1) I don't mind the calling out, tbh. I am just trying to empathize on where they are coming from, and I get it. I do feel that the lesson is pretty benign and I see nothing wrong with it. However, parents have a right to express their concerns towards schools and I feel they also have a right to opt out of certain lessons when it clashes with their values (even if we disagree with their values) for as long as they do it within the law.

It is actually the mandatory forced can't opt out nature of situation that got me replying. The idea scares the crap out of me because there are many things that society might want to impose that I disagree with. If they do, I feel that many will condemn me for simply not agreeing. But at the end of the day, I will not feel bad for exercising my rights because I am free to have an opinion for as long as it does not directly hurt others. Ppl are telling me that society always knows better and parents should just shut up and accept it. Personally, I find that idea ludicrous.

2) My race has been oppressed, repressed, bashed, murdered and discriminated historically and I've experienced prejudice in the western nations as well (I'll not go into my race tho as I do not feel that my race defines me. I am me, that is all). It is annoying but I feel I am owed nothing. I guess there is a difference of opinion here.  I feel the world and society owes us nothing because the world isn't inherently fair. We are only owed what we worked for and earned (and even then society and the world can just as easily stiff us). We make do with what we get and we would only find happiness if we can find contentment in that. But I digress...

We all have our biases. So I get where you are coming from. No judgement here! :p Mine is actually an overprotectiveness of my daughter and future kids (as my wife and me are trying for more) and my rights on how to raise them.

1) Ah ok, then I don't have more to say about this point.

2) So we agree on almost everything. I also think that parents deserve to be heard but so do other members of society. In the end officials have to weigh which position has more weight to it and here it is absolutely important not only who is the partie(parents) but more so what concrete positions the partie has(don't want their children to be told about LGBT people)

3) the local mayor obviously doesn't hire the local teachers, there are many layers of administration between the class teacher and the elected politician. Don't underestimate to power of the politicians though, we don't see it very often because politicians aren't too eager to constantly change the education system (price, etc.) but the topic of this thread is proof how much influence politicians have on education, the school didn't just randomly decided to make their school books more inclusive, this is all based on the Equality Act.

4) This is probably what they did before they changed the school books, it probably wasn't too successful.

More scientific facts about monogamous homosexual relationships -- the curriculum is growing. We need to move to a scientific look at homosexual behavior and its outcomes. 

Between 24% and 90% of lesbians report being abused by their partners

https://archive.is/dm9Qw

https://archive.is/o/LRe05/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9360290

75% of straight men report to be faithful to their partners, compared to 4.5% of gay men. Among gay Canadian men in “committed relationships, only 25% were monogamous. In Berlin, 83% of gay men in “steady” relationships had had frequent affairs in the last year. "German sexologist Martin Dannecker, who is himself homosexual, says fidelity between homosexual men living in a “committed relationship” is a myth. "

https://archive.is/cr4QD

Lesbians are 2.5x more likely than straight women to be obese...

https://archive.is/6Ro60

https://archive.is/qTCUQ

❌ BANNED: Substance/Trolling (multiple posts) ~ CGI

I'm not saying that you don't have morals, or that I know you, I'm not talking about your own beliefs, they won't change what atheism is, I'm saying that atheism doesn't provide any ground to support morals, nothing forces an atheist to have morals, either you are a moral or immoral person your fate is oblivion either-way, unlike religion, which has judgement day and different fates for each of 2 types of persons.

"What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean that is a genuinely difficult question" Richard Dawkins

"Your belief that rape is wrong is an arbitrary conclusion" Justin Brierley

You're asking for empirical evidences because you ignore how things work in Islam, we believe that we are in a test world where men should believe in God if he received the invitation (undistorted and adequate) and obey him. let's say that God appeared himself in a form of his choice to us, everyone is going to believe, the test is too easy then.

Homosexuality research are subject for sponsorship bias, confirmation bias,publication bias... there are plenty of articles for both pro and anti genetic homosexuality, and many other scientific topics, don't take it for granted, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scientists-cast-doubt-on-gay-gene-theory-1088951.html 

A study proved that even simple bodily features are too complex to be related to a single gene or a specific group of genes, let alone behavioral ones: https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081105/full/456018a.html

Can you give me examples of immoral acts in the quran?

