ON to allow parents to withdraw kids from pro-queer sex ed classes

News from the Pink Palace in Toronto this morning is that the LGBTQ types who (allegedly) run Ontario's government appear to have flinched in the face of stubborn resistance to their new pro-queer sex education curriculum. Lez Sandals -- Minister of Education in the government of Kathleen "Proud to be a lesbian" Wynne, has announced that parents who are still opposed to the new curriculum being taught in publicly-funded schools this year can pull their kids from class.

This flies in the face of statements made last week by officials of the Toronto and Peel Region public school boards -- the largest and second-largest in the province -- that any requests for students to opt out of learning about "gay families" or "diverse gender identities" will not be tolerated. See "Ontario's 'dirty' sex ed curriculum going ahead. Worried parents scramble to get kids out" (WWW 2/9/15).

Why the sudden volte-face? [Did you learn that word in school? Ed.] Looks from here like protests orchestrated by Parents As First Educators (PAFE) and others are having an effect. At Toronto's Thorncliffe Park Public School (whose students are predominantly from Muslim families), almost half the students were kept home by their parents this morning -- the first day of the new school year. Instead, they gathered in an open space near the school to have classes under the trees, just as they would have in their countries of origin. A spokesthingy for the parents said the boycott would continue till month's end or beyond.

Complaints from parents -- not just Muslims but Hindus and Christians and even the non-religious -- have ranged from a lack of consultation, to lessons not being age-appropriate, to not wanting their kids to be taught about same-sex relationships and different "gender identities". An underlying, even more important theme of the protests is that teaching about sex and family life should be done by parents, in the home, not by teachers shackled by a pro-gay, anything goes curriculum written by a gang of secular humanists including at least one convicted pedophile.

Will allowing parents to withdraw their kids from sex ed classes be enough to stop the growing protest? Or will concerned parents keep it up until the new curriculum is "temporarily withdrawn for further study", as happened back in 2011 when Dalton McGuinty was Premier of Ontario and Kathleen Wynne was... wait for it... the Minister of Education responsible for the whole queer mess. Stay tuned.

Footnote (added 9/9/15): CTV's flagship station in Toronto took an online poll yesterday on a simple yes-no question: "Do you support the new sex education curriculum?" Of almost 4000 responders, 78% voted NO! Agent 3 reports that when they asked a similar question back in the spring, and got a similar negative answer, they didn't reveal the results on the 6 pm news. This time they did. The people of Ontario are speaking, but will Kathleen Wynne listen? Walt doubts it. Lifetime pct .951.

Further reading: "Wynne wrong about sex-ed consultation": Lorrie Goldstein in the Toronto Sun.

Filmed peeing in customer's coffee mug, politico quits election race

Canadians go to the polls on October 19th to elect a new federal government. And not a moment too soon, given the urgent necessity of ending the dictatorship of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harpoon, now seeking his fourth (4th!) term in office. The number of seats in the new Parliament will be 338, so Steve's (or any other party) needs to win 170 of those to have a majority in the House of Commons.

Mr. Harper's Tories are struggling in the Greater Toronto Area. The Dear Leader himself is campaigning in the eastern part of the city area today. He will be accompanied by two Conservative candidates, but not by Jerry Bance, the candidate for Scarborough Rouge Park, who is withdrew from the race after CBC News aired a spycam video of him peeing in a customer's coffee cup while on a service call.

Former candidate Bance owns XPress Appliance Service, an appliance repair company [Duh! Ed.] in the GTA. He has been a service technician for the last 25 years. In 2012, he was caught in a sting by CBC-TV's Marketplace urinating in a homeowner's coffee mug and dumping the contents into the sink. Do we have the video, Ed.? ... ... Apparently not, but we do have a screen grab.

The original Marketplace show only named Mr. Bance as "Jerry". It did not mention that he had been a Conservative candidate in the previous elections of 2006 and 2008. When contacted by CBC News yesterday, Mr. Bance said, "I deeply regret my actions on that day. I take great pride in my work and the footage from that day does not reflect who I am as a professional or a person."

Walt is resisting stoutly the temptation to indulge in cheap shots of the "Peegate" variety. End of story.

