Fuquay Varina is really rockin the news lately. In addition to the pepper spray incident, it looks like a local high school teacher compared public schools to concentration camps for Christians, due to the fact that they teach kids that homosexuality is all right, and one homeschool girl even came out as lesbian after going to a public school. He actively counsels Christian families not to send their children to the school he teaches at.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I generally think that freedom of speech for government employees is really important, and that hand kind of thinks I’m a jerk even for having doubts about this case.
On the other hand, I wonder whether someone so virulently anti-gay can serve as a good teacher to his gay students, in the same way that a published white supremacist might not be able to effectively serve her black students.
Wake County Schools has suspended him for a week with pay and offered him counseling. Given his view of himself as a missionary behind enemy lines, I’m not sure that’s going to have any real effect.
I don’t know what the legalistic jungle looks like but I rather like your comparison to a white supremacist. If there are doubts about the teacher’s ability to properly educate their students that fall into a particular demographic then I don’t think they should be in a teaching position. High school is difficult enough and the homophobia can fuck you up real good when it’s non-directed. I shudder to think how difficult a class would be with a homophobic teacher and an out LGBT student.
It depends on how well he can keep his personal feelings outside the classroom. If he treats gay students differently, or makes them feel ashamed, or anything of the sort – then yeah, he should be removed. If he treats all students with the same level of respect and doesn’t promote his agenda within the school walls, then I wouldn’t have a problem with him.
A teacher who says it’s OK to be gay is fine (IMHO). A teacher who says that being straight is (evil, immoral, against the word of God, anti-family, a threat to children, etc) is not.
Pretty much my opinion as well. As far as I’m concerned you get to be as big an ass as you want outside of class as long as you can behave inside of class.
That goes for students as well :D.
Anecdotically, I remember having an actually racist history teacher back in high school. We didn’t have a clue about his thoughts on race until one day, out of the blue, an incident clued us in - he’d left a white student enter the class 10 minutes late with nary a fuss, then 30 seconds later a second student tried to come in, an Algerian girl. Her, he told “I don’t know how they do in your country, but here we come in on time. Get out.”
Outraged, half of the class got out along with her. So, y’know, there’s also some civic-boosting value to a shitlord teacher sometimes
I’d be questioning the ability of any employee to do his or her job while vocally and publicly expressing a vote of no-confidence in the administration, coworkers and clients of my business.
Fire his ass. Not because of his beliefs, but because he is actively working against successful outcomes for his employer.
The answer to all those questions is “yes,” because none of those positions are inherently bigoted. This makes them distinct from the position advocated by Mr. Fournier, which is nakedly hateful. I would assume that a teacher who preached similarly poisonous statements against blacks, or Jews, would be shown the door pretty quickly. I don’t see a good reason to cut Fournier any more slack.
Also, there aren’t a whole lot of jobs you get to keep if you regularly tell your potential customers to go elsewhere.
There is a crucial difference here in that you don’t choose to be gay. All the above are choices made that have reasonable and arguable pro/anti points.
I had a number of teachers who I strongly believe held anti-black prejudices…including some black teachers.
Sometimes you get a feeling about someone. You see discrepancies in how they discipline, how they grade, how they relate to students. Sometimes these discrepancies map onto race or gender. Sometimes it’s just personality. Like, I remember recognizing early on in the semester that my 12th grade English teacher did not like one of the girls in my class. I have no idea what it was about this girl, but I could see detest in her dealings with her.
However, even my prejudiced teachers were kinda-sorta awesome in their own ways. I had a music teacher all through middle school who seemed prejudiced against black kids (and she was black herself), but she was really really excellent at her job.
As a minority, learning to deal with bigots (or people you suspect are bigots) is just as important as any other lesson. In the “real world”, you will deal with people who aren’t accepting of who you are or what you look like. I feel like schools shouldn’t shelter kids from this reality.
However, if someone is being really obnoxious with their prejudice and they can’t grade fairly because of it, I’m all for firing them.
