A year ago, I noticed that at least a couple of times per week, stories like this one would come up. Now, it seems these reports are surfacing every single day. School districts, despite the national backlash coming from parents, remain intent on indoctrinating young children into far-leftist ideas on race, sexuality, and gender identity.
Parents taking issue with this movement have been demonized as bigots for refusing to allow this conditioning to take place. But even teachers have been under the proverbial gun – especially those who resist efforts to force them to inculcate their students with these radical ideas.
A school district in California fired a teacher allegedly because she refused to read books about same-sex marriage to young students between the ages of one and five years old. The Thomas More Society filed a religious discrimination lawsuit against Bright Horizon, a national childcare company. The suit also alleges harassment and retaliation.
The educator, named Nalli Parinsenkova, worked at the Studio City location for four years before being terminated. The lawsuit alleges that after the director of this location discovered the teacher’s Christian beliefs, she “enforced company policy requiring all teachers to support and promote celebrations of ‘diversity’ including same-sex marriage to children in the care program.”
The educator claims the director harassed her and had security remove her from the premises “like a dangerous criminal.” The director then fired her after she requested that she not be required to read these books to students because of her religious convictions.
The issue arose in April 2018 after Parinsenkova found that the classroom in which she taught contained LGBTQ material. In the lawsuit, she claims she took her concerns to the director and was provided with “an informal accommodation that she would not be required to read books to the children promoting same-sex marriage.”
In April 2022, the director, who is a lesbian, found out Parinsenkova was a Christian and reported her to human resources. She took “personal offense” at the teacher’s beliefs according to the filing.
“Bright Horizons did not engage in any negotiations and made no attempt whatsoever to determine whether a reasonable accommodation could be reached,” the lawsuit reads. “Instead, Bright Horizons issued a counseling memo with false statements, terminated her life-insurance benefits, required her to complete retraining in diversity issues, and encouraged her to resign her position.”
Paul Jonna, the attorney representing the teacher, said in a press release that her firing was “unethical” and “blatantly illegal.”
“Make sure you know what books are on the shelf in our children’s care programs and schools,” the lawyer said. “This is a clear-cut case of one of the largest childcare employers in the country having anti-religious workplace policies that promote indoctrination of young children with the LGBT agenda.”
This is one of several stories in which educators have been punished for refusing to go along with the progressive agenda in schools. Earlier this year, I spoke with a teacher in Colorado who was disciplined for not affirming a supposedly transgender student’s gender identity.
Many teachers pushing this agenda have been indoctrinated themselves. But there are many who are only going along because they fear losing their jobs or being ostracized. The hard left tends to function through fear, so this is not exactly a shocker. But perhaps when more educators push back through the legal system, it might give at least some of these districts pause when they think about forcing teachers to go along with a movement with which they do not agree.
