K.John Cheung, a lawyer who heads the mainly Asian Canadian Alliance for Social Justice and Family Values Association, said that in a little more than a month, his group had gathered nearly 17,000 names on a petition demanding the government drop the course unless input into the curriculum was also admitted from parents and students.

The course, scheduled to begin in September next year, would be taught as an elective class in the last year of public high school.

Mr Cheung said about 70 per cent of the signatories were ethnic Chinese and other Asian Canadians.

He was worried that if the new course was allowed, other education boards would pick up the idea and begin holding classes teaching similar content.

'British Columbia is always at the forefront of liberal ideas. Now, the government has entered into an agreement with two activists who have an agenda,' he said.

'They've hijacked the whole educational system at the expense of parents and if this is allowed to go by, it will spread and eventually other activists could use it as an example of precedent and demand it be in their school system. And then it could go to Hong Kong.

'That's why it's very important for us to stand firm and stop it now.'

The activists, Murray and Peter Corren, who legally married in 2004, filed a human rights complaint against the provincial government seven years ago for failing to make the curriculum 'inclusive of queers and queer content'.

The government settled the case this summer and agreed to give the Correns the unprecedented right to have direct input into the British Columbia school curriculum and make it more inclusive of and responsive to the gay community and its history and culture.

The elective course would not focus entirely on gay and lesbian issues but include other historical forms of discrimination, including those against Chinese and South Asians when they arrived in Canada and the lack of equal rights for women in the past.

The protest organisers were spreading misinformation and were victims of homophobia, said Murray Corren, a teacher from the city of Coquitlam.

'When you exclude a group of people and don't allow their realities to be acknowledged, it causes them to be invisible and silent and when you make people invisible and silent, you can do all kinds of things to them. It's easier to make them scapegoats and the targets of discrimination,' he said.

Parents have always had the right and would continue to have the right to have input into the curriculum, said Peter Corren.

He expressed surprise that there had been protests against the agreement, and that the response had come from a large number of Chinese-Canadian parents. In Vancouver last month, about 800 parents demonstrated their opposition to the government's agreement with the Correns at a protest rally.

'We're trying to be inclusive and it's ironic that there's now this group calling themselves an alliance for social justice and traditional family values trying to exclude people like our family,' Peter Corren said.

Ministry of Education spokeswoman Corinna Filion said the government had settled the case because it saw it as an opportunity to improve the school curriculum.

'As with any new or revised curriculum, ministry staff regularly consult with stakeholders and experts in the subject matter and solicit public response on the draft curriculum. Final decisions about course content remain with the ministry of education,' she said.

But Brian Roodnick, with the group Concerned Parents of BC, said the two issues were fairness and precedent. 'The problems that we foresee is that the Correns will introduce a one-sided curriculum without adequate parental input.'