Rights advocate threatens lawsuit over proposed Alberta law on gay-straight alliances

A Calgary group plans to launch a constitutional challenge if the provincial government's Bill 24 to support gay-straight alliances (GSAs) becomes law.

The proposed legislation would stipulate that Alberta students who join GSAs clubs where LGBTand straight students can gettogether in a safe space cannot be outed to their parents by teachers or staff.

But John Carpay, president of the JusticeCentre for Constitutional Freedoms, says the bill doesn't respect the rights of religious and independent schools or their parents' Charter-guaranteed rights.

"It attacks and undermines the religious character of schools by forcing them to have GSAs, which are not peer support groups, but they are political clubs that promote an ideology that is hostile to Islam, to Catholicism, to evangelical Christianity, to Orthodox Judaism and to other religions," he said.

Carpay is not yet revealing the identities of the parents, independent schools and other stakeholders on whose behalf he would be filing the constitutional challenge.

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