‘Just Say No’: public dissent over sexuality education and the Canadian national imaginary

ABSTRACT

Scholars of sexuality have argued that ‘moral panics’ about sexuality often stand in for broader conflicts over nationality and belonging. Canada has spent decades cultivating a national image founded on multiculturalism and democratic equality. The Ontario sexuality education curriculum introduced in 2015 drew audible condemnation from a variety of groups. Drawing from Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Race Theory, we argue that the public discourse surrounding these protests exposed the limits of Canadian pluralism, fuelling a meta-debate about the ‘Canadianness’ of recent immigrants and the incompatibility of liberal values with those of non-Westerners, especially Muslims. We explain this in terms of contextual factors such as Ontario’s publicly funded Catholic school system and anti-Muslim xenophobia in the post-9/11 era. Our analysis speaks to the importance of intersectional social justice efforts as part of the movement for comprehensive sex education.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex education
• national identity
• public discourse
• critical discourse analysis
• critical race theory
• multiculturalism
• Ontario
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Many scholars use the term ‘sexuality education’ as opposed to ‘sex education’ to emphasize the multifaceted nature of this kind of education and reduce the focus on sexual activity as such (Fields, Gilbert, & Miller, 2015).

2 Ontario is Canada’s largest province with about 40% of Canada’s population (Ontario Ministry of Finance, 2016).

3 For example, a study published in 2016 demonstrates that the worst poverty is experienced by status Indigenous children (51% live in poverty, rising to 60% for those living on reserves) (Macdonald & Wilson, 2016).

4 Many such efforts did take place, though rarely in the media.

5 This article was published in the small outlet Canadian Immigrant, reflecting the fact that many recent immigrants were in fact concerned about the curriculum.

6 Eventually, the fact or timing of one’s immigration to Canada becomes irrelevant, as the hierarchy devolves into one of race rather than nationality. As Thobani (2007) argues, ‘Racialization renders the distinction between citizen and immigrant all but meaningless in the eyes of nationals’ (p. 246).

7 As Rasmussen (2016) notes, the religious label of a school is not absolutely indicative of the kind of sexuality education its students receive, and secularism is no guarantee of progressiveness. Our point is that opposition supposedly rooted in Catholicism can be accommodated more easily in Ontario than opposition supposedly rooted in non-Christian faiths.

8 A similar phenomenon has been seen in both the UK and the Netherlands. For example, the notoriously liberal sexuality education in the Netherlands has been protested by Dutch-born Pentecostals and newcomers from Morocco and other predominantly Muslim countries. Media portrayals of the protests tend to focus on the values of Muslim newcomers as incompatible with Western society, rather than on the traditional values of their White counterparts, just as Ontario’s Christian protestors garner little media attention (Zimmerman, 2015).

9 Note that Susan Mabey’s comfort with the niqab is referenced as evidence of her Canadian tolerance whereas Harper’s opposition to the niqab is also constructed as proof of some essential Canadianness. It is telling that such antithetical positions on Muslim women’s dress could both be casually provided by non-Muslim-identified speakers, and in both cases, corroborate the speaker’s credentials as a national subject.

10 ‘The good Muslims are the assimilated ones; they berate other Muslims for their cultural backwardness’ (Thobani, 2007, p. 237).