Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

So it seems my last column has touched more than  few nerves, given by the piles of emails that hit my inbox over the weekend. No surprise really, given that I was poking Ontario Catholic educators in the eye for their “alternative” to gay-straight alliances in their schools in recent guidelines that create “respecting differences” groups for students that do none of the things gay-straight alliances do.

Essentially, I have hard time accepting all the talk of respect and dignity in recent Catholic school guidelines that turn to the Catholic Catechism as it’s foundational document — a catechism which regards homosexuality as being fundamentally depraved. This cannot, I wrote in the Grant Rant, either respect and help gay students, nor will it do much to prevent bullying.

Well, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would try to defend these guidelines. And it was equally inevitable that gay bashing would be part of it. To whit, I offer this bit of feed back to the column for a reader who goes by the handle “thatsallfolks”:

Typical left-wing, religion-bashing distortion. LaFleche is trying to restate Catholic beliefs by accusing Catholics of labeling homosexuals depraved when their teaching clearly reveals that it is “homosexual acts” which are “distorted” and “depraved”. There is a BIG difference between the sin and the sinner. Christianity commands us to love the latter and hate the former.

Wonder when Mr. Grant will do a piece on the inappropriate homosexual indoctrination which is occurring in the youngest grades of our PUBLIC school system via a cloaked anti-bullying curriculum? Can’t we just have generic “bullying” education REGARDLESS of race, sex, and gender? Funny I can’t recall anyone reaching out to the obese, the less than beautiful, or the “four eyes” population like myself?

Oh where to begin?

First, he is technically correct when he says the Catechism describes homosexual “acts” as fundamentally depraved and disordered. And this becomes the first line of defense for this kind of discrimination. You know, the whole “love the sinner, hate the sin” stuff.

First, it’s a fairly absurd precept to being with. It’s a bit like saying “oh well love Darth Vader, but hate Death Star.” I mean, what?

More important for our discussion here, however, is to point out that people are what they do. To say that is fine and dandy to be gay so long as you never have an actual relationship with another gay person is like saying “oh it’s ok for that animal to be a bird, so long as it doesn’t fly.”

Ultimately, it’s just a cover. A po’ duck game of semantics that is used to try and defend a point of view that is fundamentally unfair, unrealistic, outdated and discriminatory. Attempting to the draw the line between gay people and gay sex is a meaningless distinction.

But Mr. Thatsallfolks and a few others readers — not many, mind you, but enough to get my attention — go a step further than this Through the Looking Glass rationalization. I am referring of course to talk of the evil gay agenda bent on turning school children to a legion of homosexuals who will, from what I can gather, destroy the world. Or at least join the cast of Glee or something. Well, you tell me! It’s like these bozos think that gay people gather together in secret meetings and plot the take over the world, one child at a time, until there isn’t a straight person left. It’s never made even a little bit of sense.

The talk of “homosexual indoctrination” and the “gay agenda” is exactly the consequence of the kind of policy the Catholic Church is trying to enact in Ontario’s (public funded) Catholic schools. Once you point to a segment of the population and say “oh THOSE people are screwed up” which is what the church does, it becomes easy to define them as a “them” against you “us.” And of course “them” are always bad, always up to do something to undermine the “us”. I mean, if you listen to all the talk of the gay agenda and replace “gay” with “Jewish” you have something that resembles the paranoid rhetoric from Germany circa 1939.

So I will say it once: there is gay agenda bent on destroying school children in the same way there is Bigfoot, the Lochness Monster, UFOs, a good James Bond movie before the Daniel Craig version and sugar coated happy endings for all us. IT DOESN’T EXIST!

(On the other hand, there is an identifiable Catholic “agenda”. The entire outfit exists to spread the faith by converting, well, everyone. There aren’t gay churches designed to turn straight people gay, are there? So…just sayin’.)

The bottom line here is that that is being established in Ontario’s Catholic schools with public tax dollars is institutionalized discrimination, and that is something that needs to be very carefully looked at.