(LifeSiteNews) — Armenian-Americans and Hispanics clashed with far-left activists outside a California school board meeting this week amid conflict over LGBT ideology in the classroom. The racial diversity represented by opponents of the LGBT agenda bolsters observations that the political left’s promotion of gender ideology is alienating tradition-minded members of minority ethnic groups.
In footage that has since earned widespread attention on social media, a large group of people — largely men of Armenian and Hispanic background — came to fisticuffs outside the Glendale Unified School District’s administration building on Tuesday.
Glendale Police declared an “unlawful” assembly and arrested three individuals who participated in the melee.
Breaking: Armenian-American men fight against #Antifa & far-left protesters outside the Glendale (CA) school board meeting. Immigrant families have been furious that elementary schools are doing pride events. Antifa have gathered to oppose the parents. pic.twitter.com/1LCTeCgc32
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) June 7, 2023
The clashes occurred outside a school board meeting at which parents objected to pro-LGBT policies enacted by the school board, The Daily Signal reported.
Grassroots parental rights group Glendale Unified School District Parents’ Voices (GUSD Parents’ Voices), which is largely made up of Armenian and Hispanic parents, have expressed strong opposition to the district’s policies in the past.
On its Instagram page, the group has posted a photo of a display put up at one of the district’s schools using Black Lives Matter, “Pride,” and fetish symbols to construct a Christian cross. Another post showed the cover of pro-LGBT children’s book “I Am Jazz,” which a user said was available to children in the district. Representatives of the Armenian and Hispanic families have argued in comments to reporters that children should not be exposed to sexualized materials at young ages.
READ: Immigrant parents are rising up against woke LGBT ideology in schools
During the Tuesday meeting, parents raised concerns about the school district’s LGBT-related policies, including allowing use of locker rooms and bathrooms based on “gender identity” rather than biological sex.
Opponents of the conservative parents, including an individual The Daily Signal described as “a man in a skirt, high-heel boots, and a women’s leather jacket” who said he had three daughters who attended school in the district, argued that children should learn about LGBT lifestyles and attacked parents protesting the curriculum for their “hate.”
Just over 40 minutes into the June 3 meeting, school board president Nayiri Nahabedian shut down the public comment session as police struggled to control an increasingly unruly crowd outside.
It’s unclear how the brawl first broke out. Regardless, a large number of people ultimately became involved in the altercation, leading police to physically intervene to break it up and arrest some of the participants. Video footage shows men wearing t-shirts reading “Leave Our Kids Alone” trading blows with masked leftists.
Journalist Andy Ngo pointed out on Twitter that the southern California chapter of the radical far-left activist group Antifa previously called on supporters to “attend the Glendale school board meeting on Tuesday, June 6 to oppose anti-LGBTQIA+ hate groups trying to silence LGBTQIA+ voices in the Glendale Unified School District.”
In an Instagram post several days before Tuesday’s school board meeting, the local Antifa group stated that “the same group from NoHo [North Hollywood] is planning an attack,” adding “[w]e need everyone there” and “there are [sic] safety in numbers!”
SoCal Antifa also recently advertised a counter-protest against a pro-life rally in Santa Monica and called on members to fight back against opponents of a “family” pride event in Burbank.
The group’s Twitter account was suspended on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the protest and altercation came after parents began pulling their children out of school after the Glendale school board decided to promote pro-LGBT content in the classrooms during “Pride Month” (June), The Daily Signal noted.
According to the outlet, some of the district’s elementary schools saw just 40 percent of their students come to class on June 2 following outrage by parents.
While certainly not all people of minority background espouse traditional values (Erik Adamian, who sits on the Board of Directors of the Gay and Lesbian Armenian Society, spoke to reporters in favor of LGBT ideology in Glendale classrooms) rejection of radical sexual ideology in school curricula by members of minority ethnic groups mirrors a growing shift among minorities away from the Democrat Party and toward the right.
Daily Wire editor emeritus and podcast host Ben Shapiro suggested that the backlash from ethnic minority groups against LGBT ideology represents the rejection of the “radical social agenda being promoted by the left.”
“This is going to be part of the future of the country,” he said. “Essentially what you have is a cadre of upper-class white liberals who have a particular set of morals that do not match the morals of particular ethnic minorities in the United States, and the backlash is going to be very, very strong.”
According to Shapiro, traditional morality is “particularly prevalent in exactly the diverse communities the left pretends that it represents. Armenians are just one example of that.”