Western Standard - February 14, 2023


HANNAFORD： Defending the faith against the faith

Topics
Catholic school suspension debate
Hosted by
Nigel Hannaford
Mentioned
Josh Alexander Jordan Peterson Lee Harding
OE： OE： Trudeau squeezes Danielle Smith's hand just like he squeezes Alberta The war on cars is a war on freedom

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

139.64

Word count

803

Sentence count

49

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A Catholic school in Ontario suspends a Catholic student for what? Supporting Catholic doctrine? Seriously? How can that even happen? Well, it happens when a Catholic school board goes woke. A few days ago, my colleague Lee Harding broke this story in the Western Standard. Josh Alexander is a grade 11 student at St. Joseph s School in Renfrew, Ontario. He was suspended for 20 days last year because during class debates and on social media, he defended traditional church teaching that there are only two genders, that students cannot switch between genders, and that male students should not be permitted into the girls' bathroom.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So, let's get this straight.
00:00:04.520 A Catholic school in Ontario suspends a Catholic student for what?
00:00:11.000 For supporting Catholic doctrine?
00:00:13.640 What? Seriously?
00:00:15.520 How can that even happen?
00:00:19.200 Well, it happens when a Catholic school board goes woke.
00:00:23.800 A few days ago, my colleague Lee Harding broke this story in the Western Standard.
00:00:28.720 Here is the gist.
00:00:30.000 Josh Alexander is a grade 11 student at St. Joseph's School in Renfrew, Ontario.
00:00:35.740 He was suspended for 20 days last year because during class debates and on social media,
00:00:40.500 he defended traditional church teaching that there are only two genders,
00:00:44.800 that students cannot switch between genders,
00:00:47.380 and that male students should not be permitted, not permitted, into the girls' bathroom.
00:00:54.160 I'm not a Catholic, but it seems to me that this is what the Catholic Church
00:00:58.720 has believed and taught since St. Peter was a fisherman.
00:01:01.900 It's also what the rest of humanity has known for thousands of years,
00:01:05.980 and notwithstanding how powerful the woke voice has become in this country,
00:01:09.660 it's also what most Canadians still believe today.
00:01:12.640 Isn't this what a Catholic kid should think? 0.95
00:01:15.820 Are you getting this?
00:01:17.240 It's now more important to the Catholic school board for their kids to be on board with wokeism
00:01:21.840 than it is for board members themselves to be on board with Catholic orthodoxy,
00:01:26.580 not to mention common sense.
00:01:28.480 Now, young Alexander tells us he's not a problematic kid,
00:01:31.580 which is interesting because if you have to deny you're problematic, somebody thinks you are.
00:01:36.000 Alexander apparently did organize a student walkout in regard for the principal's failure
00:01:42.040 to address the concerns of a female student about the boys in the girls' washrooms.
00:01:47.840 Yes, most principals would find that problematic.
00:01:51.020 But good for him, say I, because what's really problematic here is that the Catholic board 0.82
00:01:57.660 isn't standing up for their own Catholic doctrines.
00:02:01.840 And you wouldn't have to be a Catholic to think that, or even an evangelical, which is what I am.
00:02:06.380 You just have to be somebody who thinks boys and girls should use separate washrooms.
00:02:13.700 One thing is about expectations being met.
00:02:16.480 If you send your boy to a Catholic school, you expect him to get a Catholic education.
00:02:21.540 And if you send your daughter to a Catholic school, you expect the same.
00:02:26.320 Plus, that when she goes to the washroom, she won't be surprised in there by a biological male.
00:02:33.020 Meeting expectations is Consumer Affairs 101, and this Catholic board is getting an F. 0.96
00:02:39.780 What's the matter with them?
00:02:41.180 But it's also about freedom of speech, thought, and coerced belief.
00:02:51.400 Think about it.
00:02:53.020 This all fell out of a classroom discussion.
00:02:57.020 But if you're not allowed to disagree, maybe it was more like classroom indoctrination?
00:03:05.460 Maybe, indeed.
00:03:07.000 According to Alexander's lawyer, one of the conditions of his return to school is that he submit.
00:03:14.600 He has to skip classes attended by transgender students who disapprove of his religious beliefs.
00:03:23.900 In other words, it's the Orthodox Catholic boy who is now the victim of discrimination at a Catholic school.
00:03:32.300 Meanwhile, the people rejecting Catholic doctrine are just fine.
00:03:37.680 The problem here is that in Canada today, it's not just the Catholics who are allowing themselves to be buffaloed.
00:03:45.540 For example, we all know that men don't menstruate.
00:03:50.500 We all know that men can't have babies. 0.95
00:03:54.540 We all know that allowing biological males to compete in women's sport just means biological women seldom win. 0.97
00:04:04.780 Yet nobody whose voice matters, Jordan Peterson accepted, calls out this nonsense.
00:04:14.640 And we let the people who spout it write the rules.
00:04:18.380 That is, there are many professional and social situations where failure to agree with the standard lies means loss of employment or status.
00:04:30.180 People have become like the crowd in the fable of the emperor's new clothes, afraid to state the obvious truth until a child blurts it out.
00:04:38.300 That's how it is that when a kid's simple understanding turns out to be closer to verifiable scientific truth than his school boards, he's the one who's called problematic.
00:04:50.900 Bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, I'm with the kid.
00:04:54.320 And when it comes to stating obvious truths, maybe more of us should become more problematic.
00:05:00.760 A lot more.
00:05:03.320 Because if we don't, we'll soon enough find that we can't.
00:05:11.060 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.
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