Two people who may not have wanted to be famous are now having to struggle with a potential firestorm that I wonder if they considered before they created it.  Fran Steer and Mary Craig are a same sex couple  raising a now 13 year old daughter, Brooklyn. When their daughter was 12, she felt compelled to right the injustice being felt by a classmate who had lost her dad just before Father’s Day. Brooklyn made it her cause to create a generic “Family Day” for students at the school who feel prejudiced by such traditions when they don’t fit them.  All of this is admirable and before we go too far, I am absolutely void of homophobia.  Where this crossed the line is the school in adding Family Day, banned Mother’s and Father’s Day!  It really is amazing, huh?  But there is good news.

Enter the fray, Michelle Allaby.  A mother of two students at the scene of the crime, Astral Drive Elementary school in Dartmouth, NS  has started a petition to reverse the decision  and not a new-fangled online one, an old school, door-to-door campaign and early numbers  are bordering on 97%  in support of the reversal.  So, done deal, right?  Wrong.

One more disclaimer; I completely reject prejudice and racism and support LGBT rights. but this story for me is bigger.  This is about the proverbial slippery slope that way too many critics of issues like same-sex marriage espouse. Clearly, much of their dialogue is homophobic and again I also support marriage for all but i must agree with this one component.  Gay rights activists are like another other lobby group and of course,  supporting your self-interest includes making noise about it.  Considering the almost satanic persona of gay people in previous history, we have come a long way to a much more enlightened society about this and scores of contentious issues.  I myself have passionately supported and participated in disability issues.  I think we can all agree that its hard to fix stupid!  But when only this kind of thing happens must we contemplate it is one thing to be stupid but another to be duped.

To me, it’s like this; we have a victory for the underdog but then the underdog gets cocky and all of a sudden think they run the show forgetting the humility lesson and even worse, forgetting they are still the “minority” but as those who rail against the politically correct owning the throne state, why is it the smallest voice gets the biggest stage?  To continue the  metaphor, the amateur musician gets a shot at playing one song  on a big show and instead of being thankful, they go ahead and play a whole set not realizing one was enough.  This couple took advantage of a giving society and got married but that wasn’t enough so they adopted a child but that wasn’t enough. Now  they want to push their agenda further to where their private agenda is now affecting public policy and the 97% of the public have to give in or they come across as racist, prejudiced or in this case, homophobic.

Ironically, the women that started this have gone into hiding and their poor daughter is now facing ridicule.  Before you know it, she’ll be bullied and it will be everyone else’s fault and lost in the mix of all of this is the two days that started this.  One might argue  that Mother’s and Father’s Days are nothing but commercialization and profits for Hallmark.  But my memory is it was a wonderful day to honour my parents with something special and I am aware you “don’t need a special day” but that isn’t the point.  This affected me  in such a personal fashion because in case you didn’t know, my Mom & Dad adopted me as a newborn baby without arms.  They changed my truth and my Mom in particular deserved a medal but I settled for a “day” and since they are both gone now, I am particularly sensitive  to anyone who takes such an event for granted.  Perhaps the biggest offenders are the growing number of schools who in an attempt to be worldly look nothing but small and weak.  They have cancelled Halloween, Easter and Christmas and under the veil of offending the sensitive, they are offending us all. its time for the majority to get our voice back. To stand up, open the window and scream…”I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!”