Canada: Taxpayer-funded school warns children that gays will end up in ‘lake of fire’
A taxpayer-funded Catholic school in Alberta requires its staff to abstain from ‘homosexual relations’, and warns children that the ‘unjust’ will end up in a ‘lake of fire’.
According to the Calgary Herald, the Prairie Christian Academy, which is about to undergo a $7m (£3.8m) revamp, has come under fire for its discriminatory policies.
Kent Hehr, an MP for the opposition Liberal party, said: “Fifteen years after the Supreme Court outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, it is unbelievable this is still happening.”
“I am starting to question what oversight Minister Jeff Johnson and his education department are providing to the system.”
The newspaper reports that Prairie Christian Academy was founded as a private school in 1938, but joined the local Golden Hills School Division in 2003, to access to more government funding.
A ‘statement of faith’, which the school requires all students to sign, warns that the unjust will face “everlasting punishment of conscious torment in the lake of fire”.
Meanwhile, the school’s Professional and Ethical Standards documents, which all staff are required to sign, states they must “uphold the sanctity of marriage, defined as that between a man and a woman, and abstain from homosexual relations”.
Hehr continued: “Either these schools stop this ludicrous behaviour or their funding should cease immediately.”
“I couldn’t care less what these parents believe, but what I want is leadership from our government about what our society believes.”
The school division’s superintendent Bevan Daverne argued that requiring staff to be straight was no different than requiring them to speak Spanish.
He said: “If we were offering a language school with French or Spanish immersion, we wouldn’t be hiring teachers who weren’t fluent.”
“The same is true with our religious-based programming where we’re looking for staff who have a fluency within that faith.”
