The Toronto District Catholic School Board has done the right thing — finally.

In a marathon meeting last week, trustees voted to amend the board’s code of conduct to include gender issues and family status.

As board chair Maria Rizzo stated: “We finally, finally, after months and months of turmoil and creating this division, we finally came together as a board and did the right thing by our students and our families.”

In the end, they did make the right decision. But it’s awfully disappointing that it took so many months of acrimonious debate, littered with comments that have no place in a public school system, to get to the position that they should have held right from the start.

That’s a place of compassion and understanding and one that follows the directives of the education ministry and the Ontario Human Rights Code.

At issue was the expansion of the school board’s code of conduct to keep in line with the human rights code. The board was directed to add gender expression, gender identity, family status and marital status as prohibited grounds for discrimination.

Even the Archdiocese of Toronto — the Catholic Church’s spiritual leadership in the GTA — rightly understood the need to include those terms and come down on the side of inclusivity.

And why on earth not?

The language will now state that all members of the school community must “respect and treat others fairly, regardless of, for example, race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientations, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status or disability.”

“Respect and treat others fairly” is a pretty low bar to meet.

That makes it particularly troubling that four of the 12 trustees still voted against the change.

The principle of doing the right thing should have be enough for them. But, aside from that, they must realize that being a publicly funded school board comes with responsibilities.

That includes supporting all their students, and perhaps most especially those who are members of the LGBTQ community and disproportionately affected by bullying and harassment in schools.

If they want to keep digging in their heels there is, of course, an alternative. It’s one that critics of Ontario’s system of funding public school boards and Catholic school boards would like to see anyway. That’s an end to public funding for Catholic schools.

That would not be a simple thing to do. It would require a constitutional amendment for one thing, and there’s currently limited appetite for it. But that could well change if members of the Catholic community continue to use religious doctrine as an excuse to oppose necessary progress in what are, first and foremost, public schools.

Some of those who opposed this latest update to the code of conduct did so by spewing a litany of hurtful and regressive comments about the LGBTQ community, just as they’ve done on previous occasions over issues such as sex education and gay-straight alliances.

So this isn’t the first of these messy debates about which bits of the provincial Education Act, ministry directives and the Ontario Human Rights Code the Catholic school system might want to ignore.

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But it should be the last.

Religious doctrine doesn’t trump human rights — especially in a publicly funded school system.