UPDATE: Turns out it wasn't the end of the story, after all. CBC News has just reported that the Tories have been forced to drop a second GTA candidate (Tim Dutaud -- Toronto-Danforth) over embarrassing videos that surfaced on YouTube. No peeing or worse, just prank calls. Agent 3, who is a politics junkie, says it doesn't matter, because the Harperites didn't have a snowball's chance of winning either riding.

The new ranch hand

Ed. here. Since tomorrow is Labor Day (or Labour Day, depending on which side of the 49th parallel you inhabit) Walt has taken the weekend off. Fortunately, Agent 6 has stepped into the breach with a little story from the formerly wild west.

A successful rancher died and left everything to his devoted wife. She was a very good-looking woman and determined to keep the ranch, but knew very little about ranching, so she decided to place an ad in the newspaper for a ranch hand.

Two cowboys applied for the job. One was gay and the other a drunk. She thought long and hard about it, and when no one else applied she decided to hire the gay guy, figuring it would be safer to have him around the house than the drunk.

He proved to be a hard worker who put in long hours every day and knew a lot about ranching. For weeks, the two of them worked, and the ranch was doing very well. Then one day, the widow said to the hired hand, "You've done a really good job, and the ranch looks great. You should go into town and kick up your heels."

The hired hand readily agreed and went into town one Saturday night. One o'clock came, however, and he didn't return. Two o'clock and no hired hand. Around 2:30 he finally returned. Upon entering the living room, he found the rancher's widow sitting by the fireplace with a glass of wine, waiting for him.

She quietly called him over to her. "Unbutton my blouse and take it off," she said.
Trembling, he did as she directed. "Now take off my boots."
He did as she asked, ever so slowly. "Now take off my socks."
He removed each gently and placed them neatly by her boots.

"Now take off my skirt." He slowly unbuttoned it, constantly watching her eyes in the fire light.
"Now take off my bra." Again, with trembling hands, he did as he was told and dropped it to the floor.

Then she looked at him and said, "If you ever wear my clothes into town again, you're fired."

Ed. again. I didn't see it coming either.

French experts confirm flaperon is from MH370

What with all the flap about the refugee crisis, the lamestream media didn't devote a lot of space to other stories. One that got buried was a pronouncement by French investigators examining a piece of aircraft debris found on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion in late July. They have concluded "with certainty" that the flaperon -- a wing part -- came from the Malaysia Airlines B-777 that, while operating as flight MH370, disappeared in March of 2013 while flying to Beijing.

So what have we learned? MH370 went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Anything else? Errr... that's all.

We do not know where it went down. We do not know how it went down. We do not even know if any of the 239 passengers and crew were still on board when it went down.

Most important, we do not know what caused it to go down. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe not. What some have called "wild conspiracy theories" -- e.g. that MH370 was shot down, accidentally or on purpose, by the US military operating out of Diego Garcia -- have not been disproved.

Further reading: "Current thinking on MH370" (WWW 31/7/15)

2014 Vatican Synod's "Welcome gays!" moment was rigged!

The Gay Mafia at the Vatican must think that faithful Catholics have short memories. Come October, the pro-LGBT gang in Rome -- which may/may not include Pope Francis -- will try again to push their agenda through a second "Synod on Family Life", which wags like Agent 10 have already dubbed "Vatican III".

The goal of the Synod is to rectify the unimaginable political incorrectness of the Synod held in October 2014, at which a majority of cardinals and bishops had the temerity to reject an "interim report" recommending that the Church demonstrate more "openness to gays and their gifts and qualities". See "Majority of bishops reject "Welcome gays!" (WWW, 18/10/14).

The bishops failed to approve even a watered-down version of the section on ministering to gays, which stripped away the welcoming tone contained in the "interim report". Two other paragraphs concerning the other hot-button issue at the Synod -- whether divorced and civilly remarried Catholics can receive communion -- also failed to pass.

Why? Because the "updating" of the Church rules on these subjects would be contrary to God's law and nearly two millennia of Catholic teaching! See "Catholic bishops say "interim report" asking Church to welcome homosexuals grossly misrepresented by pro-LGBT media" (WWW 14/10/14).

So how did those proposals get on the table? Aha, that's the BIG question, and journalist Edward Pentin provides the answer in The Rigging of a Vatican Synod? An Investigation of Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family (Ignatius Press, 2015).

