>A teacher at a posh private school in British Columbia was fired last month after making an innocuous comment about abortion to his Grade 12 law class.
>The 44-year-old teacher, who has asked that he not be identified to protect what’s left of his career, was teaching “the criminal law unit, a lesson on vice, ethics, morality and the law” to his small class in the Vancouver-area school in late November.
>“I was working my way through examples of how some people’s sense of personal ethics was more liberal than the letter of the law,” he said in an email.
>In other words, he said, in a pluralistic democracy, there’s often “a difference between people’s private morality and the law.“ I find abortion to be wrong,” he said, as another illustration of this gap, “but the law is often different from our personal opinions.” That was it, the teacher said. “It was just a quick exemplar, nothing more. And we moved on.”
>A little later, the class had a five-minute break, and when it resumed, several students didn’t return, among them a popular young woman who had gone to an administrator to complain that what the teacher said had “triggered” her such that she felt “unsafe” and that, in any case, he had no right to an opinion on the subject of abortion because he was a man.
>The school, for the record, is a witheringly progressive one. Before classes even started last fall, teachers underwent serious “gender training” given by QMUNITY, an organization for LGBTQQ2S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning and two-spirit) people. Teachers were told in no uncertain terms, for instance, that “no one is 100-per-cent male or female” and that everyone is somewhere on the “gender spectrum.”
