"The philosophers have merely interpreted the world. The point is to whinge about it"

Brett at Harry's Place gets cross with the Muslim parents who objected to their five year olds being taught about Adam and Steve. I'll note in passing his :

"I'm not convinced that parents ought to have too big a say over what children are taught anyway. Children have rights and the State has a responsibility towards them. The same logic that says a parent doesn't have the right to pull a son from school and force him to work up a chimney, or to refuse to let a daughter learn to read and write, demands that children are taught based on what prepares them for life, not what individual nut case parents or sects want."

That's right, Brett. Not wanting your little one to be taught about homosexuality is EXACTLY like sending them up a chimney to work or not teaching them to read. His disdain for parents tells me Brett doesn't have kids. But that's by the by.

What Brett's noted isn't exactly a defeat for his ideology - this stuff has only recently been shimmied into schools under the guise of 'preventing homphobic bullying', now a statutory requirement at all State schools. It's an attack that's been repulsed - thus far and no further.

"Mo pasaran !".

The campaign will continue elsewhere :

Theatreland will have to give up its bedroom secrets in the quest for funding, under new Arts Council requirements. Organisations applying for grants are being asked to state how many board members are bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, lesbian or whose inclinations are “not known”.

Audrey Roy, the director of grants, said that the council needed to understand who its audience was and to whom its funding was going. “We see diversity as broader than race, ethnicity, faith and disability,” she said. Question 22 of the Grants for the Arts forms, relating to sexual orientation, was not compulsory, she added, although the form states that it must be answered.

I think it likely that the response of the Bristol parents has drawn a line in the sand that educators will be wary of crossing. If Christian parents object, the schools can always call the police and get them arrested. But they'll be paralysed by that old guilt/fear cocktail if the parents are Muslim. We are on the way to a two-tier system of sex education, with all sorts of deviant delights for the natives and 'don't even think, let alone talk about it' for the sons and daughters of the Prophet. It served the UK pretty well for a thousand Pill-free years - and by the STI figures, it seems to work pretty well for Muslims.

It's the commenters at HP that get me. The majority are against what's happened. And there's not a single concrete suggestion ('Fight for secular values' is meaningless posturing without concrete expression) as to what to do about it in all the 118 comments. It's just too uncomfortable to think about. They prefer to talk about their schooldays and what would happen in an ideal world. They'll still be examining their collective navels when HP is closed down as an organ of the Zionist Entity.


UPDATE - BBC is too scared of Islam, says Ben Elton. For once it must be said they reflect the nationsl psyche. Oh, and surprise surprise, Ben Elton is one of those unbelievers who sends their kids to church school.


UPDATE2 - Fulham Reactionary points out that "last May, Sunderland University's Dr Elizabeth Atkinson, who is responsible for the production of the books, was scathingly dismissive of Christian concerns, saying that "we knew when we started this that the Christian groups wouldn't like it because they don't like homosexuals. It wasn't surprising.""