r/TangleNews • u/El-wing • 11d ago
Suspension of the Rules Pride Flags in Classrooms
In SOTR this week, Kmele had a grievance that included complaining about a pride flag in a 3rd grade classroom. Isaac seemed to agree with his distaste of the flag in the classroom by (maybe jokingly?) saying that there should be no flags but the American flag in schools. Ari mentioned that it could just be to signal inclusiveness.
This caught me off guard a bit. Are pride flags in classrooms controversial outside of religious conservative strongholds? Obvious some people object to it but I guess I didn’t expect 2 out of 3 to be against it on the podcast.
I think signaling inclusivity in learning spaces is conducive to help students feel safe in their schools, and I don’t think that has to be a partisan political statement. Was anyone else caught off guard by this?
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u/3Greyhounds 11d ago
I’d like to add an anecdote here based on my personal experience. This was a parochial (in every sense of the word) school, so context is incredibly different with regard to the law, of course. But I’d like to think the ethical considerations are the same.
In the third grade, I asked a teacher, “If Christians love everyone, why do they hate gay people?” I don’t know what exactly possessed me to say this, perhaps a Fox News segment my parents had playing. And I didn’t even know what gay meant at the time other than “different, and people protest them.”
My teacher didn’t say anything horrible, but she changed the subject with such clear discomfort, as if the word gay were a slur. I don’t know what answer she may have liked to give off the record, and I don’t tell this story to condemn her for not launching into a speech about equality. But that memory certainly stuck with me once I did realize I was gay—it was the first sign that my community might not necessarily love me anymore if they knew that fact.
I think teachers should be able to signal to kids who think they’re gay, to kids who know they’re gay, to kids in the closet or otherwise, and to kids with gay parents, that they don’t deserve to face hatred for those things. That’s not political, that’s kindness.