While schoolchildren elsewhere were eating candy corn and cutting pumpkins out of construction paper, kids in Toronto public schools were “writ[ing] health warnings for all Halloween candies.” Why? Because Halloween is the latest target of political correctness.

Last week, teachers in Toronto received a memo from the District School Board advising them to “forego traditional classroom Halloween celebrations because they are disrespectful of Wiccans and may cause some children to feel excluded.”

Canada’s National Post reports:

“Many recently arrived students in our schools share absolutely none of the background cultural knowledge that is necessary to view ‘trick or treating,’ the commercialization of death, the Christian sexist demonization of pagan religious beliefs, as ‘fun,’ ” says the memo.

Entitled “Halloween at TDSB Schools: Scarrrrrry Stufff,” the document seeks to clarify for teachers and principals the extent to which Halloween activities should be pursued in multicultural settings. [...]

The memo goes on to remind teachers that, “Halloween is a religious day of significance for Wiccans and therefore should be treated respectfully.”

As is usual, the people who have decided to take offense to Halloween on behalf of Wiccans don’t necessarily have the support of the Wiccans:

Nicole Cooper, a first-degree priestess of the Wiccan Church of Canada’s Toronto Temple, agreed. “Frankly, Wiccans are a minority — an extreme religious minority,” she said.

The Halloween celebrations of North American pop culture, she added, are “not actually threatening to my religion anymore than eggs and cute little bunnies are threatening to Easter.”

[...]

“If I had children I wouldn’t deprive them of that — it’s a really fun thing to do. It’s engaging in the spirit of the season; it’s exciting for kids,” Ms. Cooper said.

That argument won’t get you very far, though. “Fun” is a concept completely foreign to the High Priests of Political Correctness, the mentally disfigured intellectual dwarves who dwell in the twilight of the mind concocting new ways to get upset on behalf of other people who often don’t want the “help” in the first place.

But it makes me wonder: what kind of culture will we be left with if we rid ourselves of everything that makes us unique just so we don’t offend any new arrivals? We bend over backwards to accommodate every foreign and fringe culture, but at the same time, we don’t even show half that respect to the culture that already exists here.

Are the High Priests of Political Correctness really concerned with being open to other cultures? Or is their real goal to destroy ours?