What do a drag queen reading gender books to a kindergarten class have in common with a Muslim man praying in a school hallway? Apparently, absolutely nothing. Nothing further than a transvestite escaped from red-light and a devotee kneeling in a corridor in the middle of Ramadan. If the first seems straight out of a postmodernity that laughs at everything, the other seems resurrected from a distant past where religion occupied all the space.
However, there are more points in common than you might think between these two scourges that are flourishing in France, the United States and Quebec. In both cases, in fact, it is no longer simply a question of the right of an individual to preach a religion or an ideology, in this case that of the diversity of “genders”, but of the right of the school. to protect themselves from all forms of proselytism, whether they concern religions or sexual minorities.
The more than complacent interview granted last week by the drag queen Barbada to the show Everybody talks about it was a case in point. At no time was there any question of the literary quality of the “tales” that she reads to the children – sometimes, moreover, they are not at all about tales -, of their role in learning to language, culture and knowledge conveyed in these books. What was discussed if not the so-called ideology of “gender” diversity and sexual identity? In short, subjects that concern neither the school, nor school programs, nor the primary function of public libraries. And even less the children of primary and kindergarten.
In the United States, France and Quebec, the growing presence of these “gender” propagandists in schools and public libraries does not meet educational criteria, but essentially ideological ones. However, a drag queen spreading diversity ideology and gender theory has no more place in these public establishments than a preacher denouncing homosexuality. These discourses simply do not concern the public school, which, in matters of sexual morality, cannot go beyond what the law says, namely that no one should be discriminated against on the basis of their orientation. The rest is a matter of personal choice. Final point.
Unfortunately, it happens that, under the pretext of openness and broadmindedness, but also often out of naivety, we throw wide open the doors of our schools to people who pursue goals, certainly sometimes laudable, but above all ideological.
Muslims who pray in the hallways in order to claim places of prayer at school represent a similar phenomenon. In France, street prayers have long been used to promote Islamism. In some neighborhoods of large cities, hundreds of worshipers have been seen invading public roads, thus transforming these religious ceremonies into illegal demonstrations.
This proselytism, which we have good reason to believe is not entirely spontaneous, is all the more unacceptable in a secular school, which must remain strictly neutral on these issues. Unless he considers religious freedom to be superior to all other freedoms, the minister is perfectly right to say that the school is not a place of prayer. No more than a cultural center, a library or a university. Especially since, unlike the barracks, the prison and the hospital, they are not permanent places of life.
It is also striking to note that the ideologues of Islamism as those of gender theory use the same methods of guerrilla warfare in order to exploit our credulity. Nothing like starting to pray in the hallway of a secular school and being called to order to denounce oppressive secularism. There’s nothing like inviting a drag queen — a cabaret character usually identified with sexual transgression and dirty jokes — to elicit a reaction from parents and denounce homophobia. This has long been understood by the Black Blocs, whose provocations have no other purpose than to force confrontations with the police and then denounce police violence.
The spirit of secularism presupposes a certain conception of school. If it must be kept far from religious (or anti-religious) proselytism, all the more reason should it be kept from all political, economic, cultural and even environmental interest groups. In reality, activists, whoever they are, have no place in an institution that should be preserved from ideological debates and considered a sanctuary of knowledge, knowledge and reason.
School and ideology do not mix. More than two years after the assassination of the teacher Samuel Paty in the Paris suburbs by an Islamist at the exit of his school for having dared to show a caricature of Muhammad in class, it is not useless to remember it. The “free school” of today is no longer that of the 1960s. It would rather be a school free of pressure groups, ideologies and lobbies. It would be a school centered on knowledge and returned to its primary vocation, which is first of all to instruct. I know we are far from it, but nothing prevents us from dreaming.