, they do not make up the majority of the population as they do in provinces such as Quebec or New Brunswick. As the numbers of Catholics in Canada declines, the numbers of people describing themselves as non-religious have increased, as have the numbers of people who follow non-Christian religions. And yet, the only people to be given special treatment (i.e., government funding for their separate schools) outside of the public school curriculum are Catholics.
So far, all I have heard from Dalton McGuinty on the subject is that he wishes to maintain the status quo. I, however, would like to know why? No one seems to be willing to answer that question. No one seems to be willing to state any logical reason for the public funding of any religious institution. Oh, people are happy enough to tell us why Muslims shouldn't be allowed to have publicly funded Muslim schools (they'll breed terrorists, don't you know?), but no one is willing to tell us why Catholics should.

Comments

Well put. I couldn't have expressed my thoughts any better. Down with those bastards getting funding for their revisionist teachings!!!

Posted by: Dave at October 3, 2007 05:28 PM

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