Yet another faithful Ontario Catholic school trustee has been canceled. She’s being persecuted for the “crime” of trying to keep her Catholic school board faithful to Church and biblical teaching.
In an affront to representative democracy, a majority of Natalia Benoit’s Niagara Catholic District School Board (NCDSB) trustee colleagues recently banned her from receiving board meeting correspondence for a period of five months, until the end of June.
Even more seriously however, she’s facing a separate, frivolous complaint, filed by a local pro-LGBT activist, regarding Natalia’s election campaign finance reports from 2022. This could potentially result in Natalia’s trustee seat being vacated. Although unlikely, the law even allows for jail time!
She appeared before a tribunal to decide her fate on January 31, 2024.
All of this persecution is politically motivated.
It’s a vindictive tactic to cancel her for having publicly opposed the flying of the LGBT Pride flag, as her faith and conscience required. When the board voted to fly the controversial, anti-Catholic flag for the first time, she had vocally opposed it.
Then, at a May 23, 2023 board meeting, Natalia had attempted to pass a motion that would’ve prevented school board employees from advocating “partisan, political or social policy matters.”
Although it wasn’t mentioned explicitly in her motion, it would’ve effectively prevented the homosexual and transgender Pride flag from being displayed at any NCDSB building.
Well, as you can imagine, the LGBT mob and their legacy media allies went berserk, accusing her of all manner of wickedness.
In particular, they seized on a video posted on social media in which a parent had expressed to Natalia, right after the board meeting when her motion failed to pass, that it was inappropriate for a Catholic board to fly LGBT Pride flags.
Natalia agreed with the parent and made the point that Catholics shouldn’t fly any symbol opposed to Church teaching. She made the commonsense analogy that: “Well, any flag at all … Like the Nazi flag, we don’t want that up either, right?”
On the basis of that simple comment, the board ruled that she violated the trustee Code of Conduct by “comparing the Nazi flag to the Pride flag.”
Well, she didn’t compare them at all.
She just gave an example of another ideology that the Catholic Church opposes.
She could’ve given dozens of other examples too, and they would all have been correct. The Catholic Church opposes Nazism. It opposes homosexual acts. It opposes transvestism and transgender lifestyles. It opposes racism. All these statements are true.
Stand with Natalia Benoit: LifeFunder
The nature of the election finance violation is that while filing expenses, Natalia made the innocent mistake of not recording $259.90 of her personal funds which she had spent to buy lawn signs for her campaign. Keep in mind this was the first time she had ever run for office!
“I didn’t think I had to report my own income,” she explained to a news outlet. “That’s a mistake, and I was honest about it.”
It’s notable that when the pro-LGBT Mayor of St. Catharine’s had made a similar error, but for a massively greater amount of $50,000, he was not prosecuted. He was simply warned not to do it again.
Natalia who is a Christian, conservative-minded person, is being prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Why isn’t Natalia being given the same treatment as the “progressive” Mayor?
Could it be this is a politically motivated show trial, designed to send a message to all other elected officials: “Don’t you dare oppose the LGBT agenda, or the same will happen to you!”
Natalia is a stay-at-home mom with four young children. She has no money and couldn’t afford a lawyer.
So, Campaign Life Coalition agreed to crowdfund up to $5,000 so that she could retain a defense lawyer to represent her at the January 31st tribunal.