Open Letter to Proponents of Bill 44

Dear Sir/Madam,

I read with interest of your plan to keep your children ignorant of subjects taught in school that you disapprove of. I assume this includes things like evolution, sex education, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and other things that you would prefer to ignore.

I, sir/madam, heartily endorse your plan.

I am a parent/guardian, employed, neatly groomed and well-educated lady who is also a woman of faith. You see, I do believe in God. Just not Her fanclub. Sorry.

I endorse your plan because it means that your children will grow up ignorant of some basic scientific facts. Your children will also grow up not knowing any social configuration except for the heterosexual, binary-gendered. religion-rooted view of society. Or, for that matter, how procreation works. But hey, you're here - I'm sure your encore performance of that highly informative 5 minute chat your parent had with you before your wedding will be also be passed onto your child just before his/her wedding. I really admire people who can explain things like that in a hurry, and without visual aids either! Thoroughly brilliant! You have my admiration for your communication skills as well as keeping such family traditions alive.

Be sure to instruct your kids about abstinence being the only way before marriage. After all, you followed it to the letter, right? Since you're preventing your kids from learning about biological elements like hormones and the reproductive system, as well as methods of birth control in sex education classes, abstinence is really the only thing you can tell them to do. Good for you! Never hurts to have clarity about things.

By the way, I have no problems if you wish to teach your children that the Sun rotates around the earth too. Or that evolution is a lie but the Flintstones is based on fact rather than a children's cartoon. Please, go ahead. Would you like me to find a dinosaur saddle for you on eBay? See? I'm a nice person - I'd do that just for you.

You opting to hobble the teachers' efforts to educate the next generation of Albertans merely adds to the Herculean task that they already face in trying to teach our children. Opting your kids out of classes because you don't believe in them constricts them to just your dogma. I see that as akin to saying No to opposable thumbs when the Evolution cart came along. Oh wait, you don't believe in evolution. Sorry, my bad.

Don't think of it as me opposing you. Please see it as me balancing out your dead weight.

For my part, I'm going to keep teaching my kids (and anyone else who wants to learn) about fact-based science. That there is a natural progression that can be traced through time that led us to where we are. Yes, there are holes in the theory, fossils we haven't dug up yet. But you know what? I'd rather teach my kids that there are mysteries in the universe. That there are missing pieces which, if one looked hard enough, will eventually prove that one's understanding is correct. Or prove that it's wrong, which is also a valuable lesson.

My kids won't let their ignorance keep them in their search for truth. Your kids won't let their ignorance stop them. See? We have a common point already! Isn't that great?

There are a lot of things that we don't know about the universe. Whether the Higgs boson exists, for example. What the proof to Goldbach's Conjecture is. Why life exists on this planet. Or why sticking your head in the sand is a bad thing not just for you but for your country when it comes to education.

I'm sure your religious book tells you all you want to know. See, this is where I get really jealous - scientists like me have to figure out the mysteries of the universe from scratch, by dint of hard work. You? You take the shortcut by having all those answers given to you in a convenient book. Wow. All that written ages ago in the Iron Age when indoor plumbing wasn't even around yet. I'm kicking myself for all those years of hard work in school and university. I mean, your holy book's Truthiness is self-evident - I could have saved myself so much trouble if I simply stopped all this headache-inducing thinking and just cited directly from that book.

Call me stubborn but I want to know more. I would like to have independent proof, not just hearsay. Yes, I'm teaching that to my kids too. My children will be ignorant of the things they know they don't know. Your children will be ignorant of the things they don't even know they don't know. But that's okay, because they have your holy book to quote from.

The proof will be in the pudding when they grow up. If I'm not mistaken, one of your holy books say something about you inheriting the earth. I thoroughly support that - please, do take the planet. It's okay, there's no strings attached.

By the way, you don't mind if my kids colonized the rest of the galaxy, right?

Sincerely,
Handmaiden of Science