Christian teacher suspended by school

The Christian Legal Centre are reporting the case of a Christian teacher who has been suspended after raising objections to an equal opportunities training session that turned into a deliberate promotion of homosexual and lesbian life styles. The report can be found here, and there are links at the bottom of the report to other electronic media coverage.

My trade union experience teaches me to be careful - very careful - of the "... and ..." when reading a report like this. The grounds for the allegations against Kwabena Peat lie in the letter that he wrote to his colleagues, and the contents of that letter remain essentially undisclosed. One can perhaps see - in the suggestions that Mr Peat referred to Biblical teaching in his letter - some seeds of justification for an allegation, seeds that might have been avoided with care. The idea of "writing privately" to his colleagues, rather than pursuing a complaint in a more formal (though "informal" in the procedural) sense also seems a little unwise. But the media reporting does not really make completely clear what has happened.

However, two things spring to mind.

1. The evidence itself seems quite clear cut - it is the text of a letter, and there seems to be little dispute about the contents or authorship of the letter. It strikes me that investigatory meetings and a hearing should not have necessarily taken as long as they appear to have done. Unless, of course, we are now nearing the end of a process of hearings and appeals. But one is left wondering whether a different undercurrent exists along with substance of the allegations themselves and the investigation of them.

2. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Mr Peat's conduct, the conduct of the trainer from Schools Out appears to have been utterly outrageous. As it has been reported, she showed a quite complete lack of respect for others who held a different view than her own, and appears to have done this on a very public platform. The word "equality" in the strapline of Schools Out, and other similar organisations, does need to be treated with a pinch of salt ....