By Steve Weatherbe
VICTORIA, B.C. , June 6, 2019 – B.C. education critic Jenn Smith finally got his say in British Columbia’s capital, delivering a devastating critique of the NDP government’s radical Sexual Orientation Gender Identity 123 curriculum supplement.
Several weeks ago he was prevented from delivering the same lecture by a mostly chanting and shouting crowd of several hundred strong SOGI 123 supporters led in by provincial NDP vice-president Morgane Oger, outside the Oak Bay lecture venue. Police did nothing. Inside a smaller, fractious mob, beribboned in the colours of the LGBTQ spectrum, simply yelled Smith down from a few feet away.
But this week the rebooted lecture went ahead in the City Light Church, where an audience of about 100 were protected from several dozen yelling pro-SOGI-ites by a cordon of a dozen Saanich police. The Oak Bay News immediately questioned the church’s tax-exempt status.
The fight is over the new ideology of Inclusion as promoted by the NDP government’s SOGI 123 public school maerial. It holds, first, that the sexes and genders are interchangeable, second, that any parent, school or church that argues otherwise is a “hater” and , third, that to oppose a child changing from male to female and vice versa is an act of “family violence” and will lead to suicide.
Smith condemned SOGI material as a propaganda effort to undermine the traditional family and worse.
“SOGI 123 is not Orwellian, it is post-Orwellian,” he told this reporter. As in George Orwell’s novel 1984, “where the State insisted that ‘peace is war,’ we are being told that male is female. And we are being required to say it and not to deny it.”
During the lengthy talk, Smith unleashed an avalanche of scholarly studies and forensic evidence to reveal the dangers of SOGI 123 and of the push by legal, medical and school leaders to persuade BC children that biological males who identify as females can actually change into the other sex, and vice versa.
Ostensibly SOGI 123 is designed to prevent bullying of children with gender dysphoria This is the technical term for the psychological illness of believing oneself to belong to the opposite sex. Opposing SOGI 123 , its defenders claim, will lead to young gender dysphorics committing suicide.
To rebut this, Smith cited studies showing that across Canada in recent years after public schools have established Gay Straight Alliances and other programs to promote tolerance of homosexuals and transgenders, nonetheless “suicide rates in school age youth have not gone down. They have gone up slightly.”
He showed video of parents who supported their childs’ transgendered desires, saying, “I’d rather have a live daughter, than a dead son.” Smith agreed that transgender youth have a suicide problem. However, it is not caused by their being bullied or thwarted in their desire to change sexes, he argued. According to Smith and the data he presented, gender dysphoria is frequently associated in psychological literature with other “co-morbid” psychological illnesses such as depression and, especially, autism.
Children with such illnesses are likely to be marginalized by their behaviour in school, leading to bullying on the one hand, and a resort to escapist behaviours such as gender dysphoria, and a vulnerability to confusing ideas such as gender fluidity—that changing one’s sex and gender is possible, even laudable.
Smith also noted that transgender youth may self-report suicide attempts at a much higher rate than non tg youth because they are hoping thereby to extract support from their parents to getting hormone blockers and cross sex hormones. He cited a Vancouver psychologist, Wallace Wong, who said publicly that tg youth pulled such “stunts” to get the drugs they wanted.
What’s more, Smith cited a long-term Swedish study of post operative male to female transgenders that shows they have a far higher suicide rate than the rest of the population, despite Swedish society being one of the most accepting societies in the world in terms of transgenders. The implication is that getting their way does not solve the transgenders’ suicide problem because it does not address their underlying psychological issues, be they autism, depression, anxiety or schizophrenia.
Smith likened gender dysphoria to anorexia and displayed a picture of an anorexic girl’s midsection. Children with gender dysphoria are deluded just as anorexic children are, he said. They deserve treatment, not encouragement.
Anorexics could die of starvation, said Smith, but gender dysphorics could be rendered impotent by hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones, or their normal growth permanently impaired. Sometimes Male-to-Female transgenders are, in the case of males, castrated, and in the case of females willingly have their breasts removed. Later, if they have regrets, they cannot recover their sex-appropriate physical features.
Smith argued at the beginning of his lecture that propaganda consists not only of falsehoods that are told the public, but truths that are concealed from them. One such truths concealed is that most MtF transgenders retain their male genitals. This means that the MtF transgenders who the SOGI program says should be allowed in girls’ washrooms and change rooms will have their male genitals and sexual interest in females intact.
“Who is in the washroom with your six-year-old daughter?” he asked.
He cited two well-publicized cases of two MtF sex offenders, one in the United Kingdom, named Karen White, who recently sexually attacked fellow inmates in a women’s prison, and an earlier one in Toronto of sex offender Christopher Hambrook, who molested women he was sharing a bedroom with in a women’s shelter.
The truth is not only being withheld, it is being suppressed, he said. He cited the case of a British feminist Posey Parker, whose billboard carrying the dictionary definition of “woman” was condemned as a hate crime and removed.
He also described the celebrated, recent case of the BC man who opposed his 13-year-old daughter’s being administered testosterone by the BC Children’s Hospital. When he took the hospital to court, he not only lost, but was ordered by the judge never to speak to his daughter, or to anyone else about his her, except as the boy she insisted she was. To use even female pronouns in reference to his daughter would be an act of “family violence” potentially leading to charges.
Smith also recounted how Christian crusader Bill Whatcott was fined $55,000 by the BC Human Rights Commission for describing NDP Vice President and candidate Morgane Oger as a “biological male and transvestite,” during the last provincial election.
