University of British Columbia launches plan to train all faculty in LGBT ‘inclusion’
The University of British Columbia’s
Education Faculty has partnered with a homosexual advocacy group to train all
of its faculty in LGBT “inclusion,” with hopes to take the program to the rest
of the university faculties.
DailyXtra reported last week:
“Starting in September 2016, every faculty member, staff person and student in
UBC’s Faculty of Education will get training on every level: from bathrooms to
teacher-training to policy inclusion and climate within the faculty, all the
way to the dean, says the faculty’s senior associate dean, Mary K Bryson.”
The rest of UBC, Bryson adds, will
gradually follow her school through the process to “create and maintain an
LGB/T2/Q inclusive curriculum, culture, work place, and learning environment.”
Constitutional lawyer John Carpay of
the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms warns that the program could
violate faculty or staff employment rights, if people are required to subscribe
to beliefs or attitudes.
“As a general rule, employers can
require employees to undergo job-related training,” Carpay told LifeSiteNews in
an email. “However, if the ‘training’ consists of promoting a worldview or
ideology, with an expectation that employees agree with that ideology or
worldview, it would not be a bona fide job requirement that employers could
impose.”
The program, funded by a
Vancouver-based homosexual rights charity called ARC, will pour $125,000 into
the “UBC-ARC Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Fund.” Its goals, if not
entirely clear, are certainly not modest. Goal two, for example, is “to prioritize
systemic, faculty-wide interventions that focus on sexual orientation and
gender identity as critical pillars in the architecture of human rights risks,
resiliencies and interventions that aim to redress inequities and enhance
social sustainability.”
Every member of the staff, faculty
and student body will be enlisted in the overarching crusade to make the
education faculty a “positive space” for homosexuals, transgenders,
transsexuals, queers and bisexuals, and to carry this message to the public school
classrooms throughout the province and the world.
There will be “transformation towards
social justice goals,” interventions “to transform the impacts of systemic
discrimination,” as well as “a focus on intersectional approaches to thinking
about sexual and gender diversity in public education settings.”
The ARC Foundation is “delighted” to
be working with the UBC faculty of education, according to its executive
director Brad Beattie. The UBC faculty of education is “thrilled” to partner
with ARC, says its associate dean Wendy Carr.
But Carpay of the Justice Centre is
concerned that “this ‘training’ sounds like it could be indoctrination, in
which case it would be up to one or more people to challenge it. If everyone
acquiesces and goes along with it, that will be the new reality.”
Carpay added that the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms with its protection for freedom of thought does not apply
to “internal contracts” between a university and its employees. Any faculty
members who objected to this “training” would have to appeal to “the principles
of employment law, not constitutional law.”
Asked by the DailyXtra to justify the
project, senior associate dean Mary K. Bryson quoted Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau. “Because it’s 2016.”
