Originally published June 5, 2023 4:00 pm PDT
Young children in Charlottesville, Virginia were forced to participate in Pride events at their elementary school, recent video shows.
QUICK FACTS:
- Elementary students ranging from preschool to fourth grade were forced to celebrate so-called “Pride Month” at Johnson Elementary School in Charlottesville, Virginia.
- Video footage was secretly recorded showing older students explaining to small children the meaning of “LGBTQ” and reading from an “ABC Pride” book.
- “[LGBTQ] stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer. Cool!” a fourth-grade girl said into the microphone. “Now, let’s have a book about Pride Month.”
- Teachers also moved through the crowd of children in the audience forcing students to listen to the presentations.
FATHER OF FOUR MANUK GRIGORYAN ON SCHOOL’S TEACHING STUDENTS ABOUT “PRIDE MONTH”:
“A 4-year-old child should not learn about LGBTQ, especially in school. If anything, I should be the one to teach them about the birds and the bees, so to say, not the school. The school’s job is to teach them about reading, writing, and algebra,” GRIGORYAN said.
BACKGROUND:
- A group of parents in North Hollywood, California are boycotting a pride parade by keeping their children “home and safe,” according to a flier.
- The flier read, “Videos will be shown to the students including one where it says, ‘some kids have 2 mommies, some have 2 daddies.’ This has caused outrage among parents.”
- “We respect everyone, but some things are appropriate for children [of] that age, and some things are not,” one parent told KTLA-TV.
- “Hopefully the message gets across and people understand that parents should be the primary contact of what their children should be exposed to and shouldn’t be exposed to,” the parent added.
- Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland is requiring students to read “LGBTQ-inclusive” materials as part of its English language arts curriculum.
- After the initial move from the district last year, parents have incessantly protested the decision, noting that “MCPS keeps painting these books as rainbow unicorn which they are not,” according to Moms for Liberty Montgomery chapter president Lindsey Smith.
- “We asked them to just leave an opt-out in place because it goes against a lot of family values; many have a lot of religious values it goes against,” Smith explained to the Washington Post. “There’s a lot of parents that just think that their kids weren’t even mature enough to handle some of these readings and then have to explain some of these words.”
