Liberal Queer Propaganda
Being religious is not a license to be wilfully ignorant and stupid, or to force others to be that way. While everyone is entitled to their beliefs, and should be allowed to practice the traditions of their culture, if you want to be a part of modern society, there are things about which you simply need to take a seat and shut the fuck up.
Some people are gay. Some people are trans. Some are tall, some short. The world is filled with all kinds of people. Denying that, or the existence of any particular group, is dangerous and wrong. Period.
There have been several recent stories of parents protesting LGBTQ+ education in English schools, some of which lessons are utterly banal.
Of course, England is far from being the only or worst example of anti-LGBTQ+ groups protesting educational programs, which are in fact in many cases doing little or no more than acknowledging the existence of humans who are something other than the hetero cis norm. Homophobic demonstations have been flaring in other parts of Europe, Poland being a shameful example. And of course there are swaths throughout Asia, Africa, South America where homosexuality is outlawed, where not only must people hide who they are and education is not provided, but misinformation campaigns are rampant. While sodomy, same-sex marriage, and the benign act of having a drink in a bar with people of your same sexual inclination are no longer illegal in the US, we can hardly pretend our nation is as a whole a bastion of enlightenment, freedom and equality.
Homophobic activism, whether it be targeted against a school for showing children a picture book in which two people or animals of the same sex are parents to a child, or a gay person who’d like to have a goddamn cup of coffee at a public cafe without some militant right-wing inflamed-sphincter blathering and bleating at them, often comes from, or uses as pretense the cover of, religious belief. This current case in England, but certainly not limited to it, is the product of homophobic activism from conservative Muslim and Christian groups. These two bickering cousins, whose animosity for one another is often cited as the cause of an ongoing “holy war,” which the vast majority of us recognize as pure idiocy, have found common ground on their shared hatred of queer folk. Fundamentalists Christians and Muslims have much more in common than that which divides them or which they’ll deign to admit. Is it ironic that these two cults -- excuse me, “religions” -- that claim a basis in love, peace and salvation find common cause in acts of intolerance and hatred.
Children in general are not nearly as stupid or impressionable as these homophobic activists believe their own children to be. Teaching kids about, or simply making them aware of the existence of, LGBTQ+ people will not make them gay, or any of the other things represented in that unwieldy string of initials. That’s not how education, or sexual and gender orientation, works. As a child, I was taught about amphibians, photosynthesis and math. I did not grow up to be a frog, a plant or an integer. Matter of fact, for all the two decades that I was forced to learn different forms and facets of math, all those efforts accomplished was making me an adult who wanted not a goddamn thing to do with math.
Except when it comes to counting all my paper. Aw yeah, baby.
Learning about scientists, explorers, presidents and samurai didn’t lead to my becoming any of those things.
Yes, I’m still bummed I didn’t grow up to be a samurai.
No, there has never been a child who “became” gay because they learned about it.
I do not recall having LGBTQ+ education in early childhood, perhaps because the initialization didn’t have as many letters when I was a kid. But it’s definitely possible, considering I went to a small, progressive, touchy-feely Quaker grade school, that I was given such lessons but forgot; thus proving that I was not warped or scarred by the experience.
What I do remember is that I grew up with queer uncles and aunts, neighbors, friends, teachers, and my sister. Homosexuality was always a normal reality of life for me, just as it is for everyone not living in and enforcing denialism. Despite the presence of so much gayness around me and all the efforts of the liberal gay agenda, I turned out to be just another conventional hetero cis man. That’s who I am and was who I was going to be from the beginning, no matter how much pro-homosexual propaganda was thrown at me. Because that’s how it fucking works. The same is true for all children. Teaching them about queer people won’t make them queer. Refusing to teach them won’t prevent them being queer. Education doesn’t determine who or what we are; it gives us the tools to understand. The only thing you’ll accomplish in denying LGBTQ+ education to children is ensuring their confusion, incapacity for dealing with their own sexuality or gender differences and those of others, possible anguish, and potentially that they turn out to be ignorant, bigoted assholes like yourselves.