"The Waterloo Region public school board meeting was so packed last night the doors couldn't be closed.

"The 140 or so people formed the biggest and most diverse audience in recent memory.

"There were representatives of Muslim groups, Christian groups and multicultural groups, but the largest and most vocal group were members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning community.

(...)

"Shafiq Hudda, an imam and director of Islamic Humanitarian Service, said most new Canadians have concerns about 'the redefinition of family and what constitutes a proper relationship in our community, he said.

"'If every male was to be a homosexual or if every female was to be a lesbian, the human race would end within one or two generations,' Hudda said.

"As for the report, 'reading between the lines, it seems there is an emphasis on encouraging homosexuality and lesbian relationships,' he said.

(...)

"It's not enough to just tolerate -- schools need to celebrate diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity, [OK2BME coordinator] Young said.

"'We tolerate bad smells, not people.'

"More than just providing anti-homophobia training, as the report recommends, the curriculum should teach about gay victims of the Holocaust,* the Stonewall riots of the 1960s and the fight for the right to wed, Hick said.

"The notion that teaching anti-homophobia gives explicit information about sex acts is laughable, and parents and students shouldn't be able to opt out of it, both women said.

(...)

"Sid Bater, a Christian minister who has two children with his husband, said it's wrong that Christianity has been used to justify discrimination.

'We cannot discriminate against one group or another and say it's all right,' Bater said. 'It's not all right.' He asked trustees to move ahead with the report's recommendations. 'We have an opportunity to turn that power imbalance around.'"

* "Although homosexuals were never targeted for extermination, some were interned in Nazi work camps. The actual number of pink triangle prisoners, estimated at 5,000-15,000 by Joan Ringelheim of the US Holocaust museum (Rose:40), was a tiny fraction of the total camp population. Of these, an undetermined percentage were heterosexuals falsely labeled as homosexuals. Homosexuals who died in the camps (mostly of disease and starvation) were 'a small fraction of less than 1 percent' of homosexuals in Germany (S. Katz:146), compared to more than 85 percent of European Jewry exterminated in the gas chambers. More significantly, many of the guards and administrators responsible for the infamous concentration camp atrocities were homosexuals themselves, which negates the proposition that homosexuals in general were being persecuted and interned."