Being anti-Democrat, for example, doesn’t equate to believing and arguing/promoting that all Democrats are intrinsically evil and bound for eternal damnation. (While there are probably anti-Democrats who do espouse those beliefs, that’s not what most people see as mainstream “anti-Democrat.” “Anti-gay,” however, most of the time DOES mean belief that gays are damned.)
An atheist teacher who told Christian students that they are stupid/immoral for their religious belief would be a bad teacher, and should not be in the classroom. Pretty much any teacher calling out students, telling them they are “bad” solely because of their personal religious/political/moral beliefs, would be wrong and should not be in the classroom. Denigrating students for being gay is no different than denigrating them for being black or Catholic or Republican. Expressing your own beliefs does not require denigrating others.
An atheist who
There is a fine line being opposed to any specific political aganda and expressing that, which I support and promoting an anti-homosexual agenda, in which he stereotypes the nature of some of the very students he is there to teach.
It is absolutley of value that diverse political and ideological viewpoints get expression at high school and its a good thing if students hear different authority figures disagreeing, especially if the position differs from the one taught at the kitchen table.
What we don’t want is anyone disparaging gays or the gay ‘lifestyle’ as opposed to disparaging same sex marriage or hate law legislation or protected status based on sexual orientation.
What the hell does this have to do with “freedom of speech”? The concept here is that those who are fringe radicals at best, and perhaps outright lunatics who belong in a mental hospital at worst, are not exactly the best qualified role models for our kids. Argue the First Amendment to your heart’s content, profess lunatic views all you want in celebration of the freedom to do so, but it has nothing to do with the qualification to be a teacher.
If they keep it out of the classroom, I don’t see a problem.
Not that being homeschooled (as I was) or going to a Christian school is gonna keep anyone from being gay. If anything, I’m glad I didn’t go to a public high school! Didn’t have to go through being called a faggot, beaten up or any of that jazz which at the rural local school which would have been a strong possibility.
If they can keep their beliefs out of the classroom, then absolutely they’re fine as a teacher.
Even if they can’t… Well, I’ve had plenty of teachers who have had one prejudice or another that clearly carried over into the classroom. It’s not ideal, but sometimes with school teachers (or any job) you have to choose the best person who’s willing to work for you, even if there aren’t any ideal candidates.
A classroom is not a soapbox. A teacher is there to teach a particular subject, and if a teacher is drifting off the subject onto some kind of pet topic, and not teaching the subject, he’s not doing his job. It doesn’t matter if the subject is why you shouldn’t do drugs, why the Kennedy assassination was a wide-ranging conspiracy, that it’s wrong to declaw your cats, or that gay people are going to hell. It isn’t censorship for the school to say “Cut it out and teach your subject.”
The teacher can do what he likes on his own time, and if the school threatens to fire him for expressing his opinion in an appropriate forum on his own time, that is something different entirely, but it doesn’t sound like that is what is happening. Was he threatened with firing? It seems like people objected to the Holocaust language more than the fact that a virulently anti-gay teacher was at the school. As a Jew who was mostly raised by my aunt, who survived the Holocaust, I found the language offensive too. No one in a majority position like Christians in the US should ever play the Hitler card.
But that’s not relevant. How does he behave in the classroom? I don’t think we know.
Is this incident going to cause parents to request that their children not be placed in his classroom? If that happens, then the school has a problem.
Who cares about grades ? None of them matter (especially these days when kids hardly ever get held back without their parents’ approval) and the ones that might could maybe do, finals and things like that, get graded anonymously.
Besides, outside of maths and the like (where tests and answers can actually be binary, right/wrong ; as opposed to e.g. book reports or history dissertations) grading is pretty much always random and arbitrary to some degree anyway. Every teacher has some preferences and kinks when it comes to grading, every last one. None of it matters, and nobody’s going to look into your 8th grade’s “permanent record” (I can’t say those words with a straight face. Now there’s a mighty Lie to Children :p).
The only people who care and ever cared about grades are parents. Because parents, by and large, are idiots.
What’s important is how kids are taught, what they’re taught, what they *actually *understand from that and take away from class, and how they’re generally treated because that’s a big part of how they’ll in turn treat others. All the rest is noise.
