It seems to come each year with the spring flowers. Bigotry is the passion of Quebec nationalists. They care less that people recognize them for what they are: small-minded, intolerant, ignorant and ungracious people who want to inflict children and youth with their narrow and harmful parochialism. They want to build Trump-type walls around Quebec.
These are the people who challenge religious symbols. They seem to fear the inanimate objects of devotion such as a cross, a Jewish yarmulke, a Sikh turban or a Bedouin hijab. Just how they are threatened by these objects or dress, we cannot fathom.
But their passion has launched early this year. With the smarmy connivance of premier François Legault and his right-wing pequistes in his coalition avenir Québec party, the national assembly has a new hate bill to pass. The education minister, Jean-François Roberg, is proposing a bill to abolish a program that teaches Quebec students respect and tolerance for people of different faiths.
To their horror, the politicians have found that the program works. Instead of joining the pequistes’ hate movement, the young people in Quebec are becoming more inclined to be tolerant and accepting of others’ views and religions.
This has angered the nationalists in Quebec who want to build walls against multiculturalism as evidenced in the rest of Canada. What they are really going to try to do is change the course to their religion, that is actually secularism. As a religion, secularism denigrates the various religions as pap for the masses. It is closer to an atheistic viewpoint. With the lingering vestiges of the once dominant Roman Catholic church in Quebec, these nationalists see even the weakened Roman church as a threat to their movement.
The nationalists describe the present teaching on ethics and religion as a type of virus that teaches the young to appreciate multiculturalism and pluralistic ideas. The youth of Quebec would certainly also benefit from learning about the European experience in lowering borders and expanding cultures. The nationalists in the national assembly have an evil agenda for them.
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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry
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