Last year Brendan Barber’s raised concerns about a booklet with a strong anti-gay message which had been distributed to pupils at some Roman Catholic schools in Lancashire in 2010.
The booklet, “Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be”, discusses a boy dealing with “homosexual attractions” which it suggested may “stem from an unhealthy relationship with his father, an inability to relate to other guys, or even sexual abuse”.
The booklet, which claims that “scientifically speaking, safe sex is a joke”, explains that “the homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals. Both acts are directed against God’s natural purpose for sex – babies and bonding.”
The leaflet seems confused as well as bigoted. Why should homosexual sex have less to do with bonding than heterosexual sex? And ascribing male homosexuality to ‘an inability to relate to other guys’ is still more baffling.
Michael Gove has now responded to these concerns, asserting that the leaflet relates to ‘the content of the curriculum’ and is thus excused from the provisions of the Equality Act which prohibits discrimination based on protected characteristics. Looking further into what exactly all this meant, I found this useful gloss.
The Act sets out the legal framework for universities in a number of areas. While it places obligations on universities not to discriminate in the provision of education, it includes an express protection for academic freedom in the sense of not applying “to anything in connection with the content of the curriculum.”
Clearly teachers should not be prevented from teaching texts which might be thought to reflect sexist, homophobic or racist views – that might make it difficult to teach The Merchant of Venice or The Taming of the Shrew. But this provision relating to curriculum content was surely not designed to protect the inclusion of polemical literature such as this pamphlet in teaching.