This Utah teacher gives all Christians a bad name
We don’t know the name of the teacher who was fired for giving her fifth-grade students a Christian lecture that “homosexuality is wrong.”
She’d asked her students what they’re grateful for this Thanksgiving, and one of them, an 11-year old boy identified only as D.M., replied that he was grateful for his two Dads. The teacher proceeded to harangue the class for ten minutes on the evils of homosexuality; she actually told D.M., “That’s nothing to be thankful for.”
We might never have known about this horrible incident were it not for three girls in the class. The girls “asked [the teacher] to stop multiple times,” but when the teacher continued her homophobic diatribe, “they walked out of the room to get the principal.”
The teacher was immediately escorted from the school and fired.
Thank goodness for the decency of the principal, and for those three little girls. Their parents must be very proud of them.
It won’t surprise me if the unidentified teacher finds some Christian law firm to sue the school district. There are all sorts of private organizations representing Christian lawyers, who defend their clients against legitimate charges of bigotry, discrimination, slander and civil rights violations, such as those bakers in Colorado who refused to serve a cake to a gay couple who were getting married (a decision upheld by the Christian-dominated U.S. Supreme Court). The fired teacher probably didn’t intend to get herself in trouble, but once she found herself there, she may be thinking she can make some serious money from her experience and at the same time defend her religious beliefs. And, given the makeup of our increasingly conservative-Christian courts, she may be right.
Because, you see, it doesn’t matter that that teacher is a hopelessly bigoted, vile woman. It’s one thing to hold a private belief about homosexuality, but it’s quite another to haul that prejudice into a public school classroom and then unleash it on a group of eleven-year olds. What trauma the child of the two Dads must have experienced! “It’s absolutely ridiculous and horrible what she did,” one of the Dads told a newspaper reporter who interviewed him. He added, “This situation really hurt him. This person really hurt us.”
The rightwing, religious faction of the Republican Party is repugnant for many, many reasons (including continuing to support an amoral, greedy adulterer and liar who is the opposite of Christian decency), but surely one of their most egregious sins is their ongoing campaign against same sex love and marriage. Despite the fact that the United States Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, these homophobes continue to mobilize, hoping that a future Court (one dominated by Christian radical conservatives like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) will overturn Obergefell v. Hodges.
That seems unlikely, given the Court’s traditional respect for precedence, or stare decisis.
But the thing to realize is that we’re now dealing with a group of revolutionaries—radically Christianized rightwing conservatives—who wish to overturn many of the fundamental tenets of American society, and the Court’s historic embrace of precedence may not matter anymore to the Christian extremists on the Court. They may feel that they have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do away with same sex marriage and if they don’t act soon, they’ll be stuck with it forever. We can’t know how this will turn out, and there doesn’t seem to be a case out there in the lower courts that will float up to SCOTUS and give the Christians the opportunity to strike a blow (no pun intended) against homosexuality. The point is that the Christian haters, like that Utah schoolteacher, aren’t going away. They’re thoroughly radicalized; they’re attempting to radicalize others (including children), and even death won’t stop them, because new haters are being manufactured every day, on the assembly line of the Christian Gay-Hating Factory.
Still, remember those three little girls, who saw injustice and decided to oppose it. And remember the school that fired the damned teacher, and vowed that she would never, ever be allowed to teach there again. If only everybody in America were that noble.
I was also heartened to read that friends and neighbors of the fathers were very supportive of them and their child. And this is in Utah, which is not exactly a bastion of tolerance. I also believe, or at least hope, that the fired teacher won’t find a lawyer to take up her cause. It’s really not a very sympathetic case, even for a nutcase “Christian” lawyer.
I think what blows my mind the most is that the teacher felt free to say what she did, in a public school classroom. This just shows how much trumpism has taken over the culture. Normally, that teacher would have kept her mouth shut. But trump has given her permission to say hateful, outrageous things.
You and your ilk’s centuries-old Jewish hatred of Christians is quite obvious. Substitute Jewish for Christian in your rag article and the SPLC would add you to its fraudulent hate list.
Feeling guilty, fleming?
Naw but I know a bigot in disguise as the smartest guy in the room syndrome.