Seven-year-old expelled from Christian school for talking about gay dads
The parents were asked to remove their child as the school do not ‘promote gay’.
A father has told how he was forced to pull his seven-year-old daughter out of a private Christian school after she told classmates her parents are gay.
He said principal Andrew Newhouse of Foundation Christian College in Australia threatened to expel his daughter if she continued to talk about her father and his partner.
“I was told that they don’t promote ‘gay’ at the school and my child was unable to talk about my life between [my partner] and me,” he told The Mandurah Mail.
“She could mention my name, but she couldn’t talk about us being gay or relating to us as a couple, so we were forced to say that she wasn’t allowed to talk about us at all.”
Brendan – who withheld his surname to protect his daughter – said the principal accused him of lying to get his daughter a place in the school.
“The principal said to me that he felt they were fooled at the interview,” he said.
“He said to me that ‘if we knew you were gay at the interview you would never have got in this school.”
Brendan said that although he feels guilty about the discrimination his daughter may experience due to his sexuality, he felt he had no choice but to remove her from the school.
Brendan added: “I carry a lot of guilt and I hate that my daughter has to deal with her dad not being accepted.”
The families story has provoked national outrage – with more than 20,000 have signing a Change.org petition, urging the state education minister to “ban schools rejecting kids based on homophobia.”
“The Principal of Foundation Christian College told the dad that if they knew he was gay at the interview, his kid would never have got into the school. Outright homophobia in 2015,” the petition reads.
“The school gets millions of taxpayer dollars and they’re allowed to exclude kids based on whether their parents are gay?”
Current Australian Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently backed plans for a plebiscite (public vote) on same-sex marriage slated for 2017, but has resisted plans to introduce it sooner.
However, given overwhelming public support suggesting a public vote would be redundant, activists have called on the government to back equality in Parliament instead to allow the issue to be addressed sooner.
