Social conservatives are lining up to oppose legislation that will legally recognize same-sex parents as the parents of their children.

Committee hearings on Bill 28, the All Families Are Equal Act, began Monday afternoon. Representatives of groups that support the bill and those who oppose it had signed up to speak to the legislation, which is facing backlash from social conservatives.

Parents As First Educators (PAFE), which has been campaigning against the sex-ed curriculum, is among those organizing opposition to the bill. Ahead of the meeting, the chair of the Standing Committee on Social Policy, NDP MPP Peter Tabuns, got an inbox full of criticism of the legislation — although he's not inclined to give the letter-writers a lot of extra help.

Even so, a stack of emails were sent to the committee asking that the equal-family bill be stopped in its tracks. One author said they were “so concerned that this looks too much like Hitlerism,” while another declared themselves a “proud mother and I refuse that title to be taken away by anyone.”

A few emails voiced support for the legislation. One, from the Ontario Association of Private Adoption Professionals, said they "applaud the broad objectives of Bill 28...to ensure that a child's parents' sexual orientation, gender identity, family composition or the use of reproductive technology in the child's conception, will not be a bar to the equal recognition of status of such child and the equal benefits and protections of law available to such child."

However, the group said the language in the bill would lead to a "profound change in the definition" of the "parent" whose consent must be obtained for a child to be adopted. This "would result in the necessity of seeking the consent to adoption of every putative father of a child," even if the child was conceived in an "entirely casual nature," the group added.

PAFE and anti-sex ed activist Queenie Yu launched the anti-bill email campaign, but they've directed supporters to email Tabuns' personal account. His views on the issue are clear and he's not going to go out of his way forward their wayward emails to the committee clerk, for consideration by the other MPPs, he said.

"They've been sending me emails saying they oppose the bill, that they're protecting their sense of the Christian family and frankly they don't like the idea of what's being proposed," said Tabuns.

There are a lot of emails, and he doesn't have the staff forward them all, he said. Tabuns said he'd helped Yu arrange her appearance (scheduled for Tuesday afternoon) at the committee even though she emailed the wrong address, but that's as far as he'll go.

"I'm not the conduit for communications to the committee," he said.

So, he wrote back to Yu, and let her know.

"I have received a number of messages opposing Bill 28. It may be that those are meant for committee. This email address is not a committee address and I will not be forwarding these messages. If you want those messages to go to the committee for consideration I suggest people be told to send them to the clerk, Mr. Koch," he wrote, in an email.

And, unlike Yu, Tabuns does like what's being proposed.

"The reality is we have families in which there are two females or male parents and recognition of those families is proper, it's just and it's important to our conception of how the world should be operated," he said.

Bill 28 is a complex piece of legislation that deals with many different parenting arrangements, including those that involved assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and sets out how parentage is dealt with under provincial law. At the heart of it, the bill is about recognizing that two same-sex parents are parents under the law, without requiring them to adopt their children.

PAFE's said their opposition is the language, which "will strip away use of the term 'mother,' replacing it with 'birth parent,' and remove 'father,' replacing it with 'parent.'"

“The communists had their one-child policy; Ontario has Wynne’s four-parent policy. Being a father or mother has been trivialized,” Yu told Joe Warmington, who took up her argument in his column in the Toronto Sun.

“The premier is re-engineering the family,” said Charles McVety, of Canada Christian College, told Warmington. “She removes ‘mother’ 17 times. Removes ‘father’ 23 times. The Act is amended by striking out the ‘mother’ and substituting it with ‘birth parent’ and ‘father’ with the word ‘parent.’”

Tabuns response to those highly technical legal arguments? "Gimme a break."

"I think recognizing the validity of same-sex marriage and same-sex led families is really important in society and it's a backward step to not recognize them. They deserve this recognition and it doesn't harm anyone, it helps a lot families," he said.

The early in-person testimony urged passage of the bill, although there were also recommendations about how it could be improved. Andy Inkster, a health promoter for the LGBTQ Parenting Network, said the "heart" of the legislation should be that no child should be discriminated against based on their parents.

“The presumption of parenthood is simply not enough," he told the committee.

To contact the reporters on this story:
gzochodne@qpbriefing.com
jsmithcross@qpbriefing.com
416-212-5913
Twitter: @geoffzochodne

‘Too much like Hitlerism’: Committee begins hearings on equal families bill

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