Beware of vocal minority

In mid-April as many as 3,000 people gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto to protest the provincial government’s sex-education curriculum. It was an intriguing collective, lead by evangelical firebrand Charles McVety and various conservative Catholics. A large number of the crowd, however, were Sikh and Muslim and, to be candid, I had not seen so many hijabs and burkas since the last anti-Israel demonstrations I reported on.

There was a great deal of anger, chanting and shouting but when I asked people if they had actually read the curriculum nobody had. Even a Catholic teacher, a lady convinced she would lose her job if she was exposed, admitted that she “hadn’t actually read” that which made her so upset.

There was numerous personal attacks on Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, attempts to blame the entire curriculum — which is pretty standard stuff in Europe and elsewhere — on the hideous child sex offender and former deputy education minister Benjamin Levin, and lots of posters, often misspelled, with the words “anal,” “oral” and “masturbation” on them.

Things were said about the curriculum that were completely false, there was lots of talk about agendas, homosexuality and how this was all part of a much greater plot and even I was denounced from the platform by a loud man with a microphone. He was, by the way, an Elvis Presley impersonator. A strange coalition indeed.