The Hypocrisy of The Alberta Human Rights Commission

In Alberta, you only get the rights you pray for.

In Alberta, you only get the rights you pray for. If you don’t pray, well, look somewhere other than the Alberta Human Rights Commission to uphold those rights.

That’s the basic message the Alberta Human Rights Commission sent to Morinville parents fighting for a non-religious schooling option in their town. All the schools in Morinville are operated by Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools, meaning an  education comes with the religion included. Some parents didn’t want that, preferring a religious free education for their kids. After being told to forget it, it’s a religious education or no education by The Greater St. Alberta Catholic Schools, these parents applied to Alberta Human Rights Commission. They were recently informed that the Commission was refusing to hear their complaint.

This is where the hypocrisy comes in. In 2009, the Alberta government passed Bill 44, an amendment to the Alberta Human Rights Act that included a “parental rights” clause  requiring school boards to notify parents ahead of when students would be studying sexual orientation or religion, giving parents the opportunity to pull their children from class. As AskepticRTN said at the time, Bill 44 is an example of: the doublespeak that occurs when cowards write the law. What the government really means when it says sexual orientation, is homosexuality. The word religion here means evolution. (See AskepticRTN: Education in Alberta: No Monkeys Please). Bill 44 was a piece of political pandering to the Christian right. It gave parents the ‘right’, under human rights legislation, to protect their kids from learning something that offended religious belief.  It never occurred to anyone in government that their doublespeak would enable the tables to be turned, that those wishing for a secular education would demand the same rights as those given to the religious.

Now that the Alberta Human Rights Commission has made it clear that the non-religious don’t have the same rights as the religious, parents wanting a decent education in Morinville are left scrambling.

In Alberta, they have only one real option–pray.