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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
Maybe Muslims will be found to have a unique claim to not have their children indoctrinated.
Poverty doesn’t create dangerous islamic fanatics, it provides fodder, and while few Muslims become dangerous, they’ll go with their leaders and their leadership at some point is taken over by dangerous folks. What do we gain by having more than token Islamic immigration, if any? Especially with the current Democratic leadership who like the idea of non assimilation. Personal knowledge and friendship with some folks simply doesn’t compare with 1300 years of example.
I can’t speak about the case in Holland but here in the UK you have different things going on in different parties. The Labour Party have a quite cosy relationship with some pretty unsavoury Islamic groups, so both Islam and Postmodernism are in harness on the left, increasingly so under Jeremy Corbyn. Progressivism, or Postmodernism if you prefer, afflicts the Conservative Party but they are just about keeping the ‘Islamophobia’ crowd at bay (certainly will if Boris ‘Muslim women should be allowed to dress like letterboxes’ Johnson wins the leadership).
My contention is that being British, as opposed to English, Scottish etc, is inclusive enough that it doesn’t matters what your heritage is. Indeed that is the whole point about British history once you really study it, Indians were elected to Parliament in the 1890s for example – for both parties too. So Polish or Pakistani can and do become British. The left want them to remain Polish or Pakistani because they are anti-British. Substitute Britain for America, Australia, Canada or your Western nation of choice and the left are playing the same game in all of them.
It is striking that some of the most strident Conservative Brexiteers are second or third generation ‘children of empire’. Some, like Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell, were born in Peru or Uganda, others, like Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak, were born in England. British constitutional history is largely based around tolerance and non-conformism, it can accept Islam as it did Judaism in the nineteenth century. Obviously it should not bend to Islam any more than it did Judaism, the law of the land and all that. That is how the British right should argue their case, in my opinion. Bowing to the progressive consensus denies the actual progress that has been made.
1000 Likes for this statement.
Funnily enough my ‘personal knowledge’ examples do pre-date the Blair government which increased immigration from an average of well under fifty thousand to its current level of hundreds of thousands. I suspect that as with so many of New Labour’s policies it was borrowed from your Dems and for the same reasons. There is a brewing scandal about vote rigging in the recent Peterborough by election, the tactics would probably sound familiar to Republicans from California.
Nevertheless you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube but you can provide Muslim children with a choice between a free society and backwards cultures. That does not mean you ram a progressive ideology down their throats at the age of seven though, that just makes a backwards culture a safe haven.
Good article written by a teacher on this controversy has just gone up on the Spectator’s blog site. A choice quote below:
Conversion by the sword? An oldie but a goodie. You have to win the fight first, though.