UK School Teaches 6-Y-O Kids to Write Gay 'Love Letter' for Same-Sex Marriage Assignment
Last month, BBC's Radio Manchester posted a short video about a lesson that was taught to children at Bewsey Lodge Primary School in Warrington, England.
The video shows the teacher, Sarah Hopson, instructing her class of youngsters to pretend to be a fictional fairytale character named "Prince Henry" and write a love letter to the prince's servant "Thomas," telling Thomas why it would be a "brilliant idea" for them to get married.
According to BBC, the school teaches children from an early age about LGBT relationships. The video shows students being taught about same-sex marriage through the writing of a love letter.
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"They are going to go out into that world and find this diversity around them and they'll find that at a young age as well," Hopson told BBC. "And the more they can be accepting at this age, you are not going to face it further on because the children will be accepting now and will be accepting this diversity around them."
The primary school, which has about 345 students, prides itself on being LGBT inclusive.
According to BBC, the school has as gender-neutral uniform policy in which students can choose which uniform they want to wear so as not to offend students who might struggle with gender dysphoria and identify as a member of the opposite sex.
Additionally, the school has all age groups take part in lessons about LGBT inclusivity.
Over the summer, Bewsey Lodge became the first school in its region to win the pro-LGBT "Educate and Celebrate" Best Practice Gold Award, which is awarded to schools that tackle "homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying."
The school runs a "Personal, Social and Health Education" Program, which is taught from nursery age to grade 6. Under the program, students are taught about "health and well-being," "relationships" and "living in the wider world."
Under the program, students are given the "opportunity to learn about the difference between sex, gender identity and sexual orientation and the terms associated with sex, gender identity and sexual orientation."
According to a PSHE guide produced by the school in 2014, students must also be given the opportunity to "challenge their own core values and how their values influence their choices."
After receiving backlash on Facebook from BBC viewers who felt that teaching an LGBT curriculum to young children takes their innocence away, headteacher Emma Wright responded.
"It is interesting to read how many people have sexualized the content of our curriculum," Wright wrote in a Facebook comment on the BBC video. "What we are trying to achieve is a culture of acceptance and respect — put simply, live and let live. We teach about love and that love comes in all shapes and sizes. What we are trying to achieve is that children leave us, armed with enough information to make their own informed choices, children who can look at another person's life/situation and say, 'This is different to my life or the way I feel or think but that's OK.'"
"We also teach about racism, extremism and religion and the same philosophy filters through it all," Wright added. "I would challenge anyone who doubts the power of what we are trying to do around lgbt+ to come and talk to some of our little people."
In 2017, the U.K. National Union of Teachers called for children to be taught about homosexuality and transgenderism as early as nursery school.
"Those generations of young LGBT people who have been failed by the system are still not told explicitly in the law that their lives are important too," NUT executive member Annette Pryce said at the time. "The NUT ... needs to ensure that SRE is inclusive to LGBT young people now and forever."
In the U.S., some schools have received backlash for their involvement with LGBT advocacy.
A Pennsylvania school district received pushback from parents and activists after students at Emmaus High School were shown four videos during LGBT "Unity Week" in April.
The videos were included in activities organized for "Unity Week" and the nationwide "Day of Silence" that were sponsored by the national LGBT lobbying group GLSEN. The four videos that were shown at the high school were sponsored by the school's Gay Straight Alliance club.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, parents have spoken out against changes made to the sexual education curriculum that not only removed the word "biological sex" from the curriculum but also replaced it with the word "sex assigned at birth." Parents also complained that the new curriculum doesn't inform students of the dangers and harms of sex transition surgeries and therapies. Parents and activists also accused the curriculum of encouraging dangerous sexual practices by teaching students about the AIDS prevention drug Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis.
Similarly, much uproar was raised in a California school system after it began exposing elementary students to books that taught about transgenderism. After the system ruled last year not to allow parents to opt their kids out of the lessons, dozens of parents responded by pulling their children out of the school system.
