The Sex Ed Revolution: a portrait of the powerful political bloc that’s waging war on Queen's Park

[Recursion]

http://www.torontolife.com/informer/features/2015/09/03/ontario-sex-ed-revolution/

Interesting story from Canada

Azeem Mohammed, a 38-year-old stay-at-home dad from East York, is the school council chair at Thorncliffe Park Public School. It’s a volunteer position that he takes very seriously. Azeem and his wife, Sufia, are Muslims from Hyderabad, India. They left comfortable jobs overseas so their children could get a better education in Canada. Sufia teaches physiotherapy at a college in Scarborough. Azeem has two master’s degrees, but he stopped working three years ago to care for the kids—three girls and a boy, all under 10. The Mohammeds are active members of the Liberal party, and both voted for Kathleen Wynne in the last election. As they learned more about the impending sex ed curriculum, however, they began to have serious doubts.

On February 23, moments after Minister of Education Liz Sandals unveiled the curriculum at a Queen’s Park press conference, Azeem went online to read it for himself. He scrolled through 239 pages, looking for offensive content. Then he did a search. “I looked for one word: pleasure,” he explains. He discovered passages about understanding what gives you pleasure, the benefits of relationships, and how to make safe and healthy decisions about sexual activity. For Azeem, the very presence of the word was a deal-breaker. Why would a so-called educational document need to tell children about sexual pleasure? Why not just stick to the biological facts? The search revealed enough information to confirm his worst fears. “I got everything I was looking for,” he says. That’s when Azeem Mohammed became an anti–sex ed activist.

Last winter, the subject of sex ed exploded like a supernova in Ontario. It was discussed on Punjabi drive-time radio, featured on Chinese talk shows, described in apocalyptic terms in community newspapers distributed at strip malls and supermarkets. In churches and mosques across the GTA, anti–sex ed activists organized information sessions to teach other parents about the contents of a document they deemed immoral, radical and dangerous. On Facebook and the messaging app WeChat, groups began sprouting up with interchangeable, family-oriented names—Parents Alliance of Ontario, Parents as First Educators, Coalition of Concerned Parents. They were often led by people with little experience in activism, and quickly attracted thousands of passionate members, who shared articles critical of the curriculum and organized rallies. “This is not a sex education curriculum but rather a sex promotion curriculum,” wrote a member of ­Parents Against Ontario Sex Ed ­Curriculum, a Facebook group with over 5,700 followers.

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Five years ago, when Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals tried (unsuccessfully) to update the sex ed curriculum, the loudest howls of outrage came from the same white, Christian social conservatives who show up to protest gay marriage and abortion. This time, the protests have primarily been led by new Canadians: Muslims and Sikhs from the outskirts of the city, Chinese evangelicals from Thornhill and Markham, Coptic and Russian Orthodox Christians from Scarborough and Peel. Sex education has created unlikely alliances between groups who rarely find themselves on the same side of an issue, with new Canadians from around the globe finding common cause with each other and native-born conservatives not generally known for their welcoming views on immigration. The result is something new in Ontario: a multi­cultural army of social conservatives who are angry, energized and eager to test their political power.

[msongs]

1. then mr. mohammed needs to opt out his kids nt