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From the Annals of the “Careful What You Wish For” Department
My hometown of Birmingham in the United Kingdom has been rent for weeks by parental demonstrations against a new “Sex and Relationship” education mandate for primary (elementary) school children, and things are getting rather heated. Parents are objecting to the fact that, although they can request that their children not be taught the “Sex” part of the classes, they cannot remove their children from the “Relationship” part. That the “Relationship” part covers relationships between same-sex couples, which the parents find inimical to their core beliefs.
Fairly restrained coverage can be found in The Telegraph, but The Guardian has the photo that’s worth a thousand words (full disclosure: my family never read The Guardian. We only read The Telegraph. After a servant had ironed it, of course):
Member of Parliament Angela Eagle is overcome by what her country has come to, and has made a tearful plea in the House of Commons that Britain not go back to a time when LGBT people such as herself had to live in fear and be ashamed, and she criticizes the “reactionaries” who want to take Britain back to those times:
How weak, pathetic, and uncertain, she sounds, and as if she thinks no-one could possibly have anticipated this.
From The Telegraph article: “Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted [the Office for Standards in Education], has previously stated her support of schools running the “No Outsiders” course, adding that parents need to learn that “we don’t all get our way”. (emphasis added)
You’ve got a tiger by the tail, my dear. Best of British Luck.
Published in Education
Amanda, pot calling kettle black. Perhaps she needs to learn she doesn’t get to have her own way too. I suppose “her truth” is a truthier truth because she is special.
I’m old enough to remember when leftniks were liberal, and they disparaged the use of schools for indoctrination. I wonder if they simply changed their minds, or if they were insincere back then.
Oh, my goodness! What are they to do? Their two favorite groups – LGBT…. and Muslims are in conflict. How will they ever decide?
C. S. Lewis once said words to the effect that as a Christian we don’t have to believe that all other religions are wrong in everything. (I don’t recall the exact quote and don’t care to look it up.) In this case, the Muslims seem to be taking the stand that Christians should as well. I agree with the protestors signs.
Only one lesson here, maybe two. Centralized National schools don’t make sense. The rewards for capturing them are just too high so they will always eventually be captured by fanatics of one kind or another. As to Muslims, they fit into Muslim places, no where else. The UK has a real problem on that one but we shouldn’t.
I hate when children are used as political pawns; it is a wicked, evil approach to education and is pure indoctrination. I hate it.
One of my favourite websites here in Blighty is The Conservative Woman. Don’t worry, they aren’t millennial feminists posing as conservatives, quite the opposite, nor are their writers all women.
One of their co-editors, Laura Perrins, had a piece on this a while back. She doesn’t pull her punches but, being a social and small state conservative, she agrees with the parents. By the way Laura is a big Mark Steyn fan and would certainly agree that the progressive fantasy of the bearded imam living next door to the gay couple on Elm St. is for the birds.
The instinctive push by the political class to press on with the policy is interesting. It shows that in the ‘oppression olympics’ not even Islam beats the progressive orthodoxy that our nominal Conservative Party has ingested.
This sort of thing is forcing parents to home school. There needs to be a much bigger protest than what was shown above. Parents decide, not the government, what their children can be taught. Every line is being crossed and it will keep going – this indoctrination of innocent kids.
She describes how her partner works together with various “christian” organizations to push the LGBT agenda and then with indignation wants to know who has created the “network” behind these protests. One person’s coalition for “decency” is another person’s evil network of hate.
I’ll have to take issue with your second statement. I went to a school here in the UK which had almost half its pupils drawn from ethnic backgrounds, the sons and grandsons of immigrants from the commonwealth. A large proportion of them were Muslim, but they were from wealthier middle class families and were as British as your English-born correspondent here.
One of my best friends was a chap named Usman, the son of a Pakistani family. His real name was Mohammed but he preferred to use his second name. I had another close friend called Bertie because he too disliked his first name, in his case John, he also disliked his second name, Edward, so used Bertie (?). Usman was extremely pro-American with a a particular admiration for the US Navy. He was a neo-con politically and wanted the US to intervene more around the world. He wasn’t typical of course, but we had a mock election to coincide with the general election of 1997. That was the year of the Blair landslide, yet my ethnically diverse school voted Conservative by over seventy per cent.
The problem isn’t Islam, it is poverty and the left keeping people poor.
I find it unhealthy that Muslims have to stand alone on this issue. Why are none of the other Brits joining them? Why are no LGBT people joining them, for that matter? No wonder Islam may inherit at least that part of the earth.
What’s wrong with letting children grow up “normal”, then learn about homosexual relationships when they are older?
Oh, that’s right. Children are malleable, so better get them on board the “gay is okay” express before parents and clergy get to them . . .
I love it when the various interest groups of the progressive coalition are at loggerheads. Maybe one or two members of one or the other group will have occasion to re-think things.
Yeah, Leftist ethics and Islamic ethics are not compatible.
Yeah, Leftist ethics and Islamic ethics are not compatible.
Maybe their ethics are not compatible but their common hatred is.
It’s a periodic reminder that it’s never about rights, or even right or wrong. It’s always about power. That’s why small-L common sense liberalism has to be painted as racist and patriarchal. Otherwise how can one convince the masses that one’s own brand of authoritarianism is better than any other’s?
Is the “LGBTQI2+” coalition durable? I suspect that the “BTQ+” are riding on the strength of the “L” and “G” coalitions. Now that “L” and “G” have achieved their goals, will “BTQ+” be split off and have to fight for their goals? A single issue coalition is always breaks up, once their issue is resolved, right?
No, they just find other grievances. There are burocracies, foundations, and spokespersons who need to make a living.
If you get rid of certain letters, you end up with “BLT” which is a damn fine sandwich . . .
Put the “G” back in and you can have one with gravy!
True enough in many cases, no doubt.
But when I worked in Pakistan I did have a number of Islamic neighbors, colleagues, and students who hated no one in particular as far as I could tell–with the Taliban being the only likely exception.
I’ve written a few times about Granny and Grandpa who lived in Handsworth Wood, and their Pakistani (I think, may have been Indian) neighbors. Other than griping occasionally about the strong smell of curry wafting over the garden fence, Granny and Grandpa got along fine with them. That generation of immigrants was largely integrated, or came to the country already integrated; in any event, there was little friction. It’s now a couple of generations down the road, and things are very different.
Oh oh oh! There was a story about a deli which made “LBGT” sandwiches (lettuce, bacon, guacamole, and tomato) to support the whatever is called “not normal” movement these days. The sandwiches had rainbow labels, and the proceeds were going to an LBGT cause.
The “alphabet soup not normal” crowd went nuts, even though the deli was on their side. It just goes to show there’s no pleasing these $&*^&*%$%$#holes . . .
intersectionality math is hard …
Easy, it’s a hierarchy of grievance so some groups always trump others. Transsexuals rank over bisexuals and Muslims rank over them both, the protesters will be successful.
@Mr Nick – Are you sure about that? My impression is that the Postmodern heirarchy puts multiculturalism/moral and cultural diversity at the top, which in practical terms means Islam. An American gay man, iirc named Bruce Bauer, moved to Holland or Belgium about 20 years ago in search of tolerance, and found growing intolerance. In the U.S. for example, our first Muslim-American congresswomen have made repeated anti-semitic remarks, but are still celebrated on the left. So, in the long run it’ll come down to a fight between Islam and Postmodernism, imo.
It’s not cognative dissonance if you can successfully not notice the dissonance.
I suppose converting the Muslims to LGBTQ at swordpoint isn’t currently under consideration.
The belief that rivals are enemies and are wrong in all things…where have I seen that recently…?