New Jersey Law To Add LGBT People’s Contributions Into Public School Curriculum

Share this article

As the LGBT movement continues its march through the institutions, it keeps making advances within the educational world—and those advances are not confined to the halls of higher education. A law approved by the governor earlier this year in the state of New Jersey will require public schools to incorporate information about the “contributions” of LGBT people into middle and high school curriculum in the 2020-2021 academic year.

“A board of education shall include instruction on the political, economic, and social contributions of persons with disabilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, in an appropriate place in the curriculum of middle school and high school students as part of the district’s implementation of the New Jersey Student Learning Standards,” the law states. It also says that, “When adopting instructional materials for use in the schools of the district, a board of education shall adopt inclusive instructional materials that portray the cultural and economic diversity of society including the political, economic, and social contributions of persons with disabilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, where appropriate.”

A northjersey.com article addressing the question of whether or not parents will have the opportunity to opt their children out of the LGBT material explained that the text of the law does not include an opt-out option. “Advocates say such an option would not be practical, since the intent of the law is for lessons to be weaved in throughout the year rather than taught only as stand-alone lessons,” the article published in June explains.

Demonstrating that notoriously intolerant “tolerance” so frequently displayed by the left, Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle (D-Englewood) asserted that people should not have the choice of opting out.

“Our children should not be able to ‘opt-out’ of LGBT history,” she said in a statement. “They should not be allowed to ‘opt-out’ of lessons surrounding acceptance and equality.

“I am proud that the LGBT curriculum is the law of the land,” she said. “Providing parents with the option to remove their children from these lessons would only dilute the critical progress that we have and will continue to make through this law.”

So is there a path for parents who want to protect their children from the LGBT content? Rosemary Marks with Hackensack Public Schools indicated that it would depend on the Department of Education. Via northjersey.com:

“A parent has a right to submit the request,” Marks said. “It doesn’t mean we could guarantee it. We would follow Department of Education-mandated regulations on what to do with parents who have requests. The DOE might say, ‘Nope this is our curriculum.’ ”

Asked about parental requests to skip lessons, Michael Yaple, a spokesman for the Department of Education, also said the law “does not contain an opt-out provision.”

Unsurprisingly, some New Jersey residents adamantly oppose this legislation. Barnegat Township Mayor Alfonso Cirulli publicly spoke out against the law during a recent township committee meeting, asserting that “no group has a right to force others to comply with their beliefs, deprive them of their First Amendment rights and strip the rights of parents of how to morally raise their children.”

“This tramples First Amendment rights, especially religious freedom. Because you’re crossing into a realm that I believe as an educator–education should not be crossing into,” Cirulli told Action News.