FENTON, Michigan (LifeSiteNews) — The head of a Michigan teachers’ union has instructed members not to wear badges promoting the LGBT and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements following pushback from parents and other members of the community.
The Daily Caller reports that the Fenton Education Association (FEA) had designed badges for teachers to wear bearing the message “Equality: Stronger Together,” with the letters incorporating various sexual- and gender-identity “pride” color schemes as well as the clecnched-fist symbol of the BLM movement, which contends that “systemic racism” permeates American culture and institutions.
“Wearing these badges is important to us and it’s important to our students,” FEA vice president Chuck Miller claimed last month. “It’s a way to show our students that we support them and we see them.”
Many in the community pushed back on the imposition of left-wing racial and LGBT ideology, however, with more than 200 attending an April 10 school board meeting to debate the issue. “The colorful symbols used to spell out the word ‘equality’ are in most cases age-inappropriate, they are culturally divisive, not inclusive of all students, disparaging of those not listed, potentially racist, and the symbol representing the letter ‘T’ promotes an absolute falsehood,” one attendee argued.
“Why talk about sex with kids in school?” another parent asked.
Following the backlash, FEA president Sarah Foster now says she has “made the decision to ask our staff to stop wearing these badges.” Fox 66 adds that she made the decision “because of harassment,” suggesting the union is still attempting to frame themselves as victims rather than make concessions about whether the badges were inappropriate.
Left-wing indoctrination in public schools has long been an issue of concern to many Americans, especially material pertaining to sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and gender-fluid ideology as well as critical race theory, a doctrine that holds race is a “socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color” and that “racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.”
More than a dozen states have imposed laws or executive actions restricting CRT in public schools, and 35 have proposed legislation on the subject. The issues of racial and sexual indoctrination in taxpayer-funded education have in recent years fueled a parent backlash that has been credited with Republican gains in states like Florida and Virginia, whose current respective governors have taken leading roles on the issue.
Such policies have provoked some activist teachers to threaten to quit education, a development conservatives welcome as an added benefit of their favored reforms.
Last September, a New York Times/Sienna College poll found that 70 percent of respondents “oppose[d] allowing public school teachers to provide classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in elementary school,” including 53 percent of Democrats.