Read Time: 2 Minutes, 1 Second
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released material urging teachers and administrators to embrace LGBTQ causes. While the CDC describes the motivation as helping schools become more inclusive, critics say the agency is overstepping its field to push a political agenda.
According to the CDC, its “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool” aims to help schools increase support for those students. But one of the bigger questions surrounding this move, is how does it contribute to the agency’s mission of helping families, businesses, and communities fight disease and stay healthy?
“It’s disturbing,” Attorney Mary Rice Hasson, director of the Person and Identity Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center told CBN News. “It’s outside the purview of the CDC. It’s getting into social engineering.”
It encourages educators to display rainbow flags in classrooms and unisex signs in bathrooms. It also urges teachers to incorporate LGBTQ content in their lessons, use student-preferred pronouns, and attend LGBTQ training. The document also tells teachers to “describe anatomy and physiology separate from gender,” and to see students who are in locker rooms with transgender students as having misconceptions that transgender students are not “real.”
Jay Richards serves as director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation. He maintains the CDC’s action falls outside the scope of the agency’s role as a public health entity.
“So, we have the Centers for Disease Control pushing materials which essentially denies the reality of sex and instead offers a replacement ideology called gender ideology,” Richards said in an interview with CBN News. “I don’t think people necessarily realize how profound and radical that is.”
Hasson fears the move could create an atmosphere harmful to staff and students who believe it violates their religious beliefs and conscience.
“This really oversteps the boundary of what school should be doing but certainly what the government should be doing—forcing, in a sense, because of the implicit pressure,” Hasson explained. “They say it’s voluntary but really they’re putting coercion on anyone who has anything to do with the schools.”
That is something Hasson warns could be a goal of organizations associated with the tool and promoting the LGBTQ movement.
“It conditions kids to start questioning the most basic element about who they are—male or female,” added Hasson. “And then it includes in this assessment tool, the encouragement to refer children outside the school, to receive services to support their self-defined sexuality or gender identity.”
For the original article, visit our content partners at cbnnews.com. {eoa}
Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2022 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Bring Charisma magazine home with a subscription today!
