mercredi 11 février 2009

Entretien sur Radio Galilée au sujet du cours d'éthique et de culture religieuse

Entretien avec Daniel Arsenault mardi 10 février vers 19h00 à l'antenne de Radio Galilée (une radio religieuse du centre du Québec).



Pardonnez la mauvaise qualité de la prise de son.

Le malaise québécois

Barbara Kay revient dans un article publié aujourd'hui sur l'affaire Françoise David dans un cahier d'ECR et l'opposition flagrante des réactions à cette affaire entre Québec et Montréal (ou plus précisément le milieu intellectuel et médiatique incestueux du Plateau Mont-Royal).

Un extrait portant sur la controverse entourant ce cahier d'éthique et de culture religieuse :

« On Feb. 2, Sylvain Bouchard, host of a Québec City FM 93.3 talk show, got himself in hot water with the redoubtable Françoise David, head of the Lilliputian far-left political party, Québec Solidaire. Bouchard had expressed (justifiable) spleen over David's personal prominence as – literally – the face of feminism in a text for Québec's new, compulsory Ethics and Religious Culture high school course. (David's photo appears alongside a narcissistic interview of the leader on one page of the tome.)

No other ideology's or even religion's spokesman is so privileged. But then Bouchard overstepped: He exhorted high school students to punish her exploitation of their captive readership by ripping the offending page from their manual and sending it to the station. David promptly announced she would complain to the CRTC. Bouchard's station director expressed regrets, but Bouchard himself defended his action: "I'm only referring to her ideological choices and not her person." Whether or not one is sympathetic to Bouchard (I confess I am), what's notable is that David would never have been so "dissed" by Montréal's politically correct bien pensants.

This was definitely a Québec City phenomenon. In the big national picture, the famous Two Solitudes are the province of Québec and the ROC – the Rest of Canada. But within the province of Québec, the two solitudes are Montreal and the ROQ – the Rest of Québec. Québec City is the seat of Québec's left wing government, but – in what is often referred to as "the mystery of Québec" – the Québec City region is one of Canada's most conservative constituencies. Boasting a high bourgeois population of politically prudent federalists, Québec City and its surrounding enclaves, which elected four Conservative Party MPs in 2004, remain respectful of their founding military and Catholic traditions, and unthreatened by (sometimes even nostalgic for) their rich English past. Marginalized by the major political parties and the mainstream media, made to feel guilty for being culturally homogeneous (a factor in producing the Hérouxville crisis during the reasonable accommodation debates) and insufficiently deferential to grievance-collecting minorities, many otherwise voiceless inhabitants of Québec and the regions find validation in the strident resistance to postmodernism exemplified by radio talk show hosts such as Sylvain Bouchard.