I'd just like to report in on what happened this past Tuesday at the local school board meeting. The main topic up for discussion was policy 5.45, which would have created an explicit policy built around eliminating homophobia in Burnaby schools, mainly through facilitating information exchange between staff and students.
I'd just like to point out, before I get too deep into the story, that Burnaby is not a hotbed of religious intolerance. It's a quiet Vancouver suburb with a long history progressive politics at all levels of government. The elected board was composed entirely of members of the New Democratic Party, which is Canada's left wing party.
The board decided they would allow six delegations to speak on the policy, three were opposed and three were in favour of the policy, including a small group of current and former students who showed up to their first political event.
The anti-gay delegations decided that they were going to crash the school board meeting. The room the meeting was held in was legally only allowed to hold sixty people, and if I had to guess, there would have had to have been about seventy people who were angrily opposed to the policy.
Each delegation was allowed ten minutes to speak to the issue in whatever manner they chose. It was astounding to see some of the arguments used, some of which defied logic. The first speaker was a 'concerned parent' sent by the local church group. She talked about how the policy would magically force children to come out of the closet and that by labeling all the kids, the policy would somehow lead to segregated schools. She argued that we were indoctrinating children to hate their parents and force kids to choose between their parents and their teachers.
She was almost tolerable compared to the second speaker, who is a well-known member of the local Conservative Party. This guy was a piece of work, hyperbole seemed to be the only means in which he could communicate. His main argument was based on a rumour that a teacher intervened in a fight between a black female student and a gay male student, and that the teacher got angry at the female. This was sensationalized to indicate that protecting gays would mean the schools would be forced to discriminate against everyone else.
The final speaker opposed to the policy seemed more confused than anything else, as he was concerned about how this would impact cultural and parental rights. Specifically, his main concern was that schools would start teaching things before the kids were ready, and that it would be used to portray parents as bigots if they weren't sufficiently pro-gay.
I'll give them all credit though, all three anti-gay delegations managed to completely horrify everyone in attendance with a shred of sanity. Each speaker was adamant in the belief that the UN Declaration of Human Rights gave them the right to teach their children to hate members of the LGBTQ community.
When it became time for the pro-gay delegations to speak, that's when the crowd got angry. One person very loudly complained that he was a taxpayer and had the right to speak and that right apparently included the right to interrupt someone who held the floor at the invitation of the board. Thankfully, the board members looked unimpressed with the outburst and the arguments made by the opposition.
But it was the students who stole the show Tuesday night. Two students, one who recently graduated and another who had not even come out to his family, stepped up to speak about what actually happens in Burnaby schools. They spoke about the abuse they take because of their sexual orientation, and how they know there are hundreds, maybe thousands of other students in the district who are facing similar levels of abuse.
I wish I could say that they changed minds in the audience, but I saw the hate and the indifference and the plain old fact that they weren't even bothering to hear the other side of the issue. The trustees looked appalled at the situation on the ground. When we came to them three months ago, looking to enact this sort of policy, they told us that they didn't think it was as big a problem as they thought. The looks on their faces when the students spoke confirmed that they really didn't know it was bad.
I'll close by just stating that this is how we're going to win, not just in Canadian suburbs but in America as well. We're going to win by telling our stories to people who truly don't know, who don't think it's as bad as it really is.