OUT OF A JOB

Teacher Kicked Out Of School For Being Gay After Parents Raise A Stink

andrew moffatIt’s an all too familiar story: a beloved teacher comes out to his students. The students don’t really care, but enough parents raise a stink that he soon finds himself out of work.

Time time, it happened in England, and there’s a somewhat happy ending: the teacher, Andrew Moffat, has already found a better school to work at.

What a lousy move by the parents, though! They apparently objected because he was using materials in his curriculum that encouraged people to be polite to LGBTs. Outrageous!

There are some parallels here to Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO who stepped down after everyone freaked out about his contribution to the Prop 8 campaign. Both men stepped down after people objected to their stance on gay stuff.

But they’re also a little different. Brendan Eich’s contribution was about dividing people, and revealed that he feels the LGBTs are fundamentally inferior to straight. Andrew Moffat’s lesson was about uniting people by fostering cooperation.

Eich’s attitude about gay people is fundamentally incompatible with leadership. (If Moffat had been teaching that gay people are superior to straight people, that would be problematic as well.)

Another way to think about this would be switching “gay” to “Jewish.” A CEO donating to an anti-semitic group is different from a teacher who tells students to stop saying “kike.”

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