Echoing calls by the BC Humanist Association last week, Education Minister Mike Bernier announced yesterday that all public and independent schools in BC will have to make explicit references to sexual orientation and gender identity in their anti-bullying policies.

Districts have been given until the end of the year to update their policies and the ARC Foundation has committed to funding a new advisor position to support more inclusive policies at all schools.

Students across BC go back to school today. But unfortunately for too many LGBTQ students that means returning to face bullying and harassment.

The good news is that a growing number of public school districts have introduced policies to combat homophobia and transphobia in the classroom. However, there is no province-wide requirement to introduce such a policy and in many of the province's religious independent schools there are no such protections. This is despite the fact the majority of those schools receive significant public funding.

It could be better.

The Government of Alberta is currently reviewing policies by every school in the province to ensure LGBTQ students are protected. This has lead to the Minister threatening to cut funding to two private religious schools that refuse to comply with the law.

Last week we wrote to BC's Minister of Education to ask whether he will similarly act to defend queer students across BC. And we will continue to oppose public funds going to support religious based bigotry.

By Patrick Gonzalez, National Park Service

Trees are dying across Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks. Glaciers are melting in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Corals are bleaching in Virgin Islands National Park. Published field research conducted in US national parks has detected these changes and shown that human climate change – carbon pollution from our power plants, cars and other human activities – is the cause.

As principal climate change scientist of the US National Park Service, I conduct research on how climate change has already altered the national parks and could further change them in the future. I also analyze how ecosystems in the national parks can naturally reduce climate change by storing carbon. I then help national park staff to use the scientific results to adjust management actions for potential future conditions.

Research in US national parks contributes in important ways to global scientific understanding of climate change. National parks are unique places where it is easier to tell if human climate change is the main cause of changes that we observe in the field, because many parks have been protected from urbanization, timber harvesting, grazing and other non-climate factors. The results of this research highlight how urgently we need to reduce carbon pollution to protect the future of the national parks.

By Philip Almond, The University of Queensland

In 2002, the Vatican officially recognized as a miracle the healing of an Indian woman’s cancer of the abdomen. This occurred as the result of the application of a locket containing Mother Teresa’s picture. The woman, Monica Besra, said a beam of light had emanated from the picture, curing her cancerous tumour.

This one miracle was sufficient for Mother Teresa to be beatified in 2003. This meant that she had the title “Blessed” bestowed on her and that she was, from then on, able to intercede with God on behalf of individuals who prayed in her name. The late Christopher Hitchens (who had written a pretty scathing book about her) had been called upon by the Vatican to act as “the Devil’s advocate” and to give evidence against her character. Hitchen’s criticisms made no difference (which was not really a surprise to anyone).

Update (Sep 8, 2016): The Minister of Education has announced that all public and independent BC schools will now have to include specific protections for LGBTQ students in anti-bullying policies.

The BC Humanist Association wrote to BC's Minister of Education today to ask whether BC's government is willing to show a commitment to LGBTQ equality in BC schools.

In Alberta, the government is putting more and more pressure on public and private school boards to adopt policies to uphold the rights of LGBTQ students in the classroom.

A pastor who chairs two Baptist private schools in Alberta is refusing to follow a ministerial order that requires all schools to have a policy explicitly protecting LGBTQ students and staff. Instead the schools claim to have a "zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy" based on Christian principles.

The schools, like many private schools in Alberta and BC, receive significant funding from the provincial government.

At yesterday's Vancouver meeting, we ran through most of the results of the poll we commissioned in June on the religious and secular attitudes of BC.

While it will be a few weeks before we get the podcast and slides from that talk online, you can now find the full data tables from our poll on our website. Feel free to dig into the data and see if you can spot something interesting that we might have missed.

Also new on the website is our Publications page. There you can find books, stories, reports and more that the BCHA has published, including the autobiography of our member Khushi Ram, whose 95th birthday we'll be celebrating this weekend.

