Talking Balls

So UK Schools Secretary Ed Balls thinks an amendment to a Bill that will allow schools to teach what’s right and wrong about sexuality isn’t a case of watering down the legislation.

In other words, this arsehole thinks that you can give “faith” schools the right to teach according to their “faith”, and still get it right.

In other words, you have a Bill that says you must teach the whole gamut – all kinds of relationships, contraception, the lot.

In other words, you teach a balance.

In other words, you don’t introduce exceptions.

OK, you say there won’t be exceptions.

But there will be exceptions, won’t there, you heap of drivel? They won’t be official, but they’ll be there. If schools can, as you tell the BBC, “say to their pupils we believe as a religion contraception is wrong”, then it’s teaching that it’s wrong, isn’t it?

What he says is that the schools cannot now “say that they are not going to teach them about contraception to children and how to access contraception” (yes, it's as muddled as that on the website), adding, “What this changes is that for the first time these schools cannot just ignore these issues or teach only one side of the argument.

“They also have to teach that there are different views on homosexuality. They cannot teach homophobia. They must explain civil partnership.”

Yes, you bloody . . . bloody politician, you (sorry, couldn’t think of a worse insult), but the school is the authority. Its own authority is the bloody scripture. Teacher says, “Look, kiddies, this is what the government says – pah – but this is what the scripture says! And God is right! And it’s double homework for any of you snivelling little brats who dare to think otherwise.”

I remember being at a National Union of Journalists conference once in Bristol, where delegates were mandated to vote by their branches. I was one of them. Two in particular did not, I could tell, agree with some of the things they had been told to vote for. So how high did they stick their voting cards in the air? About the height of their ears, that’s how high.

A teacher who’s also a religious dickhead may well tell the kids what’s what with regard to the law, with regard to the actual facts out there in the real world where people are not ruled by invisible friends and sky fairies, but how much enthusiasm for his subject is he going to put into that?

The very fact that a Catholic school is a Catholic school and not just a school means it will be teaching from the point of view of Catholic “ethos” (read fairy tales). If Ed sodding Balls really wants the schools to teach properly about all types of relationship, then why allow them to water it down by saying, “Ah, but, God says . . .”?

They should teach about relationships, contraception, abortion, stem-cell research and everything else objectively. Not that gay sex is right and everything else second-rate, no, I’m not saying that, just that the different relationships should get equal measure and teachers should not then go and say, “But God says . . .” – because the relationships are equal (some would say in the sight of God, since, they believe, he made us all the way we are, and there isn’t much point in setting ’em up just to knock ’em down).

Balls is talking utter balls.