Recently I covered my second demonstration against Ontario’s new sex education curriculum. Standing outside of Queen’s Park were the usual suspects — fundamentalist Protestants speaking of “sodomites,” ultra-conservative Catholics disgusted at Pope Francis’ ostensible liberalism and various angry people holding clumsy posters. The last time I was here an Elvis Presley impersonator with a dog collar loudly condemned me from the platform. Not this day alas. Elvis had obviously left the building.

As bizarre as it may sound, this is serious stuff and has led to parents removing their children from school and even to the previous provincial government withdrawing this acutely necessary and entirely reasonable curriculum. So who are these perennially outraged men and women who think we’re all doomed and damned?

I know quite a few of them and their leaders; hardly surprising in that it’s always the same people and the same faces. One prominent regular is a leading anti-abortion campaigner who once made up and then spread the rumour that our youngest daughter, who was still at school at the time, was gay. She happens to be straight but her sexuality is irrelevant to us. Thing is, it was done to try to hurt her and by extension hurt me because I had become increasingly vocal in my support for same-sex marriage. The person in question is a devout Catholic.

Others were from a group who had worked successfully to have me fired as a columnist from a Christian newspaper because I had written that a 10-year-old Paraguayan girl raped by her stepfather had the right to an abortion. So, as I say, I know them well and they’re hardly representative of mainstream Canadian society.

Yet in spite of, or perhaps because of, their extremism these zealots do have a following. More than this, they are trying to co-opt minority communities — principally Chinese Christians and South Asian Muslims — into their coalition.

Their anchors are hysteria, paranoia, fear and ignorance. The apocryphal is wrapped up as established fact and what is gossip becomes ironclad information. At their demonstrations and in their literature they quote the curriculum severely out of context and speak of teachers — always unnamed — who are “perverting” children. There are frequent references to pedophilia and the smog of homophobia is seldom far away.

This latter point needs to be understood, because there has been a deliberate effort on the part of the antisex ed leadership to publicly, if not privately, play down or deny the anti-gay prejudice that was so prominent in earlier demonstrations and in their attitudes toward Kathleen Wynne.

While hardline evangelicals are part of the leadership, the central figures are traditionalist Roman Catholics who reject Pope Francis’ moves toward dialogue and have adopted Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea as their champion.

This senior cleric’s name is peppered on antisex ed websites and in their conversations. Sarah has denounced what he calls “Western homosexual and abortion ideologies” as being “demonic” and compared them to Nazism. He has described equal marriage as “part of a new ideology of evil” and supports African anti-gay laws, many of which are hideously punitive and lead to the arrest and assault of gay men and women. This is the reality of the antisex ed movement.

What the activists refuse to say is that it is not this particular curriculum they oppose but any attempt by the state to teach children realistically about sex and sexuality, and certainly any approach that embraces the full equality of the LGBTQ community. Many of them oppose birth control and virtually all of them vehemently oppose reproductive choice and premarital sex. This is not, as they claim, “ordinary parents defending their children.”

At the root of much of all this is a denial of sex as a loving, pleasurable, invariably harmless and entirely natural act. They don’t oppose sex in itself but view it primarily, if not exclusively, as a means of procreation rather than as a method of enjoyment. They also refuse to realize that children, even their children, will be and are sexually active. An acidic nostalgia for a time that never was.

Regrettably, the conversation is not over and neither is the opposition. As for the Elvis impersonator, I fear he will be back to sing again.

Micheal Coren’s latest book is Epiphany: A Christian’s Change of Heart & Mind over Same-Sex Marriage. mcoren@sympatico.ca