Marc Hall v. Durham Catholic School Board

Marc Hall (2002)

Everyone knows the story of Mississippi resident Constance McMillen, the teen who recently fought to take her girlfriend to prom. I thought I'd share what I think is the Canadian equivalent of the Mississippi prom issue.

Meet Marc Hall. On May 6-7, 2002, Hall, then seventeen-years-old, fought in an Ontario court against the discrimination he faced in his Catholic school.

(Let me just pause for a moment while you gather yourself from the shock of hearing of the discrimination of a gay student by a separate Catholic school board.)

Let's back-up just a bit. In 2002, Marc Hall sought to take his boyfriend, Jean-Paul Dumond, to his high school prom. The school board, however, decided that as a separate Catholic board it had the religious right of discrimination. Hall wasted no time in acting and headed to the court, backed by his boyfriend, his parents, lawyers, and other supporters. Marc Hall v. Durham Catholic School Board was to become a high-profile case in Canada as well as on an international scale.

A coalition of supporters was assembled in favour of Hall's case, including: Canadian AIDS Society; Canadian Auto Workers Union; Canadian Federation of Students; Catholics for Free Choice; Liberals for Equality Rights; Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC); Windsor Pride Committee, and many more.

The argument for Hall's side was that a church's rights to act according to their beliefs are not above the freedoms and protections afforded to Canadian citizens by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Catholic schools may be run by a separate school board, but they are still subject to rule and regulation by the province in which they publicly operate. Of course, the Church and the school board took the old line that they do not hate homosexuals and only condemn homosexual conduct, and so they were not discriminating or violating the Charter. Fortunately, as stated on samesexmarriage.ca, "their religious view of what constitutes discrimination simply does not correspond with the legal view of what constitutes discrimination,". The Church was not only violating Hall's right to be treated with human dignity and equality, it was violating his right of free expression and of free association.

On May 10, 2002, Justice MacKinnon ordered the Durham Catholic School Board to allow Marc Hall to attend prom with his same-sex date:

"The idea of equality speaks to the conscience of all humanity—the dignity and worth that is due each human being. Mark Hall is a Roman Catholic Canadian trying to be himself. He is gay. It is not an answer to his section 15 Charter rights, on these facts, to deny him permission to attend his school’s function with his classmates in order to celebrate his high school career. It is not an answer to him, on these facts, to suggest that he can exercise his freedom of disassociation and leave his school. He has not, in the words of the Board, “decided to make his homosexuality a public issue”. Given what I have found to be a strong case for an unjustified section 15 breach, he took the only rational and reasonable recourse available to him. He sought a legal ruling."   - Judge Robert MacKinnon

Yes, after costing the Board over $150,000, Marc and J.P. were not only allowed to attend prom at Marc's high school together, but the Board was forbidden by the Ontario Superior Court to cancel the event as a means of preventing the same-sex couple from attending. This ruling, however, was not the end of Hall's fight.

Being that the ruling would hold little permanent legal weight, March Hall filed a $100,000 lawsuit against the Durham Catholic School Board. In 2005, Hall decided that it was not a fight for him personally, that it was more important that he focus on university, and dropped the case. Marc Hall's story is featured in the 2004 CTV television movie, Prom Queen: The Marc Hall Story, starring Aaron Ashmore (think "Troy Vandergraff" of Veronica Mars and "Jimmy Olsen" of Smallville) as Marc Hall: