Relationships Education: LGBT Content
Debate between Sarah Champion and Nick Fletcher(9 months ago)
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Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my colleague on the Petitions Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn), for his opening remarks.
Currently, up and down the country, we have schools teaching our children that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. It is hard to believe, and that is the issue that I will specifically focus on today. Let me start with an analogy. If we told our children that two plus two equals five enough times throughout their education, would we be surprised if some—not all but some—started to believe it?
Sarah Champion
We do trust teachers to teach that two plus two equals four, so if we trust them in that respect, why do we not trust their judgment in all respects?
Nick Fletcher
I thank the hon. Member for her contribution. I will come back to my speech—I do not want to spoil the flow of it, as it were. From what I have heard, the consensus here is that what we are teaching children should be transparent and age-appropriate. I believe it should also be grounded in truth. There have been remarks from lots of people here saying that the literature being shown to our children is not there and that there is no real evidence of it. Members are literally burying their heads in the sand on this issue. If they did not and they actually worked with myself and maybe the Department for Education and looked at all the evidence I have, maybe we would not have to go on social media and say, “Look what our kids are being taught. This is abhorrent,” and then somebody jumps on my page and so on and so forth. If all the adults in the room sat down with the Minister and said, “Look, this is what is happening”—I have examples in my folder, but we cannot show pictures in debates.