A New Jersey middle school refuses to allow the Bible in the classroom but is perfectly fine with teaching Islam to its students.
Nancy Gayers’ son was just trying to get his classmates to donate to a good cause when he was shut down for “proselytizing” Christianity.
Gayers presented a PowerPoint to his fourth-grade class advertising his attempts to collect gloves and hats for poor children. Everything was fine until he showed a slide that included a Bible verse.
His teacher immediately stopped the presentation, and said it “belongs in Sunday school, not the classroom.”
The Bible verse he cited was from Proverbs 19:17, “Caring for the poor is lending to the Lord, and you will be well repaid” (CEV).
Gayers took the incident to the school district, which defended the teacher’s actions, saying it was in accordance with their “proselytizing” policy.
However, parents spoke up when that same policy was not applied to Islam.
Gayers said her older son was taught about Islam in his seventh-grade class in an instructional video that included lines like “Allah is the creator of everything, the one true God.”
“In my opinion, I call this proselytizing, for by definition of this word, it means convert or attempt to convert from one religion, belief or opinion to another,” Gayers said according to the Daily Wire.
The school refused to remove the course when questioned because, it says, “It is part of the New Jersey curriculum core content standards to teach students about the various religions of the world.”
However, Gayers said the teacher only talked about Islam but would not touch the other two Abrahamic religions: Judaism and Christianity.
When Nancy Gayers and Libby Hilsenrath, another concerned mother, raised this point, they were called bigots by their community.
“We were labeled as bigots immediately following the Board of Ed meeting in an op-ed,” Hilsenrath told Fox News, “and then all over Facebook with people who knew us or didn’t know us. Xenophobic, Islamophobe, I mean it went as far as the KKK, which I don’t know what that has to do with this.”
The op-ed Hilsenrath referenced was a letter by resident Susan O’Brien, who called Gayers and Hilsenrath’s concerns as “at worst, veiled bigotry and at best, sad and ignorant.”
Gayers and Hilsenrath have said many times that they are OK with their children learning about others’ religions but are not okay with what they believe is the school’s hypocritical treatment of those religions. {eoa}
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