Abstract:
Debates about same-sex marriage are ubiquitous in the Australian media. Australian schools are also grappling with how to accommodate sexual and gender diversity in school curricula and at events such as school formals. Increasingly, there is an articulation of the rights of lesbian and gay identified people (and, less often, trans and bisexual people) to have their relationships formally and symbolically recognised in public - within, and outside school contexts. Competing understandings of secularism are regularly invoked as part of these debates. It is therefore timely to critically interrogate different strategies being used to articulate rights related to sexual identity in education, and to consider how religious belief is being contextualized in such debates. kin to the situation in Australian education, Toronto is a city that has a long history of publicly funding Catholic schools. Here I study debates about the establishment of GSAs in Catholic schools in Toronto, Ontario. It has recently been legislated that publicly funded Catholic schools in Toronto must provide space for Gay-Straight-Alliances (GSAs). I trace how researchers’ and activists’ articulation of lesbian and gay rights in education in Toronto has successfully invoked secular freedom to force the hand of Catholic schools on this issue. Joan Scott coined the term ‘sexularism’ in a 2009 lecture. She uses it to identify the synchronicities that adhere to the relationship between secularism and particular understandings of sexuality. Scott has called for a critique of the “idealized secular” — she urges an interrogation of the notion that sexual emancipation is the fruit of secularism. Drawing on this notion of sexularism, I consider the contours of Torontonian sexularism in education. I consider how this debates about the competing rights of religion and sexuality in publicly funded Catholic schools can be read, with and against, Scott’s sexularism. This issue provides the backdrop for a broader discussion of how to deal with competing beliefs about religion and sexuality in publicly funded education in Toronto and beyond. These debates are therefore instructive in thinking about the future of debates between religion and sexuality in Australian schooling.