A clash of cultures is erupting in Great Britain as Muslim parents battle against liberal educators over whether a government-sanctioned curriculum on sexuality should be taught in school. They say the lessons contradict their faith and their ability as parents to have a choice over what their children learn.
Hundreds of parents kept their children home from Parkfield school, outside Birmingham, in protest of a piloted No Outsiders program that is aimed at promoting tolerance and diversity along the lines of race, gender, religion, and sexuality in the spirit of the Equality Act of 2010.
These tensions came to a flash point when parents gathered outside the school and protested the curriculum. A video clip of the protest posted on Twitter days ago amassed almost 2 million views before the user made his account private.
The video shows a man with a bullhorn standing on the back of a truck with large signs that read “Our Children, Our Choice” and “Stop! ‘No Outsiders’” as reference to the equality-based program. The man with the bullhorn then sets his focus on the school’s assistant headmaster Andrew Moffat who championed the progressive lesson. He accuses Moffat of interpreting religious scriptures and usurping parental rights.
Moffat is the author of Challenging Homophobia in Primary Schools, and has become the central figure in the controversy. He previously resigned from another primary school after another disagreement with both Muslim and Christian parents over similar lessons being introduced.
Criticism of the No Outsiders program from religious communities has been dismissed as bigoted and intolerant. With a closer look, however, the ideological foundation of this program is unveiled.
A research document relating to the program can be found on the Economic and Social Research Council’s website, dating back over a decade. The report listed on the site is titled “No Outsiders: Researching approaches to sexualities equality in primary schools” and cited approaches such as “interrogating heteronormativity in primary schools” and “using children’s literature to challenge homophobia in primary schools.”
Upon further digging, another paper titled “No Outsiders’: moving beyond a discourse of tolerance to challenge heteronormativity in primary schools” published by the British Educational Research Journal gives clear direction as to the goal of the program implemented by Parkfield officials. This clearly depicts an agenda of subverting opposing views on sexuality and not innocently promote equality as stated by Moffat and his allies. The publication claims that “heteronormativity is discursively maintained” by many assumptions, such as “children are asexual and innocent.”
Many parents reported that their children, as young as four years old, would come home claiming to want to wear their siblings’ clothes, others quoted their children as saying they have a second mother or father. This led parents to become deeply troubled over what their children were learning and forced them to pull some 600 students out of the school in order to be taken seriously.
Labour MP Shabana Mahmood gave a speech in Westminster Hall addressing the concerns expressed by her constituents over the mandatory relationships education which the No Outsiders program stems from. Mahmood clarified that the concern of parents is about the age of the children being exposed to this material at primary school. She referenced section 34 of the Children and Social Care Act of 2017, which calls for the protection of faith communities and “children who are being educated outside of the faith school system” by taking religious background and age appropriateness into account.
Mahmood is currently under fire from members of her own party for her comments defending the concerns of the parents and has written a blog post in response to her critics.
Muslims in the United Kingdom and the United States have enjoyed being exempt from the Left’s encroachment against religious freedoms and criticisms of our faith. But incidents like these show that things might be changing sooner than expected.
In the last few years, Democrats in Congress and their allies in the media have taken what can only be characterized as a vengeful and hostile position against Christians. Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, interrogated attorney Brian Buescher during a hearing for his nomination to the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska and implied that his Catholic faith was disqualifying. Hirono and Harris follow in the footsteps of their colleague Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who suggested that Judge Amy Coney Barrett was too Catholic to serve on the circuit court of appeals.
At the beginning of the year, second lady Karen Pence’s decision to return to teaching was mired in controversy when the media characterized the Immanuel Christian School as exclusionary and bigoted for requesting that its students and instructors adhere to the Bible’s teachings.
Some used the widely mischaracterized incident involving the Covington Catholic high school students to launch an attack on Catholicism writ large and called the school a “hate factory.” Nicholas Sandmann, the student at the center of this media debacle, has hired a team of attorneys who have brought a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post.
We see activists also harassing citizens when we look at the subsequent lawsuits filed by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission against Jack Phillips, the owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop. Phillips beat the Commission at the Supreme Court and has now been sued again by them for another denied request. Before the case could advance, the commission decided to drop the case.
Seeing the growing disdain that the left has had for Christians in the U.S., it shouldn’t be surprising for American Muslims to see what our British counter-parts are being subjected to.
Muslims are a part of the intersectional coalition for Democrats to attack conservatives and challenge Republicans in office. Once they gain power or feel comfortable enough, they’ll prioritize one protected group over another, and we’ll find out that we Muslims don’t make it high on that list. At that point, it’ll be too late to protect our values.
Muslims will need to team up with those on the Right for families to have more input into the education of their children and to be involved in the dialogue of school choice and religious freedom. We’re fortunate enough in the U.S. to have more free speech protections than other developed nations. But if we choose to wait idly by, there’s no guarantee those protections will last long without our involvement.
Abdi Mohamed is a conservative activist and cultural commentator in Saint Paul, Minn. He works to engage Muslim and immigrant communities to support liberty and conservative-minded policies on the local and national level.