The book, excerpted this week by Catholic World Report, tells how the 2014 Synod of Bishops' controversial interim report came to include the paragraphs on homosexuality and cohabitation that provoked strong reactions from several prominent synod participants. See "Even a liberal Cardinal calls pro-LGBT Synod report 'worthless'" (WWW 16/10/14).

Mr. Pentin quotes Father Stephen Fawcett, a Synod staff aide who was keeping the official diary of the proceedings, as saying the interim report was not an accurate reflection of the bishops' discussions. "It just was not."

And Wilfrid Cardinal Napier of South Africa observed that the document -- prepared a small cadre of prelates organized by Lorenzo Cardinal Baldisseri, the secretary-general of the Synod -- was released by the Vatican Press Office even before the Synod fathers saw it.

Mr. Pentin points the finger at Cardinal Baldisseri, but Walt (and many others) would like to know who appointed the prelate to be secretary-general of the Synod? Whose agenda was the Cardinal pushing... or following? And who's in charge of this year's Synod? Oh... wait... According to the Vatican website, it's none other than... wait for it... Lorenzo Cardinal Baldisseri!

Click here to read The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?, as excerpted on the Catholic World Report website. You can buy the e-book from Ignatius Press, at a web sale price of only $12.32.

UPDATED: Ontario's "dirty" sex ed curriculum going ahead. Worried parents scramble to get kids out

For Ontario students, the school year begins the day after Labour Day. Threatened strikes by teachers have been averted by the customary throwing of taxpayers' money at them, in spite of promises by Premier Kathleen Wynne and her minion, Education Minister Lez Sandals, that there'd be no raises. And the proudly lesbian premier's cherished new sex education curriculum, co-written by convicted pedophile Benjamin Levin, will be taught as planned, in spite of protests by 1000s of parents concerned about its pro-LGBTQ, anti-morality agenda.

Across the province, protesters gathered in front of the constituency offices of Liberal MPPs. Outside the Premier's office in Dawn Mills [Whatever became of Sid Barron? Ed.], a public school student, Umeema Khalil, aged only 9, declared she won't go to school this year because of the province’s "new dirty curriculum".

Under the new curriculum, students of Umeema's age will already have been exposed for three years to gender ideology propaganda -- it's cool to be gay, and "transgendered" people like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner are normal. The curriculum teaches Grade 3 students about homosexuality and Grade 6 students about masturbation and "gender expression".

Grade 7 and 8 students -- "tweenies" -- will learn about contraception, oral sex and the potential pitfalls of "sexting". Anal sex and other perversions come a bit later. But, Umemma told the Toronto Sun, "I want to be inspired by education, not forced to learn unspeakable stuff."

Unfortunately for Umeema and her parents, they're not going to have any choice in the matter. When the new curriculum was rolled out last year, parents were assured that they had the right to withdraw their children from sex ed classes if they had religious or other objections to the material being taught. Really? Err, no... not really.

Tony Pontes, Director of the Peel District School Board -- Ontario's second-largest -- told PDSB teachers and superintendents today that parents may be allowed to remove their kids from sex-ed classes for religious reasons, but any requests for students to opt out of learning about "gay families" or "diverse gender identities" will not be tolerated. Period! See "Peel board won't exempt kids from learning about gay families, gender issues".

Mr. Pontes said that if parents have a problem with such strong support for "equity and inclusion", the public system [sic] may not be right for them. "Let's be clear," he said. "Some in our community may not like this.... Some parents may choose to switch school systems. If so, that is a price we must be willing to pay."

Even as he spoke, one of the demonstrators in front of Premier Wynne's office, Mohammed Azhar, a father of two school-age children, decried the provincial government’s lack of consultation with parents. "They are imposing this sex-ed curriculum, which is against our moral and cultural values. Parents are the first educators."

Will Mr. Azhar, Miss Khalil and groups like PAFE (Parents As First Educators) succeed in stopping the lesbian premier's pro-queer juggernaut? Walt thinks they have two chances....

Further reading: Use the search tool to check WWW for "sex education" and you'll find 31 previous posts. The most recent, posted May 29th, is "Ontario sex ed curriculum called 'bad for Catholic kids, bad for all kids'".

