I just learned today that teachers in Broward County Florida public schools have been instructed that they all have to start teaching homosexual marriage to students K-12 effective immediately . I have never known public schools to be responsible for teaching about any kind of marriage. Should this be done? What about religious rights? I think they may be opening themselves to major law suits with this. What say you?
This sort of thing is always a bit thorny, trying to balance the secular nature of an education system that has to treat people equally regardless of their faith (or lack of faith) with the inevitable demands of parents.
Fundamentally if we figure that education is the job of the schools and the parents a lot of the problem goes away. Schools can teach things that are largely objective, parents can teach their preferred moral values and faith. I don't have a problem with schools teaching children what the world's faiths believe in but for the school to promote one faith over another isn't really appropriate - that's the job of the parents. If people start demanding that schools present their faith as preferable to other faiths they lose any right to complain if, sometime down the line, the school starts teaching a different faith as preferable to their own. Morality is a subject where schools would be better off presenting facts and letting children explore the implications and consequences of different decisions, allowing parents to present their preferred moral values to their own children. Again, if we expect Teacher A to present "Christianity" as the absolute truth (ignoring the fact that there are so many variations that could call themselves "Christianity") how can we claim any right to complain when Teacher B presents Islam as being the absolute truth and Teacher C from presenting Hinduism as absolute truth and so on?
The simple reality is that there are a fair few people in society who are gay, so recognising the fact within the education system doesn't seem inappropriate at all. It's hard to know what "teaching homosexual marriage" actually means. Is it letting children know that sometimes two men get married, is it presenting two men getting married as a morally acceptable situation, is it presenting two men getting married as preferable to a man and a woman getting married, or something else?
What should a Christian teacher do? Teach the facts, and be willing to talk about their opinion and their beliefs as and when it becomes relevant. Personally I'd really like to see religious education in schools include talks given by members of major faiths (and maybe less followed faiths, if adherents are available locally) about what they believe and why. It would give the children the chance to hear things first hand, let them consider the merits or otherwise of different faiths, and also overcome some of the problems associated with the media presenting other faiths as being Not Like Us. Muslims are the most obvious target of that sort of thing at present, for example nobody wants to demonize all men despite 99% or more of violent rapists being men, yet people demonize Muslims because a small number of them are terrorists - but when people don't see any Real Muslim People around them and the only exposure they have is the news outlets showing men with brown skin and beards waving Kalashnikovs around and burning flags it's easy to see how this group of people who are Not Like Us gets demonized. If people could meet and talk to a real Muslim, a real Sikh, a real Christian, a real Hindu, a real Buddhist etc they would gain a greater understanding of what other cultures are about.
