‘Fight discrimination but don’t infringe on parents’ beliefs,’ anti-LGBT lessons protester tells RT

UK schools that teach LGBT lessons are neglecting the religious beliefs of parents, a protest activist told RT. Britain’s anti-extremism body has criticized the government for being “too slow” to quell outrage over the issue.

In Birmingham, dozens of Muslim parents are rallying in front of a school that started offering LGBT equality lessons. They demand that teachers stop using storybooks they say proselytize same-sex relationships and a homosexual way of life.

“We need to devise a program with parents, with the schools, with Ofsted [the Office for Standards in Education] and the [Department for Education] to have a program that allows... schools to stop discrimination but not by infringing on parent’s [religious] beliefs,” Shakeel Afsar, activist and protest coordinator, told RT.

Where the schools have gone wrong is that “they have not consulted parents in a meaningful way,” he said.

The protests initially started in Birmingham earlier this year and steadily spread across England. At first, they involved predominantly Muslim parents, but now Catholics are also joining in. As the outrage mounted, the government began voicing unease over its scale and reach.

On Monday, Sara Khan, the head of the Commission for Countering Extremism, accused the Department for Education of being “too slow to respond” to the snowballing protest. The DfE “could’ve done so much more” to explain to parents that “this is what’s actually being taught, not the misinformation that we’re seeing out there.”

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