Don’t let the LGBT lobby decide our children’s sex education
by Belinda Brown, The Conservative Woman:
FROM next September, Relationships Education in primary schools and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in secondary schools will be compulsory. Parents who wish to retain their own values should read this helpful briefing from the Values Foundation.
Guidance to schools published by the Department for Education says the lessons must not undermine but respect the manner in which parents seek to bring up their children in accordance with their religious and philosophical convictions. But the emphasis which the DfE places on the teaching of LGBT relationships may, according to the Values Foundation, go beyond the letter of the law. There is, for example, no requirement to teach sex education in primary school. Ultimately schools will have the final say. While the Education Minister Nick Gibb has been clear that schools will be consulting parents, this appears to be more about ‘bringing the parents along’.
Local authorities have already been given guidance about how to quash parents’ protests about the appropriateness or desirability of their schools’ RSE curriculum. This includes liaising with the police, taking out injunctions or fining parents, no less. The guidance emphasises not getting the media involved, but the cat is already out of the bag. Yesterday the BBC reported on the ‘LGBT teaching row’ and the advice that the government has issued.
There is no recognition that parents may know what is best for their children. Rather, LGBT advocates are piling on the pressure to keep parents out of RSE, and some are interpreting parents’ right to have a say over their children’s education as hostility towards LGBT. Peter Tatchell likewise has been campaigning for parents to have no say. His Foundation’s letter to the Education Secretary said that ‘political, religious and cultural sensitivities’ should not be allowed to thwart mandatory age-appropriate RSE in every school, including in faith and independent schools, from the first year of primary education onwards. The celebrity Stephen Fry has added his endorsement to this.
The Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle argues that you would no more have parents teaching RSE than you’d have them teaching science.
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