Lesbian teacher: How I convince kids to accept gay ‘marriage’, starting at 4 years old
A primary grade lesbian teacher from an Ontario
public school revealed in a workshop at a homosexual activist conference for
teachers earlier this month how she uses her classroom to convince children as
young as four to accept homosexual relationships.
“And I started in Kindergarten. What a great place
to start. It was where I was teaching. So, I was the most comfortable there,”
Pam Strong said at the conference, attended by LifeSiteNews.
The conference, hosted by the homosexual activist
organization Jer’s Vision, now called the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual
Diversity, focused on the implementation of Bill 13 in Ontario classrooms. Bill
13, called by critics the ‘homosexual bill of rights,’ passed in June 2012 and
gave students the right to form pro-gay clubs in their school, including
Catholic ones, using the name Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA).
Strong, who is in an open relationship with another
woman and who has been a teacher for about five years, focused her workshop on
what she called the “power of conversation” for promoting LGBTQ issues in an
elementary classroom. She began her talk by relating how she reacted the first
time one of her students called another student ‘gay’ as a putdown.
“With [the principal’s] encouragement, we decided
that I would go from class to class and talk about what ‘gay’ means, what does
‘LGBTQ’ mean, what do ‘I’ mean,” she told about 40 attendees, all educators, at
her workshop.
Strong related how she began with the junior
kindergarten class.
“And I read a [pro-gay child’s] book [King and King], and I started to realize that conversations can be very difficult, and they can have the most power when they are the most difficult.”
“But difficult conversations are a part of what we
do as teachers, right? And when these conversations are properly supported by
teachers within the safety of the classroom, they provide a rich environment
for our students as they unpack these complex social issues and they reflect on
their own preconceptions, rights, of gender, sexuality, love, all these
different things,” she said.
Strong related that as she was reading “King and
King” in the junior kindergarten class as a springboard to discuss her
sexuality with the kids, she got to the part where the two princes become
‘married’ when one of the boys suddenly shouted out: “They can’t do that! They
can’t get married. They’re two boys.”
Recounted Strong: “And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah,
they can. It’s right here on page 12.”
“And I said: ‘It happens in real life too. I am
married to a woman. I am gay. And I am in love with my wife.”
Strong said the young children “just all kind of
went silent.” She then told them: “That may seem different to you, how many of
you have heard of that before?”
“Not one hand went up,” she related. “And so I
said: ‘That may seem different to you, but we’re not that different. Would you
like to know about what I do with my family?”
“Yeah, tell us,” she recounted the children
enthusiastically saying.
“I said, you know, we take our kids to the park. I
swing them on swings,” she related, telling conference attendees that she could
share things she did with her own children that “mostly likely all of their
families did with them.”
Then she told the children: “We laugh together. We
go grocery shopping together. I read to them. I tickle them, sometimes until
they scream and laugh and when they cry, I hug them until they stop.”
Strong said that at that point, the boy who had
used the word ‘gay’ looked and her and said: “Well, you’re a family.”
“And I said, yeah, we are,” she related. “And off I
go to the next classroom.”
Strong said that she went from “class to class to
class and continued with these conversations, and they were very powerful.”
‘It’s normal in my classroom’
Strong related an incident that happened last fall
involving a new boy who had recently entered her grade 5 classroom. The new boy
had not yet been made aware of Strong’s sexual preference for other women.
“All my class is very used to who I am. My family
picture is very proudly in my room now. On Mondays they quite often will say,
‘What did you do with your wife?’ It’s normal in my classroom.”
Strong said that a conversation between herself and
the students came up one day where it was mentioned that she was a lesbian. The
new boy put his hands over his mouth and said, according to Strong: “Oh, my
God, I think I’m going to puke.”
“As I took the abuse — personally, as an individual
– of those words, I also saw half of my class look at me with incredible
concern. One student who was right in front of me already had tears in her
eyes. And I noticed several other students who were looking at him. They were
just very, very upset with this kid,” she related.
Strong said the boy instantly became aware that
“something he had said had just created this unbelievable tension in the room.”
She related how she addressed the boy, telling him: “I think that what you
might not be aware of is that I am gay, and I am married to a woman, and my
family has two moms.’”
“His eyes just started darting around, and he was
incredibly uncomfortable,” she related.
“I looked at the other kids and I said: ‘Ok guys,
what I want to ask you is: Am I upset with him?’ And the one little girl in my
class put up her hand — that doesn’t usually get into these conversations very
much in my classroom — and she said, ‘Mrs Strong, I know you’re not upset with
him, because he hasn’t had the benefit of our conversations.”
“And I looked at my little friend, my ‘new’ friend,
and I said: ‘But, we’re going to have one now,’” she related.
Strong said that she then directed her class to the
board and asked them to write everything she had told them related to LGBTQ.
“And my class all of a sudden popped up. ‘LGBTQ’
was on the board, ‘lesbian,’ and all the different words coming out there. And
I sat back and said, ‘Let’s review.’ So, the last year and a half of
‘inclusive’ education came alive in my classroom.”
Strong told her workshop attendees that her “new
little friend” is now a devoted champion of diversity. She boasted how he was
the one in her class to count down the days to the pro-homosexual Day of Pink
that took place earlier this month. When Strong took a photo of all the
children wearing pink shirts in her classroom, she said the boy requested to be
in the front.
“For me, that is the power of conversations. That’s
the power of sharing our stories,” she said.
LGBTQ classroom ‘conversation
starters’
Strong called it “key” to develop a “positive
classroom culture” — and she mentioned it often takes months — before getting
into what she called “difficult conversations” with students about convincing
students of the normality of her sexual preference for women.
She mentioned how she spends time “building a
common vocabulary” in her classroom of words like “stereotype, prejudice,
discrimination” so her students will be able to more readily conform to her
pro-LGBTQ message.
“Sometimes with these big ideas there are also very
big words that are very hard to understand. I find that whether it’s
kindergarten, right up to grade six, visuals help a lot,” she said.