I know arabic and the words used in the original verses are actually clearer than their english translation, + adapting verses to any situation is prohibited in Islam, we question "science" first of all because human conclusions are susceptible to error obviously, unlike you who probably don't even consider the slightest error as a possibility.

Among the scientists that gave up on supporting and believing in evolution: David Berlinski, Jonathan Wells, Karl Popper, Fred Hoyle, Michael Denton, Antony Flew, Francis Collins, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jerry Fodor, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. Some arguments against evolution: the incompleteness of the fossil record (no transitional fossils between species, normally they should be abundant), the cambrean explosion, forged fossils (Coelacanth,  Piltdown man, ida fossil, lucy fossil, nebraska man, archeoraptor...), organs that are thought to be useless or evolutionary remains because of ignorance of their function (appendix, leg remains in whales, junk DNA...) and later proven to have a function, the improbability of the acquisition of a gene outside the gene pool of the specie, irreducible complexity.....  and this is just a sample.

You're too sure about yourself buddy, an deceived by pop science, stereotypes and media .

So you're saying, being religious makes you inherently moral because of judgement day? But what if I'm religious but don't believe in a judgement day?

Every Human, no matter religious or not religious, has morals aka a sense of good and bad.

The quran as far as I know allows men to have more than one wife, for most Christians that would be a immoral act, So there you have it.

2) Personally, I feel they parents/students have a higher stake here than the educators themselves or the hypothetical future victims of bullying that they feel would occur if said students were not to undergo their lesson (w/c would be highly debatable slippery slope logic) thus their sentiments should be considered more strongly than the motivations behind it. Opting out has been something allowed to other students/parents in the past and I feel that if we insist on forcing these parents/students to take part in something they don't want to take part in, that would be oppression (regardless of how morally higher we see our position as coming from) would it be not? Again, they are not asking that their choices be imposed on others, they are asking that others' choices not be imposed on them. Regardless of how I feel about their motivations, I cannot help but sympathize with them.

3) I feel we're going on a tangent here. Does it really matter what influence politicians have? All they can do is influence, the lessons themselves were made by the educators. The funny thing about laws like the Equality Act is that there are many ways to approach it and still meet the requirement of the law. Unless of course, there is a specific part of it that specifies that LGBT lessons be taught in school to 5 year olds. I will admit to not reading the whole thing (I did read parts) so there may very well be.

There are other ways to approach this w/o alienating the people you want to educate. A more Muslim-friendly sensitivity and diversity lesson might need to be made just to avoid these kinds of backlash. Which is the beauty of these kinds of protests/dialogue, ppl can MAYBE hit some sort of manageable middle ground. Personally, if the schools decide to double down, I would consider them highly incompetent if such is the case.

4) Well, if the demonstrations/protests are any indication, I'm not seeing this lesson doing all that better tbh. In fact this might cause a kneejerk reaction that actually accomplishes the opposite (parents over-influencing their prejudices onto their kids to compensate for such lessons).

I was talking about abrahamic religions, they all have judgment day, and if you disbelieve in it you disbelief in the whole religion.

Dude where did I say atheists have no morals? or that you need God to be good? I'm saying that there's no reason for an atheist that forces him to be a moral person or else he will regret, this is common sense among real atheists you just have to search, or read The selfish gene by Dawkins.

I don't see what you mean by the last example? I'm not an atheist, what's moral and what's not for me is defined by my religion THEN my judgement which is not stable, I don't care about what other religions or people think, if YOU think that it's immoral than explain why and I'll reply to you.

2) It is interesting to me that you are portraying the relationship between parent and child as this unbelievably strong bond, almost as if parent and child are one and the same person(legally speaking), like when you say: "Again, they are not asking that their choices be imposed on others, they are asking that others' choices not be imposed on them." that's wrong, there are actually two outside forces projecting their views onto the child, one is the school and the other one are the parents.

