Bill 18 is a piece of legislation that will come into effect in Manitoba this spring. The bill contains provisions that are geared towards limiting bullying in schools, which is a grand ambition, indeed, considering bullying far predates education, or even civilization itself. But bullying in schools is a problem that needs to be addressed, on that every rational person can agree. However, there is one provision in the bill that has stirred up some controversy, namely the provision that requires school administrators to allow students to set up any sort of support group that they wish, such as the gay-straight alliances that have become popular in some schools. Several religious groups in Manitoba are protesting this idea, complaining that forcing their faith-based schools to permit such gay-straight alliances encroaches on their religious freedom, as there are a few passages in the Judeo-Christian bible that can be interpreted as condemning homosexuality.
It’s hard to believe that with all the progress we’ve made in civil rights throughout the course of history that gays still have to put up with the amount of crap that they do. In Canada we like to think that we don’t have second-class citizens, but I think that gays are a prime example of how much further we still have to progress to be the inclusive society we like to think we are. We like to pat ourselves on the back because we gave gay people the right to marry each other, but the fact that we even entertain the kind of debate revolving around Bill 18, that we lend any sort of credence to these people who claim that it is their religious right to be intolerant of gays, and not simply decry and punish it as hate speech, is frankly quite shocking. I believe that this should not be a debate about religious freedom; this should be a public chastising of a bunch of people who I think are behind the times.
In my personal opinion, it’s not as though there is even any merit to the religious freedom argument. It is plain to see that it is a matter of personal feelings of homophobia, and not a case of a Christians trying to follow their dogma to the letter. For example, Timothy 2:12 states “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.” So if these fundamentalists were really just trying to follow the bible to the letter as they state, obviously according to this bible verse they would oppose having female teachers in their schools. But there are female teachers and they don’t oppose it. So why pay heed to one bible verse but decide that the other is simply outdated misogyny? I think that answer should be obvious.
It would be bad enough if these people were only intolerant of gay people because they believed some obscure verses out of an outdated allegorical text to be the divine unquestionable word of god, but they don’t even have that to hide behind. For whatever reason, it seems that these people want to dislike gay people, and they’ll cling to whatever flimsy justification they can find to do it. One can’t help but think that if the people in these religious communities were more focused on biblical concepts like “love thy neighbour” instead of some archaic verse out of Leviticus about a man lying with another man, maybe we wouldn’t even need this provision in Bill 18 in the first place.
And that brings us back to the main issue. Because this wasn’t supposed to completely be about combatting homophobia, was it? It was about bullying. The religious element in these schools may be wrong to try to prevent students forming gay-straight alliances, but the question we really need to ask is, are these alliances an effective way to stop bullying? And unfortunately, the answer is no, not really.
The sad fact of the matter is, even though the bullying of gays has garnered most of the media spotlight lately, bullying takes many forms and affects many different kinds of people, and it is equally devastating for every single one of them. Whether a kid is fatter, skinnier, smarter, dumber, taller, shorter, quieter, louder, richer, or poorer than most of their peers, there’s a good chance they will incur some form of bullying. All it takes is one little thing that’s different about you – maybe you wear glasses or braces – and that’s all the other kids need to single you out. Sometimes the bullying is fleeting and isn’t all that serious, but sometimes it is chronic and devastating, and leaves kids feeling ostracized and isolated, all because they’re a little different.
And therein lies the nobility of the ideas of groups like gay-straight alliances, of giving these kids who feel outcast a place of support, a place where they can accentuate how they’re different and be proud of it, but that is also the flaw. A group of kids banding together under one banner and standing against the rest of the school may offer support to those kids, but it does nothing to bridge the gap between them and the other students. In fact, it digs the trenches even deeper. And what about the other groups of kids who are bullied? This bill isn’t just about protecting gay students from bullies, after all. So will we next have an alliance for overweight kids, short kids, and for kids who wear glasses? Is that not just tribalism? Such divisiveness hardly seems like a healthy environment for anything, never mind one fit for children to be educated in.
There’s no doubt that gay-straight alliances have offered support to kids who really needed it, but if we really want to tackle bullying at its core we need to find a way to start bringing kids together by accentuating the things they have in common, instead of just standing proudly behind their differences.
