Tag Archives: British Columbia

News

Divorced father kept from seeing his own child for 15 months

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This news story is from the government-run CBC in Canada.

Excerpt:

A divorced B.C. father who hasn’t seen his young daughter for several months blames the family court system and is joining others in a call for change.

“Before all this happened, my daughter had a great relationship with me,” said Dieter Geesing. “I feel really helpless. This is not right.”

Geesing said his ex-wife has been allowed to bar him from his daughter because a court order requiring her to co-operate is unenforceable.

“I love my child. It’s not fair to her. You are cheating her of her childhood,” he said tearfully. “This child has a right to interact with her father.”

Geesing is a forestry specialist and his daughter is his only child. He and his wife separated in 2008, when the girl was eight years old. Since then, he said, his wife has tried to shut him out of his daughter’s life completely.

[…]A court order in June 2009 gave the parents joint guardianship, with the child’s “primary residence” at her mother’s home.

[…]The court also instructed the mother to pay for and attend counselling to help establish a “healthier” relationship between father and daughter. A letter from the counsellor to the judge shows Geesing’s ex-wife has since failed to co-operate.

[…]Records show there have been no consequences for the child’s mother. Geesing has been told he has no legal recourse but to go back to court to ask the judge for help, which could take several months.

[…]When contacted, Geesing’s ex-wife refused comment. Her lawyer did not respond to messages.

I think that a lot of Christians are familiar with the pro-life view and the pro-marriage view, and maybe they could even defend them with arguments and evidence. But for some reason, these father’s rights issues have not really been viewed as the same kind of injustice. I’ll bet that the mother in this case knew that the laws would not be enforced against her – that she would not be held to account for acting selfishly and maliciously. This lack of enforcement undoubtedly encourages more women to divorce their husbands and destroy the lives of their children.

Here”s a video I found about the Canadian divorce industry:

I also note that my favorite Canadian MP Maurice Vellacott has introduced a bill at the federal level to fix this problem. He is a Conservative Party MP.

News

MUST-READ: Mandatory curriculum in Ontario schools promotes homosexuality

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Political Map of Canada

Story here from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

The Ministry [of Education] put out its new Health and Physical Education curriculum for grades 1 to 8 in January, and a spokesperson has confirmed to LifeSiteNews (LSN) that the new curriculum will be mandatory for all schools, Catholic and public, in September 2010.  The high school curriculum will be released this spring, and will be mandatory as of September 2011.  At this point, it is unclear, however, whether Catholic schools are to be forced into teaching elements that violate Catholic teaching.

The new curriculum, replacing a previous version from 1998, aligns with the Ministry’s campaign to promote “equity and inclusive education” in Ontario’s schools, which includes the advancement of homosexualism and transgenderism.  A notable aspect of the curriculum’s revision is the attempt to instil a sense that homosexuality and transgenderism are perfectly normal.

[…]Students begin to explore “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in grade 3, as part of an expectation to appreciate “invisible differences” in others.  A desired response has the eight-year-old student recognizing that “some [families] have two mothers or two fathers.”

In grade 5, a student is expected to recognize that “things I cannot control include … personal characteristics such as … my gender identity [and] sexual orientation.”

Grade 7s are expected to be taught about “using condoms consistently if and when a person becomes sexually active.”

One of main reasons why I want to get married is so that I can raise children to have a relationship with God and to make a difference in the world for him. I have had that view since I started working in my teens, often working multiple jobs at the same time – and I mean white collar jobs in the private and public sectors, right through undergraduate university. And all this so that I could buy my wife and children everything that would help them to serve God as much as they wanted to, e.g. – if my wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and to homeschool, no problem.

Now suppose a law like that is passed here in the United States and applies to public and private schools. How would I then look on the viability of marriage and child-raising then? My children, (all children, really), would be taught anti-Christian views of sex for a good deal of their academic life before going to college where drunken hook-up sex abounds. And this indoctrination would be at my expense, since public school teachers are paid out of taxes I have to pay. And early sexual activity would predispose my children away from Christian faith.

Do you think that news stories like this affect my plans to marry? They certainly do. I think liberal voters need to get serious about asking themselves exactly what makes men interested in marriage and parenting in the first place. Speaking for myself, I want to raise children who share my values and worldview and who serve God effectively when I am gone. When government forces its anti-Christian views on impressionable young children, that’s a disincentive for responsible men to marry.

(Don’t say homeschooling, the left doesn’t like homeschooling)

It’s everywhere in Canada

By the way, Jennifer Roback Morse recently had a scary post about even worse laws governing schools in Quebec.

Excerpt:

The news from Quebec is not encouraging for those who love liberty. In their new Quebec Policy Against Homophobia: Moving Together toward social equality, Provincial government of Quebec just gave itself permission to take all necessary steps to wipe out, not just “homophobia,” but also “heterosexism.”

And it happens in British Columbia, too.

Excerpt:

In response to a case filed with the Human Rights Tribunal in 1999 by gay couple Murray and Peter Corren, the BC government decided last year to introduce new curricula from Kindergarten to Grade 12 that would be “inclusive” and homosexual-friendly. The pro-gay courses may become mandatory with provisions for barring parents from opting out or opting for an alternative course (see http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jun/06060101.html).

Today, the BC Ministry of Education released the draft overview for the new Grade 12 Social Justice pilot course, which is the first course to come out of the agreement with Murray and Peter Corren.

Comments will be strictly moderated. You know why.

Videos

MUST-SEE: Videos from academic debate on abortion at the University of Victoria

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stephaniegray
Stephanie Gray

LifeSiteNews reports on a debate featuring Stephanie Gray of CCBR.

Excerpt:

Miss Gray’s argument cut through the various issues that are often raised to confuse the abortion issue, boiling it down to the two simple questions: Are the unborn human?  Does abortion kill them?

If the unborn are human, and abortion kills them, then abortion must be wrong, she maintains.  Using potent examples, she explains how criteria such as disability and the lack of experiencing pain are not satisfactory justifications for killing any human if we recognize that they are human, unborn or not.

She demonstrates that all of the differences between an unborn human, even at the moment of fertilization, and a born human are merely accidental – size, level of development, environment, dependency.  Each of these differences, she says, distinguish a two-year-old from a twenty-year-old just as they do a fertilized embryo from a born person.

The video is in 10 parts. Here are parts 1 and 2.

Read the rest of the report here.

Debate proceeded in spite of censorship threats

LifeSiteNews also notes that the BC Civil Liberties Association is defending the right of pro-lifers to debate the issue in public.

Excerpt:

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) is taking up the case of Youth Protecting Youth (YPY), a pro-life club at the University of Victoria (UVic).

UVic pro-life students, who have been fighting for fair treatment from their student union since October 2008, were finally granted club status and funding by a vote of the Clubs Council on February 10th this year. However, they were again denied the right to be treated equally to other groups on campus only the following month.

In March of this year the UVic student newspaper, The Martlet, reported that the pro-life student club “was denied club money again by the UVic Students’ Society, despite Clubs Council voting in favour of the funding.”

According to a press release from the BCCLA, at the October 5th meeting of the UVic Student Society (UVSS) “the Society confirmed its stubborn determination to withhold the funding ordinarily disbursed to clubs, citing particular alarm at YPY plans to hold a public debate between distinguished UVic philosopher Eike-Henner Kluge representing the pro-choice side, and Stephanie Gray of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform on the pro-life side.”

My congratulations to the club and both participants in the debate.