Wouldn't it be the best for the child to learn about both views so it can decide which view seems more plausible to them. By giving the parents the possibility to opt out of this program you basically denied the child access to knowledge. Also I wonder where you would draw the line? Should parents be able to opt out of all kinds of topics in school(opt out of biology class because the parents don't believe in evolution, opt out of history class because the parents are holocaust deniers, etc.)?

About the oppression argument. By that logic many things would be oppression, like paying taxes. When I was in school I didn't want to go to the french class, was I oppressed? And if all these things are oppression maybe sometimes opression is justified?

3) Well you said that you don't want politics in education and I just pointed out that that is impossible, the parents protesting is already a political act. And yes the Educators made the lessons but they were told by politicians, through legislation, to include minorities such as LGBT people in them.

I don't like the term "Muslim-friendly" because it suggests that those protesters somehow represent all muslims in the UK which they don't. I think the school books are already incredible sensitive and not provocant at all. They simply tell the children that LGBT couple exist and that those couples love their children the same way as all other parents do, What is the manageable middle ground here?

I don't know too much about judaism and islam but most christians believe that the Bible was written by humans and therefore every passage of the Bible could be a potential misinterpretation of gods word. So no you don't have to beliefe in judgment day in order to be a christian.

Ah ok, yes I agree with you nothing forces an atheist to live a moral life but is this a problem? If you believe in judgment day then wouldn't the atheist be also judged on judgment day no matter if he beliefs in it or not and wouldn't be the atheist, who lived a moral life, much more noble than the theist, who lived a moral life, because the atheist was moral not out of fear but out of certainty?

Well (some) christians would say polygamy is immoral because the Bible says so.

2) Look at the video. You can see the kids taking part in the protests (even the video mentions that protests are coming from students and parents).

2a) Children at this age cannot decide for themselves, ultimately it is the parent (unless they are found to be provably grossly negligent/harmful to their kids in w/c case, the state will have to step in) who decides for their children. I kinda find this line of reasoning a bit ludicrous. You want the kids to have choice by giving them (and their parents) no choice (to opt out)?

2b) Someone already gave the holocaust-denier vs history argument to me. I feel the statement is a bit of a false comparison. LGBT sensitivity lessons are not hard sciences and I don't think we even teach hard sciences to 4-5 year olds.

Homeschooling is already the ultimate "opt out" option parents can exercise. Is opting for homeschooling illegal? Should it be? If it IS legal and if you think it should be, the answer would be: there was never a line to begin with. If not, then do you think schools should be able to take kids away from parents if they opt out of the public schooling and prefer to home school?

Did French lessons deeply conflict with your heritage/culture? Maybe you should have protested then. :p

2c) I feel that taxes and following of laws are within the social contracts agreed upon by those who wish to be members of society in order to pay for the needs of the collective. I guess you can see that as a form of oppression but at least it is something you signed up for and know about by becoming a member of society and it is enforced via the law (prison). I'm not too sure that accepting the majority's view (no matter how well meaning) on how society should be and forcing it onto a minority even tho it deeply contrary to their values is also part of the social contract we all signed up for.  I doubt these parents knowingly and willingly signed up for said classes as evidenced by their protest.

3) Their protest is a reaction to a political act. Once politics was inserted the reaction cannot be helped but be political as well. The thing about meeting government requirements is that there is quite a bit of discretion on the persons(s) meeting it, for as long as said requirements are legally met within the word of the law (this is part of what I do for a living). What this means is that educators are actually allowed to customize said lessons as a compromise to parents for as long as said lessons still meet the conditions of said law. 

Yeah, in retrospect, I agree I worded that badly, but I was in a hurry and couldn't really come up with a better descriptor at the time. My point was that protests and dialogue could possibly allow them to meet in the middle and come up with a solution for both sides. My suggestion for the school is to meet with the parents and clearly explain to them what the law is and ask them how they parents feel they should move forward to meet the requirements of this law and move from there.

I am not the parent in question here, I wouldn't know what their preferences are so I can't really answer your question on what the middle ground is. Whether or not a middle ground is ultimately found, we cannot deny the fact that if the parents are allowed to at least participate in a dialogue, their concerns can at least be heard. I don't know if it will work, but the process in place at least allows for such to be possible.