A study in how to blow an opportunity

Here's a wonderful narrative of what happened in the Alberta Legislature the other day:

[ ... ] New Democrat Leader Brian Mason was peppering Premier Ed Stelmach with questions about Bill 44, which amends Alberta's Human Rights Act to include parental rights. The clause would allow parents to pull their children from school classes dealing with religion, sexuality, and sexual orientation. Mason wanted to know if that included classes on evolution.

An excellent question: what exactly do these things consist in? Any religious reference? Must English teachers send home notes indicating that some of the novels and short stories and poems to be studied contain scriptural references? What about History teachers teaching the colonisation of North America? Must references to Roman Catholic missionary work be flagged for parental approval? Biological instruction that involves the description of the endocrine system? What about those Biblical Literalists that hold that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is exactly 3? Must mathematics teachers announce a warning? I could go on and on.

"This government just spent $25 million of taxpayers' money to give Alberta a new image," thundered Mason. "All they've done is to make Alberta look like Northumberland and sound like Arkansas ... . When will the premier start projecting an image of Albertans that is as modern, progressive and culturally sophisticated as Albertans actually are?"

This too is an incredibly interesting question. It certainly seems to me that Albertans are indeed far more sophisticated than this provision seems to suggest. Albertans certainly seem to understand that their religious responsibilities to their children are their own. The schools are, in this context, a delivery system for information. Where that information implies values to which parents are opposed, they gladly take on their responsibilities and teach their children otherwise. Albertan parents do not strike me as people who want their children to have a 'human right' to ignorance.

By "Arkansas," Mason seems to have meant Tennessee, the state where, in 1925, a school teacher named John Scopes was put on trial for the crime of teaching evolution. The famous Scopes Monkey Trial pitted two of America's greatest legal advocates, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, against each other, a case that gripped the world and inspired the film Inherit the Wind.

Mason's remarks riled the premier.

"Just look at this caucus," said Stelmach, gesturing proudly at his 72 members, on both sides of the house. "You find me another caucus in the country of Canada that is more diverse than right here in the Alberta legislature."

And so we have a beautiful opportunity to point out that the kind of diversity we need here is diversity of opinion. Instead, we get this:

As Tory members pounded on their desktops, Dave Taylor yelled across the floor. Something that sounded like -- "You've got a few Scopes monkeys in it!" (via MLA's wordplay backfires).

And so Conservatives get to ignore the point.