A school health teacher has been suspended for teaching that gay and transgender people exist.
The teacher at Cambridge high school in Cambridge, New York was suspended this week after complaints from parents, according to the Post-Star.
The row erupted over handouts on sexuality and gender that were given out to students aged 12 to 16 during health class in the New York school.
The handouts were provided by the Pride Centre of the Capital Region , a New York based LGBT community centre, whose mission according to their website is to “promote the well-being of all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer-identified people and those affected by discrimination based on gender identity and expression.”
They included a glossary educating students on LGBT-related terms such as “Ally”, “Coming Out”, “Gay”, “Gender Identity” and “Gender Expression”.
But in a Facebook Live video that received hundreds of thousands of views, a dad insisted content in the lesson referring to gay and transgender people was incompatible with his family’s “Christian values”.
The dad says: “We’ve got our Christian values and live by our own expectations. When it comes to teaching our kids certain things, that should be up to us, not health class.
He adds: “I understand, there’s gays, there’s straights, but I don’t need it being brought into a classroom where we pay tax dollars for you to teach stuff to my kids years before they should even know about this stuff.”
He then reads through the handout, mocking its contents.
Reading from the list of terms relating to gay people, he fumes: “This is state funded porn. I don’t care. I’m trying not to get too graphic, but this makes me so upset. This is stuff that our kids don’t need to be learning in school.
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