A teacher’s been fired for refusing to teach about LGBTQI+.
It really doesn’t matter what her name is, where she lives or teaches, what confession her school was, or that she got fired. Wait: it doesn’t matter that she got fired?
Well, it doesn’t really, because people don’t get fired for refusing to teach LGBTQI+ stuff. They get fired for the manner in which they refuse to teach LGBTQI+ stuff. So, what’s probably really interesting here is not the fact that Glawdys Leger, 43, who taught modern foreign languages at Bishop Justus Church of England School in Bromley, south London, told students that being LGBTQ+ is a sin (which it pretty much is, if you’re all of them at the same time) but rather how she managed to mismanage her rejection of lesbianism. All the gory details are here.
“Out on a limb” time: this 43-year-old teacher of 12 years’ experience lashed out at “LGBTQ+”? Or was she the lady that did protest too much, at that lingering “L”? Dan White, who murdered Harvey Milk, was strongly suspected of being closet gay, and of murdering the man who represented comfort with living the homosexual life, whilst he represented the man bound his life long to suppress his urges within a marriage brimming with children under the aegis of the Catholic Church of Rome. It’s what they say. He served five years of a seven-year sentence for murdering two men (he slugged the mayor as well as Milk), returned home and was so unhappy with himself he committed suicide, having pleaded how justified he was in ridding the world of the greatest gay activist ever? I have no window to look into another man’s, or indeed another woman’s, conscience…
So, Ms Leger:
i) Your duty as a teacher is to teach. You teach, we pay, you live, we graduate. That’s the deal. You don’t get to choose what you teach. But you do get to choose how you teach it. But not if it’s loaded with dogma.
ii) Who are you to say that LGBTQI+ is a sin? Sin is a matter between the individual and God. So, you’re a priest now? Just for info, no lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, intersexual or plus-sexual commits a sin if what he, she or they does sits comfortably with his, her or their conscience. And that, Madam, is a matter for them and Him. Not you.
iii) Yes, LGBTQI+ is a sin. So was the Holocaust. Do you refuse to teach German because of the Holocaust? Reasons for doing or not doing anything are like etymology: they can come from anywhere you want, but actually only ever come from one place.
iv) I’ll tell you what’s a sin: cream cakes are a sin. Naughty, but nice. But that’s not how we teach people about cream cakes. We tell them they’re fattening: ten seconds on the lips, ten years on the hips. We tell them about the social niceties of not getting icing sugar and chocolate glaze all over your face: no glaze on your gaze. But we don’t lead campaigns against pastries, otherwise we’d have the real dairy cream queens down our throats, and we wouldn’t want to choke on that, now, would we, Ms Leger?
v) Who are you making this stand for? Jesus? Do you think Jesus wants YOU for a sunbeam? Do you think the man who befriended tax collectors and prostitutes wants a pious pedagogue for a pilgrim? I dunno, ask him. He’s your Jesus, not my Jesus. But my Jesus doesn’t. There, I went out on another limb, but I think that branch will hold my weight.
vi) Take first the container-load of lumber out of thine own eye before thou removest the speckles of sawdust out of ours. And let him, her or them who is without sin cast the first stone. Would that be you, Ms Leger, by any chance who chucked that tiny pebble there? Calling LGBTQI+ a sin is nothing but the tip of a very frigid iceberg of frustration. I’M frustrated, but I don’t go around calling YOU a sin.
Time for the Pet Shop Boys.
Obvious ending, and yet never a bad time for Pet Shop Boys, ha.
I'm not sure how well your case fits Ms Leger's situation though, or the philosophical conundrum of teaching about LGBT stuff against your will. First, the school's name and your comment about the confession of her school lead me to believe that it was a religious school. If so, first I'm surprised they would put this into the curriculum, but second, in those environments, the school typically has a mission to promote its faith, and the faculty are indeed charged with that. So it seems to me that in this scenario, she was within her right to throw the ideology under the bus, even define the behavior as sin. You might need to refresh me, I know Brits and Americans use "private/public" differently, so let's say, "in a government-paid school open to anyone to attend," it should come from a secular angle. I still have a problem with this inclusion in the curriculum, but it at least makes more sense, they have more of a case. In the "religious background school that parents pay directly to enroll their children in," I would think they have more control and every right to get into this spat.
But the third, and to me more important angle, is the qualitative difference between LGBT activism as a topic vs. your holocaust example. The holocaust was a single event in the past that can be looked at from afar, and its participants viewed as "other;" LGBT material is almost impossible to separate from an *invitation* to participate. It involves direct questioning of the self and identity and opens up kids' minds to questions they might never have had. Yeah, the purpose on the label is to free up and defend the 1-2 kids who thought they might be weird or knew it and hid it, but it also invites like 10-12 other kids to social contagion through subliminal suggestion, and *that's* the part I take the biggest issue with.
When you teach kids about the holocaust, it is never glorified, and none of the kids wonder if they're secretly a Nazi, because right off the bat, they aren't German (except in Deutschland, obv), the Nazi party doesn't exist anymore, and it isn't the 1930s. It's so distant, no child ever accidentally falls into white supremacy from a holocaust lesson, they can't relate. Not to say they couldn't become white supremacist through some other means, knowledge, experience etc. but it probably wouldn't look appealing through this curriculum. The maternal longhouse approach of LGBT curriculum is what makes it so dangerous.