Link Here [dailymail.co.uk]

Pervez Latif, a 41-year-old accountant whose children Saleh, 10, and Abdurrahin, nine, attend the school, said his wife Shaheen, 38, was worried they could be taken to court.

By the sound of their names, it can be assumed that they're Muslim.

What happened to freedom of religion?

Shouldnt freedom of expression be ok (that includes freedom to have an opinion against homosexuals) as long as there's no calls of open violence towards any group of people?

Why does the state need to step in?

kyupol
By the sound of their names, it can be assumed that they're Muslim.

Why do you feel that this fact is important enough to give it a whole paragraph to itself?






Anyway, this is a touchy issue, but I agree with the parents who said that this is simply too heavy of a subject matter to be teaching to Elementary School students all willy-nilly. I'm sure there's still a lot of prejudice and ignorance involved, but the truth is that most children aren't ready to even have healthy discussions of heterosexual relationships at that age, let alone others. I think it's a step in the right direction, though, but in some ways is just more of the problem by deliberately segregating information about homosexuality to its own "month". When it's truly seen as an equal, it'll be taught in the same breath as world history.

while I'm all for educating kids about homosexuality,etc and teaching them that prejudice is wrong...

I have to admit that maybe elementary school is just too soon for that? I mean, at that age most of them haven't even learned about the "birds and the bees"? most of them likely have learned how they were born in the most simplified, basic way their parents could had told them without getting too graphic about it.

I think Middle school would had been better for any discussion on the subject of gay discrimination. As seeing at that point most of the kids already have a better idea of what their parents really meant about how they were born, etc. and as an result they already know a little bit about what sex is, even if they haven't still gotten all the facts about sex yet.

As for elementary school lessons, I think there's better ways they could had gone about it. like a simple discussion about how there's many different kinds of family types.

they could had said something along this line:

"Well today we're going to learn about different family types out there. A lot of kids out there have both a mom and a dad. But sometimes kids only has one parent. Sometimes The mom and Dad split up and get remarried to others... so the kids ends up having two sets of families. There's even kids who's only had two mommies or Two daddies under the same roof their whole lives!"

Then a small discussion about how living in those different family types doesn't always mean that one grows up to create the same exact family type as an adult.

IE: mom and dad living together like that doesn't mean that the boy grow up to live under the same roof with some woman later on. One might end up living with some other male as an family unit instead. The reverse is true too.
So if two guys are living together and raising an kid, the kid doesn't always become anything like them. So different family types isn't always bad, and therefore no excuse to ridicule kids over their parents' living arrangements.

If they focus on the keyword "Family" rather than "relationship" then there would be no problems there then... since that's pretty ambiguous enough but not too confusing for kids. This way they don't actually think about sexual relationships like that... because the lesson was really about family units than anything else.

the rest about homosexual history month should really be taught more in Middle and high schools instead.

Yeah, I see no reason for them to be teaching that stuff to Elementary school kids.

When we learn about sex or drugs in school they always have our parents sign things saying it's alright beforehand. This school definitely should have done something like that for a touchy issue like homosexuality.

I still don't even see the point of homosexual history month. For that matter I don't get black history month, womens rights month, or any of the other months they're constantly waving in the face of kids. I hardly even understand why they bother with sex ed or parenting classes. Everything I ever learned about parenting was passed to me by adults of all sexes and preferences. As far as I know, most of my fellow students and myself learned more about sex on the internet than we ever did in a classroom.

Just seems stupid to me considering everyone I've ever known says they didn't learn a thing from all those months. Nobody ever learns that prejudice is wrong when you tell them it. Kids learn that stuff by the way you act and respond to it.

Hippie Van
Yeah, I see no reason for them to be teaching that stuff to Elementary school kids.

Agreed.

OMgaaaaaaaaaaawd !! i am so sick of this kind of crap , not the cause of the contraversy , but the contraversy itself , Who cares wut happens in the schoools
in my opinion they should expel any kid that even so much as mentions the word religion and they should also force everyone to get tatoos on their ass cheeks of prominent gay celebrities

conclusion
religion is stoopid
school is stoopid

lothar
OMgaaaaaaaaaaawd !! i am so sick of this kind of crap , not the cause of the contraversy , but the contraversy itself , Who cares wut happens in the schoools
in my opinion they should expel any kid that even so much as mentions the word religion and they should also force everyone to get tatoos on their ass cheeks of prominent gay celebrities

conclusion
religion is stoopid
school is stoopid

The institutions themselves aren't stupid. People are stupid, gullible, ignorant and too willing to believe in crazy things without any evidence.

You gotta read The End of Faith by Sam Harris. ;)

along the same lines as iba, i never learned anything about sex in school. in indiana, they do it in sixth grade, in arkansas, they do it in 8th or 9th grade, i started school in indiana at seventh grade.

i learned most of it between:
akward talks with parents
bullsh*tting with my friends
internet

Someone
Parents have a legal right to withdraw their children from religious education and sex education lessons – apart from science lessons which cover biological reproduction as part of the national curriculum

so why are they getting in trouble for the homosexual section?

I don't remember when I learned what sex was. I don't remember ever not knowing. The same goes for homosexuality, black history and all the other stuff. And I learned most of it from HBO and Showtime, courtesy of a brother 11 years older than myself.

However, in regards to the actual questions posed by Kyupol, it had nothing to do with their religion, it had to do with their kids already missing X amount of days of class, and their parents taking them out of class for reasons other than a religious holiday, sickness, bereavement, etc. Taking your children out of school as protest is fine. But it's not an excusable absence as per school policy, which I'm sure has existed long before gay history month, or sex ed classes.

We can all agree that schools teach us things that end up ultimately useless. I can't remember the last time I really had anything to do with calculus or trigonometry that really mattered. What good does knowing every major battle of the American revolution bring? How has my life been bettered by disecting a frog or putting gold plating on coins? General education is just that, general education. It's the state's job to educate its masses, even on matters that don't matter or things that some people find offensive. You can't have an I.E.P. for everybody.