Two stories from the recent IMFC conference

The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada is a great resource on cutting edge research on marriage and the family. They had a conference earlier this month and I was there covering it. The picture shows the intrepid and beautiful IMFC research director Andrea Mrozek, author Brian Lee Crowley and IMFC executive director Dave Quist.

The Western Catholic reporter published two of them. The first is on the hidden agenda of public sex education:

OTTAWA - When Dr. Miriam Grossman became a physician, she thought her biggest battle would be against physical diseases and emotional disorders.

Instead, the American psychiatrist said her biggest battle has been against dangerous ideas, especially the harm in sex education promoted by groups like Planned Parenthood.

"Their priority is not sexual health, it is sexual freedom," said Grossman, the author of You're Teaching My Kid What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child.

"Sex education is a social movement," she said at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) conference here March 11. "Its goal is to change society." Those changes include freeing people from sexual taboos, especially Judeo-Christian morality.

"Kids are being taught they can play with fire," she said.

Waiting rooms like hers are filled with "people who have been burned inside and out."

And the second is on a talk by Brian Lee Crowley, author of Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values. I'm reading it now and it is the Canadian answer to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. I'm about halfway through and it's making me angry, in a good way.

OTTAWA - The erosion of Canada's founding values will have a negative impact on the future happiness and success of Canadians, says Brian Lee Crowley. Canada's founders had a theory of what made people happy and it centred on the value of the family, honest hard work and the virtue of self-sacrifice, Crowley told the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) conference here March 11.

"The family is the place where we learn to master our selfish instincts and begin to become of value to others," said the author of the bestselling Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values.

The greatest gift parents give their children is to instill character so they can rise above their selfish instincts, Crowley said.

Without the inculcation of virtue and self-restraint, he said, a person will fail to find the happiness that comes from self-mastery, self-respect and success that comes from the ability to delay gratification for future pleasure.

Over the last half century, Canada has lost sight of its founding values endowment through seeing freedom as liberation from any constraints on behaviour, he said. Tradition came to be seen as "an obstacle to the realization of our authentic selves."