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By: Lloyd Brown-John
Among my favourite baseball players was Warren Spahn. He played 21 seasons in Major League Baseball.
Among his pitching talents was his famous screwball, a type of breaking ball that breaks differently than a slider or curve. Generally, screwballs are among the rarest pitches because of their difficulty to throw.
Spahn used screwballs extensively in one of the greatest pitching duels in U.S. professional baseball. The July 1963 contest lasted 16 innings between Milwaukee Braves’ Spahn and San Francisco Giants’ Juan Marichal. Spahn had held the Giants to few hits with his effective screwball. But the game ended when, on his 201st pitch, he tried a fastball to Willy Mays who responded with a towering home run. The Giants won 1-0.
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I note Warren Spahn’s talent because now and then the word “screwball” can be applied to other situations and especially to some people.
Over the past many months I have been very critical of the Windsor-Essex public school board and those members responsible for the fiasco in naming Kingsville’s new comprehensive school.
That issue aside, it was at a Greater Essex County District School Board education committee meeting on Oct. 1 that the screwball gang showed up.
One chap, associated with a far-right-wing outfit, claimed that enrolment in public board schools was dropping in favour of independent schools — and in some cases home schooling — which I question as serious education.
This fringe activist group known as Action4Canada was founded by a B.C. woman who claims to be a ”committed Christian and defender of faith, family, and freedom.” She’s a full-fledged far-right extremist who favours banning books in school libraries which, in her opinion, promote child pornography.
Presumably, she’s based her book-banning claims upon a careful reading of offensive books and of Section 163 of Canada’s Criminal Code.
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An undynamic trio appeared at a board committee meeting to promote their self-assigned “mission” to protect Canada’s heritage, which they allege is “founded on Judeo-Christian biblical principles.”
Sometimes one wonders why those who screech so loudly about Christian principles are themselves so often so very remote in Christian behaviour.
On the Action4Canada website, the founder claims that her “greatest mission is to declare that Canada is founded on Judeo Christian principles which were inherited through our British Commonwealth, embedded in our Magna Carta, forming our laws and our values.”
Now, I’ve been in the field of constitutional law in Canada for probably longer than she has wallowed in her vacuous intellectual mire. The former British Commonwealth has absolutely nothing to do with Canada’s constitution nor our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
And the Magna Carta holds little relevance to Canada’s rights and freedoms. The document was composed by a group of 13th-century English barons to protect their property rights against a tyrannical king.
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Common folks were not included.
This is the quasi-intellectual basis upon which some religious fanatics are trying to persuade a public school board to follow their regressive lead. Many of their assertions clearly contravene the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as Ontario’s Human Rights Code.
Action4 Canada is a pathetic online organization dedicated to returning Canada to a white European 19th century. The outfit opposes abortion, climate change, 5G technology, truth & reconciliation, LGBTQ rights, and ever so much more.
Hence when a delusional dude’s entourage showed up at a school board committee meeting is it any wonder that trustee Ron LeClair blew his stack? The board has been harassed by many of these same screwball types.
Surely, the local school board has a vast range of significant business to deal with without being burdened by side-show proselytizers for weird causes.
Cheers for Ron LeClair and his efforts to have the fringes trimmed and the board’s committee more focused on matters which affect the entire community, irrespective of gender issues, obscure assertions of rights and an apparent assumption that religion should somehow define public education.
The challenge for voters in the next municipal elections will be to ensure that far-right fringers don’t gain access to managing public education.
Lloyd Brown-John is a University of Windsor professor emeritus of political science and director of Canterbury ElderCollege. He can be reached at lbj@uwindsor.ca.
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