I wonder to what extent we are going to see people like this conservative Christian high school principal leaving the public schools over all this. Imagine that you are an Evangelical, conservative Catholic, or Muslim elementary school teaching in the Fort Worth ISD. Your administration has now ordered you to present material to your students that normalizes this radical gender theory. You cannot even call your students “boys” or “girls,” by order of the superintendent. What do you do?

A reader sends this e-mail. I quote it with permission, provided that I deleted geographical details, which I have done:

I am leaving public education this year for a classical school in [deleted]. I already have lesbian students in my current school who are physically affectionate. The problem is: I often do not always know the difference between erotic affection and sisterly affection. Even if I did, I do not know if I want to go there as a public school principal. I am not about to try to sort out the two and discipline the ones I think are erotic. I am conservative and there are many conservative families in my school–but I firmly believe this could turn into a big mess if I tried to discipline lesbians for “inappropriate display of affection.”

One of the worst things about public schools is that they are raising our children as if they do not have souls. In a public school, discipline and motivation to do the right thing are based purely on external stimuli–school-wide behavior programs and incentives for the good kids and discipline for the bad ones. These are simply controls that do not prepare anyone to do what he ought. This Skinner based approach is pervasive and inescapable. The poor and poorly behaved get the worst of it, for they are truly treated like soulless animals and governed purely by external stimuli. Christian kids do okay, but I have seen even these struggle to do the right thing when the external stimuli is removed. Schools are teaching our children to merely respond to pain/pleasure responses. This is no way to raise children to stay in the faith or to live in and perpetuate a free society.

The reader adds in a follow-up letter:

As a Christian parent I would be worried that even a good principal is not going to protect their daughter from lesbian advances. Principals protect the weak against the strong, but we cannot in this case.

I wonder to what extent we are going to see people like this conservative Christian high school principal leaving the public schools over all this. Imagine that you are an Evangelical, conservative Catholic, or Muslim elementary school teaching in the Fort Worth ISD. Your administration has now ordered you to present material to your students that normalizes this radical gender theory. You cannot even call your students “boys” or “girls,” by order of the superintendent. What do you do? If it were me, I would simply not do it, and wait for somebody to complain, and immediately start looking for another job, hoping that I could find something before they requested my resignation.

This is exactly the kind of situation that the Benedict Option is meant to address: what do you do when they effectively kick you out of the public square (in this case, the public schools) because of your religious beliefs? This is what traditional Christians are going to increasingly face in the years to come. In places like Fort Worth, Massachusetts, and many other locales, they are facing it now.

The left will say, “Oh, you’re just saying that because you hate LGBT people.” It wouldn’t be that, not for me. It would be because I could not in good conscience teach something, or help create an environment, that seriously compromised my religious beliefs. If it were only a matter of making sure LGBTs were treated with respect and not bullied in any way, absolutely I could do that, and given my acute hostility to bullies, I would make that a priority. But the activists and their allies in politics and in administration want much more than that. As in Fort Worth, teachers and administrators now have to be positively affirming — even of transgender, which far more than gay and lesbian, deconstructs and destroys the very idea of male and female, and what it means to be a person.

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