Concerned Parents Demand Principal Be Fired For Being Too Metal

Someone call Tipper Gore!

For the last several months, we've been dealing with parents in the US — well, people pretending to be parents, at least — screaming their faces off at school boards about masks and critical race theory. And you know what? We need and deserve a palette cleanser for that — in the form of Canadian parents being mad about heavy metal. So let's party like it's 1988!

Parents of students at Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario, started a petition to demand school principal Sharon Burns be fired after she posted pictures to her official school principal Instagram account of herself at an Iron Maiden concert, doing devil horns and holding a sign that said 666, like you do at an Iron Maiden concert, I guess. They are claiming that the pictures, which are great, are bad because they involve openly displaying "her allegiance to Satanic practices" and "Satanic symbols" and are thus "not inclusive."

Conservatives are seriously so bad at trying to "Now how do you like it!" with the inclusiveness stuff:

As concerned parents with impressionable children at Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario, we are deeply disturbed that the principal assigned to the school blatantly showed Satanic symbols and her allegiance to Satanic practices on her public social media platforms where all the students can see them under @edenprincipal (not her personal account). Our school is based on inclusion, and openly displaying Satanic symbols (on a public social media platform) that directly goes against the principles of the vast majority of families who represent the school, is not inclusive. As parents we are demanding her transfer to another school. Please replace her with another principal who aligns with the values of the families at Eden and will not sabotage the teaching or upholding of those values and will not try to introduce impressionable students to Satanic practices or symbolism.

The petition garnered a good deal of attention on social media and was reported on by a local news station, pretty much because "parents want principal fired for loving Iron Maiden too much" is just too good. In response, whoever was in charge of the petition went totally bonkers and posted the following update.

This petition is NOT about Sharon Burns' love for Iron Maiden. At NO POINT has it ever been. This petition is about a principal of a school openly displaying her OWN handmade sign with the 666 clearly displayed on it which she knows full well what that SATANIC SYMBOL means to the vast majority of families in her school AND she put it on a PROFESSIONAL, public @edenprincipal account on social media, NOT A PRIVATE ONE, which she very easily could have done. If she had not posted a picture of her own handmade 666 sign, this petition WOULD NOT EXIST. Nobody cares what band she likes and this is not about her choice in what she listens to. That would be petty and nonsensical. This is ONLY about openly choosing to display Satanic symbols on a PROFESSIONAL profile page.

As all communities and schools are supposed to be about kindness, EQUITY and INCLUSION, this displaying of Satanic symbols is mocking and isolating large segments of the community she works in and clearly is not upholding any of those values. Sharon knows full well what she did was simply inappropriate, unnecessary and not professional but has yet to publicly admit so and is willing to allow people to believe a completely different story, making very real concerns seem petty, is allowing the start of another petition that clearly misleads people to believe it's about attacking her choice of a band or music and is not clearing up any of this misunderstanding created by the other petition and a misleading news story.

If CKTB understood they were mislead about the real concerns, (lack of professionalism, lack of equity and inclusion and openly mocking community beliefs with a handmade 666 sign on a public, PROFESSIONAL social media profile), we can't imagine they would be interested in continuing to publish the news story.

(Broken up into paragraphs by me, because it was pretty tough to read as a giant wall of text)

Here is the 666 sign that they were so very worried about. It is pretty cute — there is a heart and everything!

It probably doesn't need to be said that doing metal horns and making a sign that says 666 at a metal concert is not "practicing Satanism" or whatever the hell these fine upstanding members of the New Canadian Parents Music Resource Council are claiming it is, but we will say it anyway. I don't think it is possible get more blatantly toungue-in-cheek than a 666 valentine to the Iron Maiden mascot .

Quite frankly, I love seeing a high school principal doing this, as it assures me that the goths and metalheads or whatever it is they have now (Dark Academia-ers?) are not being sent to her office to explain that no, they're not trying to murder anyone with Dungeons and Dragons. So do her students, who started their own petition to keep her around:

Recently, there has been a petition going around to "remove" the principal of eden high school. It is ridiculous that a couple of parents only judge her role as a principal only based on an instagram post. (About liking the band Iron Maiden. That's it.) Eden High School is a public school. Not a Christian school. If you somehow don't like the principal of your child, grandchild, relative etc.'s school, then send them to another one. The principal has made so many efforts to remind students that eden is a diverse place. She has even turned a whole room into a prayer room for students who are practicing religions other than christianity, like practicing Islam. She has made eden a safe space for so many people. She spreads nothing but love and kindness, and is probably one of the best and most enthusiastic principals the school has ever had. If you would like to bring some light to this whole petition, please consider signing!

She sounds amazing , frankly — which is probably why the students' petition has 17,000 signatures and climbing as I type this, and the parents' petition has 539. Although honestly that is still way too much considering the fact that we have already been through this. 

And now you may OPEN THREAD ... until 3: 30 when Stephen and I come back for our Sunday livestream.

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