Furthermore, Smith himself lost his Twitter account for campaigning about transgender issues and SOGI 123.
While defenders of SOGI claim its goal is to prevent bullying, Smith counter-claimed that its real purpose is to actively promote gender fluidity upon confused and vulnerable children. He cited SOGI classroom materials that require students to go to the front of their classroom and in front of their classmates place themselves on a `gender line`between two boxes chalked on the board, one reading “I am male” and the other, “I am female.” He added, “They aren’t allowed to put their names in the boxes,only between them.”
Another SOGI-recommended material for SOGI is the book, “I am Jazz,” about and ostensibly co-written by celebrated MtF transgender Jazz Jennings. In it Jazz claims, “I have a female brain” inside a “male body.”
This is intended to “confuse and indoctrinate” school children into believing they can choose to be the opposite sex. People born with male biology have unmistakably male chromosones throughout their body, Smith insisted. Nobody can have female brains and male bodies.
Smith also showed slides showing various medical specialists supporting so-called sex change therapy to make the case they get financial support from major hormone makers such as Abbvie. One Powerpoint slide showed Abbvie making $1.3 billion each year from two drugs used for so-called sex-change therapy.
Smith told this reporter, “we are setting a precedent here if the state can force us to say that a man is a woman.” Soon Christian parents will face children sent home with sexual doctrines they oppose, with the potential of dividing families. “It’s not Orwellian. It’s post-Orwellian.”
Comment:
Post Orwellian indeed. We all know Orwell coined the term “newspeak” to cover how the government of England described in 1984, would generate lies and claim them to be true. Thenn it would say the opposite and claim that was the truth. But his England of 1984 was based on the Soviet Union of the mid-century. There yesterday`s heroes were erased from Communist Party histories by diligent librarians and children were indeed encouraged at school to inform on their parents when the uttered anti-regime comments
The totalitarian state cannot tolerate independent thinking. Today`s Communist China is jailing Muslims and Falun Gong believers and extracting organs for transplant from prisoners facing death sentences. Christian churches are being bulldozed.
In Greater Victoria, advocates for the state religion of Inclusion are urging Saanich municipal council to removal the tax exemption on church property if the church can`t pass an inclusion test. Federal summer intern grants for charities to employ students in their work are already tied to inclusion tests that bans Christian organizations opposed to abortion or other aspects of “the spirit of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
This use of the property tax exemption, which is at the discretion of municipalities only for property upon which the church does not sit, to frighten churches into silence, will surely be expanded. Next will be the tax on property under the church itself—this is now automatically granted by provincial law. As such, it would only take an amendment by the legislature controlled by the New Democrats to remove this exemption.
After that, there is the income tax exemption under federal law. It extends to churches and charities, but only if they stay clear of politics. Prolife groups which campaign for restrictions on abortion cannot get this exemption, for example. How long will it be before a Liberal or NDP or Green government/ coalition decides the test for this exemption should be inclusivity “under the spirit of the Charter.” This would mean that a church or non-profit that did not endorse abortion, gender fluidity or homosexuality would be taxed. At the same time, donors to these churches or parachurch organizations would lose the tax deduction on their gifts.
All in the name of Inclusion, the new state religion. (see a previous blog to read about the old state religion, which is the Compact Theory of Confederation.)
Against the totalitarian premise behind Inclusion, is a fundamental premise of pluralism, which ought to be the guiding principle of our Canadian democracy but isn’t. It holds that having different independent sources of ideas about the public interest is itself in the public interest. The content of their ideas doesn’t matter so much as the existence of different generators of content. The free press and news media that are independent of government and each other, independent churches, independent judiciary, independent universities, discrete federal states within a nation, competing political parties, private and public schools, and the principle that parents are the first educators of their own children—these are all building blocks of pluralism.
In the case of Jenn Smith’s lecture, and by implication, the case of the BC father forbidden to talk of his daughter as a female, we have seen freedom of religion threatened by a newspaper and a mob, both doing the government’s bidding; we have seen the government using emotional blackmail with the suicide card to silence its critics, we have seen the “hate card” played again and again by local politicians. We have seen Orwellian newspeak enforced by courts. We have seen the primacy of the nuclear family undermined by medical, educational and legal elites.
Why has the legal profession become the leading advocate for inclusion– hat they would call human rights? It is a blatant example of corruption. Lawyers, law professors and the judges they become have been seduced by power. Formerly the protectors and administrators of the law, they have become its masters. Because every law passed legislators is now subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—as arbitrated subjectively by judges—the legal profession has supplanted Parliament. Only a handful of lawyers, professors and judges now believes that our Charter and our Constitution mean what they say. Under the self-serving doctrine of “the living tree” our judges now decide for themselves—and for all of us—what these fundamental documents mean.
But the creepiest part of the inclusion push is that, while it is the NDP government promoting it, any opposition to it is being suppressed by the lawless rabbles who crashed Jenn Smith`s first lecture attempt in Oak Bay, led by an NDP vice president. And that boutique community`s leadership supported the state religion of inclusion by simply ordering its police force to stand by and let the lecture crashers have their way.
So hats off to Saanich and its police force, with an assist, we hear, from the Victoria force, for defending our hard-earned civil rights. And hats off to the City of Light Church for the courage it showed and to the Canadian Christian Lobby for championing Smith and the safety of children. As for Oak Bay, its council and its pretend police force, and as for the Fernwood Community Centre, which signed a contract to host Smith and reneged at the first sign of criticism, I shake off my sandals.