The new school year has come, and contrary to my hopes, LGBT students in Catholic schools are still banned from forming Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs.
However, to satisfy the provincial government, these schools are to roll out their own groups using a framework devised by the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association which is to manage the issue with a “Catholic perspective.” This is the same perspective that dictates that being gay is “intrinsically disordered and contrary to natural law.”
I wrote about the absurdity of such a solution in a previous blog entry:
Gay-Straight Alliances are student run clubs that provide support for students affected by LGBT issues and their allies. The good they’ve done in making schools safer for students have been espoused over and over by the Ministry of Education.
Meanwhile, the framework clubs came to be out of an opposition to the genuine support offered by GSAs. Not exactly a promising start. Furthermore, its mandate is being worked out by the same institution whose leadership in Ontario dictates that gay students must be viewed as intrinsically disordered. The same institution that continues to marginalize queer students, sometimes to absurd lengths.
Imagine if an organization who believed that racial minorities were “intrinsically disordered” had decided to come up with their own version of an anti-racism club, as a means to prevent real anti-racism clubs from taking hold. I think it’s quite evident how students would not likely be served with such alternatives.
This is a strategy of co-opting a support group as to prevent the help it would provide from reaching students. These doppelganger clubs satisfy both the requirements of the provincial government and the views of the Catholic boards, which continues its opposition to the acceptance of sexual diversity. As such, it is unlikely that we’ll see any further movement from these two organizations on the matter.
The only ones left behind in this deal are the very ones this was supposed to be about: queer students seeking genuine support in a homophobic system.