The Kenney conservatives are showing their true colours with their declared intent to oppose provincial legislation drafted to protect vulnerable LGBTQ students.
Pandering to their base on tired rhetoric, the United Conservative Party has predictably stood theatrically tall against the governing NDP's efforts to ensure safe environments for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning students through groups known as Gay-Straight Alliances.
Phew ó that might be a mouth full, or perhaps even a bit of a tongue twister, one might say.
But the acronym almost never gets spelled out clearly, so doesn't hurt to make the awkward-to-pronounce term more understandable.
The conservatives defend their obstructionism by claiming that, "parents have a right to know what's going on with their kids in the schools unless the parents are abusive."
The problem with that statement is the final few words, "unless the parents are abusive."
Well that's all fine and dandy, but even if parents are not physically abusive, there remains the potential for psychological abuse. Knowing beyond doubt when some parents might harbour such deep resentment that could actually lead them to disown their own children ó or worse ó is impossible.
Look at it this way.
If the youths themselves are terrified and completely petrified at the mere thought of speaking to their very own parents about the subject, perhaps they know best. After all, if the child implicitly and without hesitation or second thought trusted the parent not to flip out or cast scornful judgement, surely he or she would first approach mom or dad, expecting understanding and unconditional love. And if that's not the case, where does that youth then turn?
Offering access to a support network throughout all of the province's publicly funded schools ó as in all of those that receive tax dollars ó is the most sensible and humane approach.
A prejudiced parent's "right" to persecute his or her own kid does not supersede said kid's right to live free from said persecution.
Something about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that annoying secularism that stops theocracies from taking root.
Now, I would like to think we have come a long way over the relatively short time since our societies actually sterilized homosexuals as punishment for nothing more than the perceived "crime" of unorthodox love ó Nazi enigma code breaker Dr. Alan Turing was only one of many thousands of British men subjected to such treatment in the 1950s. The computing genius, who some historians argue helped hurry along the end of humanity's most brutal conflict, committed suicide in 1954. That country only recently issued a posthumous pardon.
But despite slow progress, there are obviously some who still carry an ideological axe to grind. Those attitudes very tragically result in emotionally neglected and abused youths along with a corresponding higher rate of suicide.
And the UCP continues to stir up emotional appeals regardless of the data that support programs such as GSAs, which improve the lives of students who suffer an absence of emotional and psychological support.
Maybe one day the conservatives will conjure up a fraction as much contemptuous disdain for corporate greed as well as chasmic income inequality as they do for what consenting people do behind closed doors.
Don't hold your breath though.
Yet perhaps our path is changing for the better, even as Kenney attempts to slow us down with broken 20th century social policy.
Some pundits predict the re-election of Calgary's Mayor Naheed Nenshi represents a foreshadow of a changing tide in Alberta politics, where partisan driven rhetoric becomes replaced with evidence-based policy.
Perhaps we can yet grow beyond the stereotype of being Canada's Texas.
ó Ducatel is the editor of the Sundre Round Up, a Great West newspaper
