As the parents in the case, and many others quickly recognized, beneath the soft soap lurked an illogic that was not only intellectually embarrassing but pedagogically pernicious.

It is one thing to teach children — or adults for that matter — that all religious faiths must be treated with respect as being true for their believers. It is quite another for the State to teach children — and demand acquiescence for the proposition from adult citizens — that all religions must be considered equally true for their non-believers.

Yet that is precisely the basis of the Quebec government’s curriculum for its Ethics and Religion Course. All must accept that all religions are equally true even when the nature of religious belief is the acceptance of one truth as true above all other possibilities.

The proof came when Montreal’s prestigious private Catholic school, Loyola, asked to be allowed to deviate just a bit from education department dogma. It wished to include the, oh, somewhat unsurprising proviso that Catholics actually believe Christianity, as held by the Roman Catholic Church for 2,000 years, is the Truth.

No, said the educrats. It’s all equal, all the time or else. See you in court, said Loyola. And won, though the legal decision upholding a private Catholic school’s right to teach that Catholicism is true is being appealed by the education ministry.

Alas, the parents in the public school case rights were not so lucky. They did not even ask the education ministry to alter the course. All they requested was that their child be exempted from the ethics and religion course. Their request was rejected, they lost a legal fight in the lower courts, and so found themselves before the Supreme Court of Canada in late May pleading for their rights.

As Iain Benson, the lawyer representing the interests of both the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association and the Canadian Council of Christian Charities, argued effectively in the high court hearing, the contradictions in the case start well before the self-cancelling illogic of the proposition that all believers must believe all beliefs are equally true.

In fact, Benson pointed out, at a purely pragmatic level, Quebec’s education ministry is contradicting its own mandate and its own self-interest in failing to keep parents engaged in the public school system by generously accommodating their particular religious beliefs.

More, the Supreme Court has set as the settled law of the land the principle that religious particularities must be respected in both public and private, confessional and non-confessional, schools by allowing, for example, Sikh students to carry the symbolic kirpan dagger in the classroom.

“It would be a strange, hollow and superficial ‘respect for religion’ that granted public place only for the symbols of religion… but refused respect to more substantive dimensions of the right such as ‘teaching’ and ‘dissemination’ without fear of reprisal,” Benson argued.

“In this case, there is not only fear of hindrance but, in the minds of hundreds if not thousands or parents… the ERC stands as an actual interference with what they believe to be their foundational rights as religious parents to have their religious rights respected in the public sphere.”

Strange and hollow, indeed. And it’s outright incoherence when we can consider that, by definition, religious belief means believing a religious belief to be true, and freedom means being able to say it is true whether others believe it or not.

Yet here we are in Canada, 2011, where we require the justices of our Supreme Court to stick their noses into what should, on its face, be self-evident truth. Let the babbling begin.

(Peter Stockland is the Director of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal in Montreal.)