By Arunas L Radzvilavicius, UCL

For nearly nine decades, science’s favourite explanation for the origin of life has been the “primordial soup”. This is the idea that life began from a series of chemical reactions in a warm pond on Earth’s surface, triggered by an external energy source such as lightning strike or ultraviolet (UV) light. But recent research adds weight to an alternative idea, that life arose deep in the ocean within warm, rocky structures called hydrothermal vents.

A study published last month in Nature Microbiology suggests the last common ancestor of all living cells fed on hydrogen gas in a hot iron-rich environment, much like that within the vents. Advocates of the conventional theory have been skeptical that these findings should change our view of the origins of life. But the hydrothermal vent hypothesis, which is often described as exotic and controversial, explains how living cells evolved the ability to obtain energy, in a way that just wouldn’t have been possible in a primordial soup.

By Gavin Bailey, Manchester Metropolitan University

The conviction of radical Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary for swearing allegiance to Islamic State shows that those breaking the law by inviting support for a terrorist organisation can and will be prosecuted. But it comes at a time when the British government is still struggling with definitions of extremism and radicalization, and how to respond to those who don’t break the law.

Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights recently flagged up new concerns about the government’s counter-extremism strategy but we have had around a decade of these debates. Back in 2008, in the wake of the London 7/7 bombings, then Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith spoke of “extremist groups who are careful to avoid promoting violence”. The same year, the Department for Communities and Local Government created a list of British values: “human rights, the rule of law, legitimate and accountable government, justice, freedom, tolerance, and opportunity for all”. Vocal or active opposition to what are now known as fundamental British values has since been defined as extremism. This marks out certain attitudes as potentially dangerous, even if they do not incite violence.

I say it’s time for a rethink, and that it should be through reclaiming the concept of radicalization.

The City of Kelowna will no longer make anti-choice proclamations.

The office of Mayor Colin Basran declined the Kelowna Right to Life Society stating that "Proclamations are not approved if they ... advocate against human rights and freedoms under existing Canadian laws."

Ian Bushfield, Executive Director, BC Humanist Association:

Given Kelowna's sordid history of mayors inserting their politics into proclamations, it's good to see the Mayor stand up for human rights and equality. We hope this commitment will extend to ensuring women's reproductive freedoms and patients' right to choose an assisted death.

Conrad Hadland, one of the BC Humanist Association's long-time members, tells the story of his escape from the Jehovah's Witnesses religion.

In my life I have been very lucky, very fortunate. I began my existence with a genetic endowment that allowed me to take advantage of some of the experiences I faced. And at critical times in my growth, I was lucky enough to find people or ideas that allowed me to move out of ideological systems that were limiting my awareness. Thus this quote from Karl Menninger’s “The Vital Balance” rings true to me:

“There is nothing more expressive of a barbarous and stupid lack of culture than the half-unconscious attitude so many of us slip into, of taking for granted, when we see weak, neurotic, helpless, drifting, unhappy people, that it is by some reason of some special merit in us or by reason of some especial favour towards us that the gods have given us an advantage over such persons. The more deeply sophisticated our culture is the more fully are we aware that these lamentable differences in good and bad fortune spring entirely from luck. 

“It is luck: luck in our heredity, luck in our environment, that makes the difference; and moreover at any movement fortune’s erratic wheel may turn completely round and we ourselves may be hit by some totally unforeseen catastrophe. It is luck, too, springing from some fortunate encounter, some incredible love affair, some fragment of oracular wisdom in work or writing that has come our way, that launched us on the secret road of health and on the stubborn resolution to be happy under all upshots and issues, which has been so vast a resource to us in fortifying our embattled spirit. At any moment we are liable, the toughest and strongest among us, to be sent howling to a suicidal collapse. It is all a matter of luck; and the more culture we have the more deeply do we resolve that in our own relations with all the human failures and abject and ne’er-do-wells of our world, we shall feel nothing but plain, simple humble reverence before the mystery of misfortune.”