The attempted push by LGBTQ activists to make teaching about alternative lifestyles and sexualities compulsory for all children from the age of 4 is a declaration of war against Christianity.
Books such as Tango makes three, an early reading picture book about a gay penguin couple who adopt a chick, alongside King and King, My Princess Boy, Daddy, Papa and Me are widely used in State primary schools to normalise alternative lifestyles. Activists – and by extension policy makers, who appear unquestioningly to have swallowed misleadingly named inclusivity and diversity arguments, hook, line and sinker – argue that failure to teach the new morality will mean children are not prepared for modern life and will grow up intolerant (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/private-primaries-allowed-to-drop-lessons-on-being-gay-bpgvst0mt).
Intolerant … really?
The practical effect of this pernicious policy is to silence faith groups, saying they are not allowed to voice their beliefs in public. Neither may parents teach those beliefs to their children, because that conflicts with the new Weltanschauung and is labelled religious indoctrination.
Let us be absolutely clear. This malign reframing of education is a species of ideological totalitarianism, determinedly suppressing any and all views that cast doubt on the ‘new’ morality.
We would remind law-makers, law-enforcers, and Government alike that, under the Equality Act 2010, religion is listed alongside such things as age, disability, gender reassignment, race and sex, as a protected characteristic. Discrimination against all these groups is unlawful, and whatever they try and assert, LGBTQ groups do not have priority or hierarchical status (https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/equality-act/protected-characteristics). At the same time, the twin freedoms of belief and of speech are enshrined in Articles 9 and 10 the European Convention of Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory (https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf). Article 2 of this same Convention further states, ‘In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.’
At every level the current imposition of doctrinaire and partisan views to entrench LGBT ideology on young minds is wrong – worse than that, it is totalitarian bigotry of the worst kind.
It is morally and legally unacceptable that from the age of four our children are being indoctrinated into beliefs that run counter to our faith. It is unacceptable that the right of parents to have their children educated in line with their religious or philosophical beliefs is being denied. We therefore call on Government to drop immediately their plans to make such teaching mandatory in both the State and private sectors, and to divert already hard pressed resources into providing and building an educational system that will best serve our children and of which we can all be proud.
Sign the petition to the Secretary of State for Education, the Rt Hon Damian Hinds MP here: https://www.citizengo.org/
