CKNW Editorial
for September 27, 2000

Since the decision in the Surrey School Board case I've been doing a lot of thinking. And what inspired me to do this editorial was a letter from a parent who believes the judgment said "that it is the responsibility of parents not educators to teach children morals." Nice phrase. Easy to agree with if you don't think about it. But I'm not sure we have thought about it enough.

I'm going to talk a bit about my own upbringing and in so doing want all of you to know that I fully accept the fact that the times were different and I'm not casting aspersions either at my parents, my larger family or the community at large. They reflected their own times. I just want to tell it like it was. Jews were kikes, blacks were niggers and Chinese were chinks. That was the common parlance in the Vancouver west side where I was brought up. When the "Japs" were sent to concentration camps that was fine and many, including my father, bought their confiscated assets at ten cents on the dollar.

Jews, it was widely accepted, would ruin a club ... they would take it over and in fact Jews weren't admitted to the premier club in town until 1976. Blacks were inferior ... every one knew that. In sports, they had a yellow streak down their back ... everyone knew that too. The Chinese, inscrutable, were a dangerous lot. Would hook you on opium given half the chance. Marriage between members of my very large west side community and a Jew, a Black or an Oriental was unthinkable. One of my family did marry a Jew and was always treated much differently after that. In fact, marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant was all but taboo with the prejudices running both ways. Catholics, so sure of their superiority in the eyes of God made it a condition that the non Catholic sign the children over to the church.

But that was my home background. And it was the home background of most kids from the west side of Vancouver ... and in fact for kids on the west side of most cities. Indeed, I suspect that many of these prejudices were share in less affluent neighbourhoods. It varied, of course but essentially we were brought up - in spite of the principles we were fighting for in the war - to be confident of our superiority and the rightness of our religious principles even though, as in our family's case, religion meant church on Christmas Day and, in a good year, Easter Sunday.

I had all this knocked out of me. So did most of my generation. And how did that happen? Because the moral values of our parents were tested by the moral values of our teachers. Not just our school teachers but all who saw the old ways of society as being inherently wrong. I had school teachers to be sure who made me think about social matters but I also had some who confirmed my parents' prejudices.

Was it the right of my parents to make me a bigot because they and their friends felt their views strongly? Were they the absolute custodians and masters of my moral upbringing? 

This brings into play the broader issue. Does society in general have a role? We consent to be part of a wider group and that wider group takes on its own rules of morality. I would not for one moment suggest that we should not carefully guide our children through some of the terrible things our society does and permits to be shown children, but doesn't society have a right to teach children to be tolerant? When a Jew is called a Christ killer by a child, taking that views from the moral values of its parents, does not the teacher have a right, nay an obligation to lay out the views of the community at large? In short, do we not repose in the state the obligation to ensure that our children are guided down a path which mandates acceptance of others?

What about the rights of a Jew, a Black, an Oriental, an East Indian to have their children treated fairly? What about the parents of gay children. Do those parents not have the right to expect that other children will be taught respect for minorities and tolerance of differing points of view? There are many in today's society that hold that homosexuality is a sin and must be condemned as such. Many believe that the gay lifestyle is corrosive of our way of life. To them, it violates their rights if their children are told anything about homosexuality and homosexual relationships for fear, I assume, that their children will be indoctrinated. But doesn't the school still have the obligation to ensure that children accept, in the sense of tolerate, that which their parents find so objectionable?

This not to say that teachers should in any way encourage kids to be homosexuals any more than my parents would have tolerated one of my best loved teachers, the late Maury Rothstein, if he tried to convert me to Judaism.

But I was raised to be anti-Semitic. Because I was such an ornery little bugger that never accepted anything I was told I became the very opposite, out of contrariness. And, ironically, as I was taught to be prejudiced we were fighting a world war to eliminate prejudice. At school I had a teacher who looked after our Hi-Y - Russ Robinson - and he insisted that we learn about others and that we have several joint meetings with young members of the Bnai Brith. He also suggested that we attend churches other than our own to find out how others worshipped. Was that wrong?

Now I close with this general statement. It was by no means just the white west-siders who were filled with prejudices. Jews had theirs, so did Greeks, so did Sikhs, so did Orientals and so on. And I daresay that a member of any of those communities could say the things I've been saying this morning only changing the names.

My point is a simple one. While parents have rights, so does society as a whole. And one of the ways society as a whole exercises those rights is in the way it teaches citizenship ... which in our larger community means acceptance of the views of those who vehemently disagree with us. And when all's said and done, isn't it just possible that the homosexual of 2000 is the Jew, the Black, the Oriental of generations past?