A primary school in Birmingham, England, has become a flashpoint of a cultural clash over gay rights. The school is 98 percent Muslim — and Muslim parents fought back against attempts by an activist teacher, who has the backing of the school authorities, to sexualize their children. Excerpts from a Telegraph story:

Nothing about this standoff is straightforward. The parents (98 per cent of whom are Muslim) say they’ve been called “backwards” and “homophobic”, and, undoubtedly, some of the opposition to the programme lies in the fact that conservative Islam condemns homosexuality. Yet, outside the school gates, every protesting parent I speak to tells me that they respect gay rights and understand that, in modern Britain, their children are going to grow up learning about different kinds of relationships.

Meanwhile, the school – which says its No Outsiders programme was recognised by Ofsted [the national UK education authority] as a key strength in its 2016 report – has been accused by the parents of flagrantly sexualising four-year-olds, while Mr Moffat is seen by them as pushing a singular agenda on the students.

Last Friday, this spectacular culture clash saw 600 families in a school of 740 keep their kids at home in protest, with many parents threatening to remove them entirely if the programme isn’t ditched.

It all began in December, when reception-age children started coming home saying a teacher had told them “it was ok to be gay, and ok to switch gender”.

“Since my daughter has been going there, she’s been saying things like: ‘I can wear my brother’s clothes and he can wear mine. I can change my name to a boy’s name’,” says Mariam Ahmed, whose four-year-old daughter Annayah started in reception las September. “I talked to other mums and many had similar stories to tell.”

More:

For the parents’ part, they feel the right to teach their children about these issues in their own way is being trumped. “We’re not stupid, we’re all very aware of what our society is about and how it’s changing,” says Mariam. “I’m not saying don’t ever talk about it, but don’t be so focused on it.”

At the protest, one parent stands on a truck emblazoned with the message “Our children, our choice!” and tells the crowd that No Outsiders is “a very dangerous, mind-altering programme which is designed to attack our beliefs”.

Great cheers go up as he speaks: “This is an aggressive indoctrination. For five-year-olds who barely know how to wipe their bottoms, you want to teach them about relationships?”

It isn’t just the Muslim community who have come out to protest. Dr Lisa Nolland, a Christian campaigner and sex historian, has travelled from Bristol to offer her support, congratulating them for “showing us the way”. “This isn’t about religion, it isn’t even about parents, it’s about what’s best for kids,” she tells me. “This is literally eroticising child development. This is damaging children. The numbers of child-on-child sex abuse are awful. Turn the volume down.”

Read the whole thing.

The school has temporarily suspended the program. Here’s a story from The Guardian about the controversy. Excerpt:

Shah claimed her children were becoming “confused” about homosexuality and that the local community’s concerns were not being taken on board. She said: “We have nothing against Mr Moffat – we are as British as they come. We respect the British values … but the problem is, he is not respecting our ethos as a community.

“We don’t send our children to school to learn about LGBT. We send them to school to learn maths, science and English.”

Look at what happened to a Muslim politician who spoke up in support of the parents:

Mohammed Idrees, the Muslim councillor who spoke out in support of the protesting parents and said pupils were “too young” to be taught about homosexuality, has since apologised for his comments and has been formally reported to Birmingham City Council’s Standards Committee by Conservative councillor Gareth Moore, who is gay.

Just saying that kids are too young to be taught these lessons is enough to get you condemned by other politicians (a Tory at that!).

Good for those Muslim parents! They have guts. They have a hell of a lot more courage thn many US Christians do. What they are standing up to is not homosexuality, but the state’s sexual indoctrination of little children. Andrew Moffat, the gay teacher who came up with the program, and who has been teaching it to Muslim students in that school, knows perfectly well what he’s doing. The strategy liberals use in cases like this is that they have to make schools “safe” for kids, and to fight bullying. It’s nonsense. What they are doing is trying to sexualize little children, and to destroy the substance of what their religiously and socially conservative parents teach them, and in so doing undermine the authority of the parents.

Notice that the parents, even though they believe homosexuality is immoral, do not object to age-sensitive treatment of the issue in schools. What they object to is this gender ideology being jammed down the throats of their young ones. You should be aware that Moffat is highly regarded among British educational authorities. He’s in no way an outsider who is doing this on his own.

Here are excerpts from an interesting Twitter thread by a UK Muslim:

Exactly right. Exactly. Take a look at this short video Andrew Moffat posted promoting the program as a way of educating parents as well as kids. What’s crazy-making about it is the way these diversity disciples go on and on about how important it is to be yourself, and how wonderful “difference” is. This, of course, is an ideological sham. They won’t for one second tolerate dissent from their narrowly defined definition of difference. Their support for diversity runs the gamut from A to B.

The Parkfield controversy is another example of a hard truth that religiously and socially conservative Americans have to learn: Christians, Jews, and Muslims had better show solidarity on these controversies, and get out into the street to support each other when they arise. I agree with Ismail Royer:

This doesn’t mean I won’t oppose something bad a Christian does, or that I deem all Christian criticism of a Muslims to be unreasonable and unjustified.

Rather, I mean that Muslims & Christians need to find find common ground & constructive ways of handling our differences. 2/2

— Ismail Royer (@IsmailRoyer) March 11, 2019

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UPDATE: Reader Peter:

Apart from denying parents the right to determine what views on the moral aspect of sex their children will be taught, sex education is inherently pro-sex. Everyone who favors intensive sex education also favors sexual permissivism. Just ask yourself what the response would be to an offer from the NRA to go into the schools and subject the kids to an intensive course in gun safety! After all, guns are very dangerous! Liberal teachers and parents would observe, correctly, that the very act of getting kids to think about guns and how to use them safely has the effect of normalizing and encouraging gun use. So it is with sex.
It shouldn’t take more than one week of hourly lessons to teach kids the basic facts of where babies come from and where diseases come from.

Our tongue-tied response to leftist education is largely a product of being intimidated by the educators’ pretense to speak with the authority of science when laying down leftist prescriptions. How dare we challenge their “expertise” with our “common sense” or religious dogma? But the scientific status of psychology, sociology, gender studies, and other politicized disciplines is so shaky that they are inevitably driven to take the position that there is no such thing as the truth. So much for them.

Enormous good could come from teaching parents how to challenge the education profession and the claims of left-wing “experts” on “human sexuality” (or most other things.)