Florida teachers quitting in protest after bill would make open gay grooming virtually impossible
By Isa Cox, The Western JournalPublished April 4, 2022 at 11:10am
LGBT teachers in Florida are lamenting the passage of the Parental Rights in Education Act -- disingenuously described by its opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” law -- banning sexuality education for early elementary schoolers.
In case you’ve been living under a rock over the last few weeks (in which case I envy you), the left is now fully committed to the policy platform that public school teachers must be allowed to teach your first-graders about sex.
Like, they’re really going with this right now.
And, of course, as politicians representing millions of parents who, you know, don’t think that teachers should be teaching someone else’s young children about sex seek to restrict the practice in the classroom, the left is hysterically characterizing this legislation as an attack on the personhood of LGBT people everywhere.
Because of course they are.
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The Parental Rights in Education Act, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last week, bans instruction on “sexual orientation or gender identity” for children in kindergarten through third grade or to older students “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Robert Thollander, a sixth-grade teacher in Orlando, said he plans to make the career change to real estate after a group of parents took issue with his discussing his upcoming gay nuptials. He told NBC News that he thought the parents had been empowered by the bill.
“A lot of trust is given to teachers, and it made it seem like I wasn’t trusted because there’s something wrong with me for being gay,” Thollander said. “It makes it seem like being gay is something vile or disturbing or disgusting when it’s described as making children uncomfortable knowing that I’m married to a man. It hurt."
Interestingly, he seems to fail to accept the no doubt uncomfortable yet nevertheless valid point that millions of Americans do, in fact, have every right to believe that homosexuality is immoral, no matter who it upsets. Those people are taxpayers, and many of them want the public school system to teach young kids how to, you know, read and write, rather than discussions about gender and sexuality.
Nicolette Solomon, 28, told NBC News she is quitting her position as a fourth-grade teacher at a Miami-Dade elementary school over the legislation, which she says would “erase” her “as an LGBTQ teacher.”
“Nobody would be able to know, which then puts me in the closet, and I’m there seven hours a day, if not more, five days a week. I wouldn’t be able to be who I am,” she lamented.
“And I don’t think I can bear to see the students struggle and want to ask me about these things and then have to deny them that knowledge,” Solomon said. “That’s not who I am as a teacher.”
Opponents of the law, like Solomon, cite concerns that limiting how teachers can address LGBT issues will prevent confused LGBT students from confiding in them, potentially putting these kids at an even higher risk of suicide and bullying.
Yet the general population of American youth is struggling with crippling mental health issues, and it is a very dangerous assumption to make that a public servant qualified to teach children phonics or long division will serve as the best confidant and counselor for a child — the assumption being, of course, that all parents who might have something different to say about the child’s sexual desires or gender confusion than his or her LGBT teacher are abusive, and children must be protected from them.
It’s easy for those sympathetic to these teachers to feel as though they are being personally attacked and marginalized, but if you scratch below the surface, this is really just a disturbingly self-centered response to a piece of legislation that is aimed at preventing young children from being taught about sexuality by public school teachers.
So, if this law is a dealbreaker for certain teachers -- if they won’t be able to infuse their sexual morals into the way they teach your children the three R’s, they're quitting -- well, then, the law is doing its job, isn’t it?
Florida lawmakers have made it clear that teachers won’t be restricted from “being who they are” at schools, they are merely banned from teaching children their values-based views on sexuality, a controversial, personal and, most importantly, highly adult topic that parents have every right to decide how they want to be taught to their children and would prefer it not happen within the confines of the public school system.
This is why, to conservatives, the issue boils down to parental rights, because as much as these teachers try to convince us this will “erase” who they are or what have you, the truth is that this law is protecting parents and families who simply want the right to their own personal convictions about sexual morals.
Let that sink in.
These are the people who have scoffed at the notion that they’re grooming our kids, and they’re falling over themselves to defend teachers’ rights to teach your children a certain set of values about sexuality.
They are openly defending the rights of public school teachers to instruct your children that it is a moral positive to have alternative sexual desires; the “sexuality” education that the left is emphatically defending is based on the “sex positive” ideology that posits that all sexual urges are natural and normal.
This contradicts the deeply held moral convictions of a great many Americans of conscience, American parents who pay into the school system, and they have every right to characterize the open desire to teach children it is morally positive to have sexual desires when they are in early elementary school as “grooming.”
Ideologically, at the very least, that’s exactly what it is: grooming children into a philosophy that has quite literally slippery sloped its way right down to seeking to destigmatize pedophilia; arguments to this effect have been made from the “sex positive” perspective, from activists who have opposed banning child pornography and child sex dolls.
Sound familiar?
The woman who is likely to become the next Supreme Court justice, Judge Ketanje Brown Jackson, has a history of letting child porn offenders off the hook as well as arguing for such treatment in a very similar vein.
Yeah.
This is the same woman who couldn’t define “woman,” by the way — how long before these ideologues are arguing that “child” is similarly difficult to define, particularly in the vein of a child’s sexual urges?
So, yeah.
For all the teachers’ sob stories about feeling erased as human beings in their classroom, if they stopped navel-gazing long enough to examine the merits of the argument and the rights of those who believe very, very differently than they do about the advisability of letting public school teachers instruct young children on radical notions about sexual morality and ethics, they’d probably realize what this bill is all about.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
https://www.wnd.com/2022/04/florida-teachers-resigning-protest-bill-make-open-grooming-virtually-impossible/
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