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):

Protesters outside the Anderton Park primary school in Birmingham.

 

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.

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  1. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    JoelB (View Comment):

    She describes how her partner works together with coerces 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.

     

    • #31
  2. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Roberto, Crusty Old Timer (View Comment):

    EB (View Comment):

    Oh, my goodness! What are they to do? Their two favorite groups – LGBT…. and Muslims are in conflict. How will they ever decide?

    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.

    Maybe Muslims will be found to have a unique claim to not have their children indoctrinated. 

    • #32
  3. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Mr Nick (View Comment):

    I Walton (View Comment):

    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’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.

    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.  

    • #33
  4. Mr Nick Inactive
    Mr Nick
    @MrNick

    TeamAmerica (View Comment):

    Mr Nick (View Comment):

    I Walton (View Comment):

    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’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.

    @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.

    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.

    • #34
  5. She Member
    She
    @She

    Mr Nick (View Comment):
    Bowing to the progressive consensus denies the actual progress that has been made.

    1000 Likes for this statement.

    • #35
  6. Mr Nick Inactive
    Mr Nick
    @MrNick

    I Walton (View Comment):

    Mr Nick (View Comment):

    I Walton (View Comment):

    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’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.

    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.

    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.  

    • #36
  7. Mr Nick Inactive
    Mr Nick
    @MrNick

    Good article written by a teacher on this controversy has just gone up on the Spectator’s blog site. A choice quote below:

    Too many schools believe they’re in the business of indoctrinating and socially engineering our children. Until this simple fact is widely accepted and rectified, I’d rather teachers didn’t involve themselves in issues as sensitive as marriage and relationships. Often these teachers are young, naïve, inexperienced and armed with youthful idealism and a terrifying, burning sense of the new, politically correct morality. They are Corbyn’s shock troops.

    Dressing up the Anderton Park Primary School dispute as a conflict between progressive secularism and reactionary religious conservatism is a kind of displacement activity. By characterising the demonstrators as reactionaries, and by implication extremists, the school is naturally portrayed as moderate, reasonable and mainstream. According to this narrative, there is nothing to discuss, apart from the intolerance of our more conservative religious communities. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Many people, including some that would consider themselves to be progressive are deeply troubled by the prospect of their children being exposed to such material.

    • #37
  8. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    TBA (View Comment):

    EB (View Comment):

    Oh, my goodness! What are they to do? Their two favorite groups – LGBT…. and Muslims are in conflict. How will they ever decide?

    I suppose converting the Muslims to LGBTQ at swordpoint isn’t currently under consideration.

    Conversion by the sword? An oldie but a goodie. You have to win the fight first, though.

    • #38
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