UPDATE 3/9/15 - A growing number of parents across Greater Toronto who oppose Ontario’s new sex-ed curriculum are making a desperate, last-minute attempt to get their kids out of the public system. They’re considering home-schooling their children or sending them to private schools, even if just for a short time, to show how upset they are. Click here to read the full story in the Toronto Star.

A real surprise from Pope Francis

What an amazing pope is Pope Francis! We -- not just Catholics but the entire world -- never know what's coming next. When he opens his mouth or takes pen in hand, it's impossible to know what to expect. Sometimes his pronouncements make us traditional Catholics laugh. Sometimes they make us cry. Sometimes they leave us confused. And sometimes we are left speechless in disbelief or, rarely, appreciation.

Today's headline news, so surprising and important that even the lamestream media are giving it major coverage, is the Pope's letter to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, on the subject of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, a year of penance and prayer which begins on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

In line with the Holy Father's emphasis on compassion and mercy, he has ruled that during the Jubilee Year, all priests will have the authority to give penitents absolution from the grave sin of abortion. For those (including most mainstream Catholics) who don't know it, having or procuring an abortion is a "reserved" sin under canon law, which can be absolved only by the diocesan bishop or priests to whom the bishop delegates that authority. In England, Scotland, Wales and some American dioceses, bishops have already delegated the authority to all their priests, but now this authority is given to all priests, worldwide, for the duration of the Year of Mercy.

The Pope said many [Walt's emphasis] women sought an abortion because they "believe that they have no other option". He said he had "met so many women who bear in their heart the scar of this agonizing and painful decision." But he regards compassion and mercy as virtues that outclass all others, so "I have decided, notwithstanding anything to the contrary, to allow all priests for the Jubilee Year to absolve of the sin of abortion those who procure it and who also seek forgiveness."

The BBC's David Willey reports that Pope Francis is aware that the decision will not be welcomed by traditionalists. That's putting it mildly. However, there is a second part to the Pope's letter -- so far unreported by the secular media -- which will gladden the hearts of traditional Catholics, particularly those who align themselves with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), the traditional Catholic order founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

In an astounding volte-face, the Pope has declared that priests of the SSPX will validly and licitly absolve sins during the Jubilee Year of Mercy. "A final consideration concerns those faithful who for various reasons choose to attend churches officiated by priests of the Fraternity of St. Pius X," the Pontiff wrote. "This Jubilee Year of Mercy excludes no one. From various quarters, several brother bishops have told me of their good faith and sacramental practice, combined however with an uneasy situation from the pastoral standpoint.... I trust that in the near future solutions may be found to recover full communion with the priests and superiors of the Fraternity.

"In the meantime, motivated by the need to respond to the good of these faithful, through my own disposition, I establish that those who during the Holy Year of Mercy approach these priests of the Fraternity of St Pius X to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation shall validly and licitly receive the absolution of their sins."

Walt, who is one of "these faithful", is happy to read this, and grateful to the Holy Father for the indult. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Catholics who harbored some doubt about the validity of sacraments administered by bishops and priests of the SSPX will (or should) rejoice and give thanks to God.

However... Walt can't help but wonder what affected the Pope's "disposition". I understood the Vatican's position on the SSPX to be that its bishops were in schism and excommunicated (although the excommunication was lifted a couple of years ago), and therefore could not licitly ordain new priests. That would mean that the hundreds of SSPX ministering to the needs of the faithful worldwide aren't really priests, right? At least, that's what a lot of "regular" bishops and priests have been telling people. But now, all of a sudden, they can hear confessions and give absolution.

What does this mean? The clue may be in the line about solutions being found to "recover full communion". That could mean that the Vatican may declare the "schism" ended and accept the traditional Catholics back into the fold, allowing them to keep the pre-Vatican II Faith and practices of the Church, particularly the Latin Mass.

Or (and, sadly, more likely) it could mean that the SSPX is going to give in to the demands of the Vatican and "reform" itself, eating the poisoned fruits of the Council, in order to gain some sort of "personal prelature" or other accommodation. In very blunt language, the Pope's indult may have been made in anticipation of a sell-out. God help us and Our Lady guide us! Let it not be so!

Further reading: Full text of the letter of Pope Francis granting indulgence during the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy