It’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.
How about we take this to the next level?
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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.”
sangsue
Why is it that Queerty feels that in order to make a point, you have to be anti-semitic?! I can’t believe you felt you had to use the K word to make your point! If I used the F word that ends in T, everyone would be flaming me and rightly so. Yet you use the K word with absolutely no thought at all. Why do you hate Jews? What did we EVER do to you? Between this and your hatred for bisexuals, you can go to hell.
scoundrel
Someone has their outrage-o-meter calibrated a wee bit high.
sangsue
@scoundrel:
Nope. You like being called a f****t? How about other slurs? That word was not necessary.
Ronbo
@sangsue: Careful going outside, with skin that thin, you’re likely to flash fry under a full moon.
Miss Understood
@sangsue:
Kike fag here. Using a word in context is not a problem. They didn’t call anyone anything. Paranoid PC-ness will get us nowhere.
PS: Voldemort! Voldemort! Voldemort!
Billy Budd
” I am hard but I am fair. There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on nigg*rs, kik*s, w*ps or grease*s. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you ma*gots understand that? “
AdrianS
Comparing ‘gays’ to ‘jews’ is very common place, and a very useful tool when explaining to masses about the injustice gays are getting from society.
Please lets not forget where the pink triangle comes from: the Nazis. Same as the yellow star of David, the Nazis branded homosexuals with the pink triangle and killed 120,000 homosexuals in Germany and beyond during the war.
As for the matter at hand (the teacher) I can not believe this is still going on in the UK today. This should be outlawed! It’s ridiculous that idiot parents are allowed to have such a say in this. Boo!
DK
“There are some parallels here to Brendan Eich…” No there’s not. Brandon Eich was fired for his choice to fund an anti-gay hate campaign. This guy was fired for being born who he is, which is why he immediately found a better job elsewhere — making this a nonstory.
But it’s nice to see that the Stockholm Syndrome is still running high at Queerty, who is still trying to make Eich a martyr and curry favor which people who don’t think gays deserve freedom and equality.
Let it go.
Polaro
@DK: Did you read the whole article? Or just stop before the author made the exact same point you just did?
Cam
@Polaro:
His point was well taken, there was actually no reason to even try to say there were parallels. It would be like saying there were parallels in a situation where one person died saving babies from a fire and another was shot trying to rob a woman.
No paralles.
As for Queerty’s take on Jews, Queerty has been flamed multiple times by avoiding posts about Mormons and gays and yet running multiple posts about some crazy Rabbi somewhere that hates gays, even though the Major Jewish denominations all have gay rabbis, support gay marriage, and the Mormons actively work against gay rights.
That combined with the fact that it’s interesting they didn’t blot the word K*ke. Would they have written out the N word or Sp*c? Doubtful, so Sangsue’s post at the top doesn’t seem out of line.
Throbert McGee
That combined with the fact that it’s interesting they didn’t blot the word K*ke. Would they have written out the N word or Sp*c? Doubtful
Perhaps the difference is that many Kikes have a better sense of humor about themselves than some N****rs or S**cs do — not to mention most F****ts, who like to pretend that they’re brilliantly witty just because Oscar Wilde and Cole Porter happened to enjoy sucking cock.
For example, here’s one I got from a Ukrainian Jew on a Russian website:
(It sounds better in the original Klingon…)
Throbert McGee
Oh, shoot, sorry about the double-post, moderators!
Throbert McGee
Since I haven’t seen the actual teaching materials used by Mr. Moffat, and since I’m well aware that some LGBT people are well-practiced experts in providing Stalinism With a Smile™, I’m inclined to withhold judgment of the parents.
I mean, for all I know, maybe this public school teacher was encouraging children to make fun of the silly and outdated rules against homosexuality in the Bible and Qur’an, or telling them that it’s a really cool idea to boycott people who disapprove of homosexuals, but they should NOT boycott homosexuals, because THAT would be mean.
That kind of stuff isn’t “teaching”; it’s political indoctrination, and it’s a flagrant violation of professional standards to bring it into the classroom.
Of course, I don’t KNOW whether Mr. Moffat’s curriculum was inappropriate or not; do any of the Queerty editors know?
Throbert McGee
Hmmm, a follow-up to this thread:
From what I gathered by Googling, the school from which Mr. Moffat was fired has quite a large population of Muslim students, and some UK news sites are spinning this as being an example of “creeping sharia” and fretting about “extreme Islamists” taking over school boards by stealth, etc.
For his part, Mr. Moffat claims that the complaints against him came both from Christian parents and Muslim parents; whether this is true, or whether he’s being overly PC and made up the part about Christian parents to avoid charges of “Islamophobia,” I’m not sure.