The Catholic church has seen the devil, and it is a form of diversity known as gay-straight alliances.

GSAs are small groups of high school kids — typically a bunch of straight girls and cool gay boys who oppose the bullying of other gay kids (who aren’t always so popular and sometimes kill themselves).

Not a big deal, you might think — the GSAs, I mean. And quite a big deal, you might say — the suicides.

Yet the church cannot countenance this social innovation. It sees GSAs as a cancer on its catechism, to be rooted out before the movement metastasizes.

Hence the remarkable open letter issued Monday by Ontario’s Catholic bishops accusing the provincial government of launching a virtual Holy War — or at least a politico-religious one — by requiring schools to back student requests for a GSA.

In three pages of rambling “observations,” Cardinal Thomas Collins takes aim at Ontario’s second-ever Catholic premier, Dalton McGuinty, for trying to “micromanage” separate boards so that their “legitimate local authority is nullified.”

This is a faith-based fight — a cri de coeur aimed at all people of faith: Allowing GSAs to go forth and multiply, the Cardinal warns, will harm more than just Catholics because the plan constrains their “freedom to act.”

Including their “freedom” to suppress GSAs.

“If it happens to us, it can happen to you,” the Cardinal writes in a dramatic flourish. “When religious freedom becomes a second-class right, you also will eventually be affected.”

This seems awfully out of tune with the present debate about how to help high school kids show solidarity with bullied gays. By targeting GSAs, demonizing them, declaring them unwelcome, the church is picking a fight it will not win, a battle it should not fight, a cause it cannot justify.

Not just in terms of the safety of gay kids, but the survival of Catholic schools.

In every political and social cycle there is casual talk of amalgamation that would marry the separate system with public boards. The discussion never goes too far because none of the three main political parties has the appetite to take on the church, antagonize Catholic voters or unleash social divisions.

Nor do I. But past inertia is not necessarily an indication of future political behaviour.

Polls show the public is broadly supportive of gay-straight alliances and unsupportive of separate schools. If the church persists in denigrating GSAs, as the Cardinal did Monday, and follows up with threatened legal action, it may face double jeopardy — losing both in a court of law and the court of public opinion.

Perhaps times are changing. Rather than a forced marriage of the separate and public systems, we may be moving toward a bitter divorce (or more properly, an annulment). Not at the instigation of politicians or voters, but by the hand of the church itself should it walk away.

Freed from public funding, a truly separated separate school system would gain a respite from perceived political meddling — liberated to run its own schools in its own way. On its own dime.

This is where the church and Catholic trustees appear to be heading with doctrinal diktats that eschew compromise. Initially, the McGuinty government proferred creative ambiguity, giving separate schools the flexibility to support “a gay-straight alliance or another name.”

Catholic trustees responded with a picayune riposte that omitted the word “gay” and flatly ruled out GSAs. Once spurned, twice shy: the McGuinty government countered by tightening its proposed language, saying explicitly that no school could refuse a reasonable request for a GSA.

The Cardinal was not amused.

“We simply ask that diversity be respected in our society,” he implored Monday, with unintended irony.

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Grant us our religious diversity, the church asks, so that we may deny sexual diversity to students of goodwill and good faith.

The church is playing a high-stakes game. If it loses this religious gambit, will it quit the political game and go its own way? Or will it simply have reached the point of no return — eroding public support at a time when people are more inclined to backstop gays than back intolerance?

Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, twitter.com/reggcohn.

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