Brody's Notes... Polish LGBT Equality Rights Group Angered Over School Textbook

Cover Of Controversial Polish Schoolbook: 'On The Road To Adulthood.'  Photo By SPR LGBT Equality Rights Group- Warsaw, Poland

By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) AUG 30 | The Association for Diversity, a Warsaw-based LGBT Equality Rights group, say that a recently approved school textbook,  which is also used in family and sex education classes, restricts its views on LGBT people to a narrow, traditional view of homosexuality espoused by Poland's powerful Catholic Church. However, the Polish education ministry reportedly took no action over the complaint, stating that textbooks were approved on the advice of experts and individual teachers were free to choose which ones they used.
The Association for Diversity's Przemek Szczeplocki told Reuters:

 "[The book] remains silent on the problems of homophobia and discrimination and presents the theory that homosexuality is something one can reject and that one can return to 'normality'. This kind of attitude deepens the lack of acceptance for gays, lesbians and bisexuals and perpetuates a belief that some sexual orientations are weird, and this is hurtful."

However, Mr Szczeplocki added that the current edition of the textbook took a less extreme stance than an earlier one, which he said had put homosexuality on a par with incest and pedophilia.

Grzegorz Zurawski, an education ministry spokesman said that the gay rights group would be better served if it addressed its concerns to teachers and the book's publishers.

"We tell our experts to pay particular attention to any racial, sexual or religious discrimination before approving a textbook, and in this case they found no such issues.

"We can't withdraw a book simply because a group of people disagree with the theories expounded by the scholars who wrote it," he said.

On the group's website, Szczplocki wrote: { Translated from Polish }

Bisexuality, and homosexuality is a matter of free choice, trauma, seduction, or abuse of pornography, the Polish law severely punished for "inciting minors to homosexual contacts, you can" turn back "and become a heterosexual, the Catholic Church is not favor of LGB people and homophobia is not exists - is a revelation of the textbook education for family life authorized to be used in middle school.

Education for family life for students in grades I-III school, "by Krystyna Maśnik, Wojciech Śledzińskiego, Grazyna Węglarczyk Wronicz and Jadwiga, edited Theresa King (Rubicon Publishing, 2009) presents a world so unlike the true, the conclusion must be the same: it was a present world rather than wishful real.

Each method has proved to be so good: the total disregard scientific findings on sexual orientation, selective and distorting the truth to present the facts, concealing "uncomfortable" issues of homophobia, and even frightening paragraphs of the Penal Code.

This Manual intrusively promotes pseudoscientific arguments about the sources and nature "of homosexuality," according to which all are born heterosexual (the Crown's argument is that it is not found "homosexual gene" - the logic of a manual on "gene heterosexuality" no one asks), then the some people something happens (victims of rape, watching too much "homosexual pornography" or simply "choose" homosexuality itself) and are homo-or bisexual.

The Manual reassured that the process is reversible, and besides, you may find that "homosexuality" is only "apparent."

[So apparently: you can breathe and stop being afraid - not that the "homosexuality" terrible as author is painted.]

There is a section of the "Catechism of the Catholic Church, from which fragments of the manual's negative thesis that the Church has a "existential" and "human" approach to LGB people.

Is it worth saying that the positions of other religions or those non-believers in this regard does not mention even a word?

On the other hand, you may need to be glad that the author and the author is limited to only one religion and - giving up the present positions of other religions - do not deepen the impression that the principle of ideological neutrality of the state (at the end of this textbook for public schools) they are not on the way .