ROCKVILLE, Maryland (LifeSiteNews) — Parents from a diverse range of traditional religious backgrounds joined forces this week to protest the mandatory indoctrination of their children into radical LGBT ideology. Protesters said their children shouldn’t be forced to read materials that violate their religious beliefs.
Hundreds of parents, including Christians, Muslims, and Hindus, reportedly gathered outside the headquarters of Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) on Tuesday to protest the district’s new policy mandating that children in kindergarten through fifth grade “engage” with LGBT reading materials as part of their English language arts curriculum.
The district said in a March statement that it “expects all classrooms to be inclusive and safe spaces for students, including those who identify as LGBTQ+ or have family members in the LGBTQ+ community … Therefore, as with all curriculum resources, there is an expectation that teachers utilize these inclusive lessons and texts with all students.”
Concerned parents previously filed a lawsuit against the district over the new policy last month.
“Parents in general at Montgomery County are starting to realize that ‘Oh, this district doesn’t care what they think. They think [the kids] belong to them,” one of the protesters, Bethany S. Mandel, told Fox News Digital.
Local news outlet WJLA reported that Tuesday’s rally was organized by Montgomery County parental rights group Family Rights for Religious Freedom (FRRF). Participants were scheduled to meet at Rockville Pike and march to the MCPS headquarters building, reaching it at about 2:15 p.m. A small number of pro-LGBT counter-protesters also gathered outside the building, per the report.
According to WJLA, a scheduled school board was set to begin at 1:30 with a closed session, and then open to public comment at 4 p.m. Citing “safety concerns,” however, MCPS previously announced it would be restricting attendance to just “scheduled speakers, invited attendees and other guests to the capacity of the room,” Fox noted. The district didn’t respond to the outlet’s request for comment.
Religious families and their supporters who protested the school’s new policy outside the MCPS building said parents should be allowed to choose whether or not to allow their children to read LGBT-oriented texts that cut against their religious beliefs.
MCPS, however, has stated that parents “may not choose to opt out of engaging with any instructional materials, other than ‘Family Life and Human Sexuality Unit of Instruction’ which is specifically permitted by Maryland law. As such, teachers will not send home letters to inform families when inclusive books are read in the future.”
The new plan is set to take effect when students return from summer break.
In comments to Fox, Mandel complained that the district is focused on indoctrinating children into its sexual agenda rather than ensuring kids are academically well-prepared.
“Test scores are absolutely catastrophically bad,” she said, adding that instead of addressing the problem “the school district is spending its time and energy on ideological activities.”
And this isn’t the first time parents in Montgomery County have earned headlines for standing up in protest of the district’s policy.
A protest against the policy earlier this month earned national headlines, with observers quick to point out that the conservative parents were largely members of ethnic minority groups while the leftist pro-LGBT counter-protesters were primarily white.
Fox pointed out that Montgomery County council member and former public school teacher Kristin Mink previously accused Muslims of siding with “white supremacists” for rejecting LGBT ideology. She has since apologized for the accusation.
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Meanwhile, the protest in Montgomery County isn’t the only one in which a diverse group of concerned parents have banded together despite religious differences to fight the radical sexualized indoctrination of their kids.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, Armenian-Americans and Hispanics clashed with far-left activists outside a California school board meeting earlier this month amid conflict over LGBT ideology in the classroom.
In footage that drew 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. Video footage showed men wearing t-shirts reading “Leave Our Kids Alone” trading blows with masked leftists.
While certainly not all people of minority background espouse traditional values, the recent rejection of radical sexual ideology in school curricula by members of minority ethnic groups mirrors a growing shift among minorities away from the increasingly radical Democrat party and toward the more traditional stances promoted by the political right.