Last week, Sandy Rios spoke to a South Carolina teacher named Ira Thomas who denounced the National Education Association’s gay-inclusive curriculum during the union’s Atlanta convention and even compared the curriculum to instructing children on how to use crack.
Thomas also spoke about his anti-gay activism to Linda Harvey, a harsh critic of the NEA, over the weekend and this time said that gay-inclusive curriculum will let people force “things on us in school that we don’t believe in from witchcraft to even the molestation from children.”
Later in the interview, Thomas likened the issue to the Penn State abuse scandal where “so many people knew what was going wrong but no one spoke out for whatever reason.”
Thomas: There was another item about showing a video and I can’t remember what video but it was something dealing with the gay and lesbian [sic], but after sitting through several of those I decided it was time to let the voice be heard instead of sitting by and saying nothing.
Harvey: So what did you eventually say?
Thomas: In short I told them as a person I do not have a right to discriminate, but by the same token they do not have a right to disseminate what I consider to be harmful material to children. I do not have a right to tell them what to choose but they also do not have a right to choose a curriculum for me that I feel is biblically wrong. It’s like with prayer, it’s not right for me to put my Christian beliefs on anybody, it is right for me to share the Gospel, but even Christ gave us the choice. If we’re going to go there then the next thing we know we’re going to have everybody forcing things on us in school that we don’t believe in from witchcraft to even the molestation from children.
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Thomas: I don’t want to take this analogy too far but the best one I can think of is the incident that happened at Penn State. So many people knew what was going wrong but no one spoke out for whatever reason. Even with this, we can believe it in our heart but if we don’t ever speak out we are allowing things to go and to keep going on and on.
