In the United Kingdom, where the LGBT+ agenda is well entrenched in the school system, there have been protests from the Muslim population against these so-called teachings of tolerance. In Birmingham, a program called No Outsiders, organized by Andrew Moffatt, has been on the curriculum to teach students as young as five the ins and outs of same-sex families, inclusivity, and diversity.

Moffatt, who is deputy head teacher at Parkfield Community School, developed the program “to ensure future younger generations learn about acceptance and respect of others.” While that’s a rather non-offensive ethos, what sowed tensions in the community was the introduction of LGBT+ content in the program.

The Brits have typically been gung-ho for the gender unicorn, accepting trans women on short lists of women politicians, allowing males who identify as transgender — including sex offenders — to be housed in women’s prisons and battered women’s shelters, and being extremely accommodating about pronouns and National Health Service (NHS) facilitation of transgender medical interventions. But for the most part, those who tasted the rainbow were basic, white English folks.

Controversy in the Muslim Community

Then religious Muslims got wind of the LGBT+ indoctrination of their primary school students, and freaked out. According to these parents, who staged protests outside of the schools in their districts that offer the No Outsiders program, homosexuality is not sanctioned by their religion, and they don’t want their children taught that it’s acceptable. The parents’ protests included pulling more than 600 Muslim children from school, and were incredibly effective. The lessons have stopped.

The funny part is that gender-critical British feminists have been protesting this stuff for a while, and their lamentations have fallen on deaf ears. Moreover, they’ve been badgered, brought up on charges, called bigots and TERFs, been doxxed, harassed, and fired from their posts, all for saying that perhaps the LGBT+ agenda is moving too fast through the social and educational system, and could be harming children instead of helping them. But now that an ethnic, religiously practicing minority takes issue with the program, it’s been put on pause. Why?

For one thing, the UK’s Labour Party has been courting Muslim immigrants, using identity politics and favorable immigration policies as a lure. Muslims in England do tend to vote Labour, but that won’t last long if the social attitudes advocated by the leftist party undermine the more conservative values of an immigrant group that tends to replicate the conservative social fabric of the home nations.

Wanting to bolster the ranks of Labour is only part of it. If it were the only aspect that matters, then Labour would not be so quick to dismiss the women who have of late been leaving the party due to conflicts over the LGBT+ agenda in education and health care.

To understand why it matters when an ethnic minority takes issue with an otherwise well-accepted social agenda, but not when English women have problems with it, it’s imperative to look at the driving moral standard of our time: moral relativism. Moral relativism is the idea that there is no objective, moral truth. That each individual’s, or groups’, perspective on right and wrong are, in fact, right and wrong for them; that there’s no objective reason to prefer one set of moral guidelines over any other.

Moral Relativism Meets Privilege Theory

However, when we combine moral relativism with privilege theory, we land in something of a muddle, where there is a reason to elevate the moral position of those who are less privileged over those who are more privileged. That means that, because British women who have a moral view against LGBT+ indoctrination in schools are more privileged than those who are LBGT+ and want the lessons to proceed, the lessons will proceed. But when an ethnic minority that scores less privilege points than English members of the LGBT+ community opposes to the program, their moral perspective supersedes the claim of the LGBT+ group.

It is not the moral perspective that matters here—otherwise the lessons would have stopped when the gender-critical feminists got on board—but the identity of the group. The moral perspective of the most oppressed identity group wins the day, which is certainly a subset of moral relativism because the morals themselves are still irrelevant. It is only the holder of the perspective, and his right to hold any perspective he chooses, that is relevant.

This is an odd application of moral relativism, where greater value is placed on historically underrepresented perspectives within a dominant, Western culture, and lesser value is placed on the grounding moral principles of that dominant, Western culture, but because it makes no claim that any one moral principle itself is more moral than any other, it is still very much within the framework of relativism.

Perhaps, then, it’s time for a refresher on how best to apply the principle of moral relativism, so the morals are given equal weight, as opposed to the identities that espouse them affecting the relevance of a moral view.

Moral Relativism Muddles Everything

The case of the example at hand is a great one to get started with. We have one group of people being told that their view is unacceptable, and another group of people who espouse the same view being told that their view is acceptable. However, in moral relativism, if one culture or group is held to a standard or lack thereof, the standard must be applied to cultures or groups equally. Therefore, if it’s okay to be Muslim and opposed to LGBT+ ideological indoctrination, it’s okay to be a native British female and be opposed to it as well.

Relativism means that all people are only held to the standards to which they hold themselves, perhaps only for the duration for which they hold them. It does not mean holding the members of your own, dominant culture to a set of standards to which you would not hold another culture.

In this example, if the British women are trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) who do not deserve to be heard on gender indoctrination in school, so too are the Muslim parents bigoted TERFs, who do not deserve hearing. Just as mums on Mumsnet (a popular parenting site in the UK) are told that their little Girl Guides can sleep separate from the troop if they are uneasy sharing tents with boys who call themselves girls, so too should the leaders of the LGBT+ program be pleased that the Muslim parents have taken it upon themselves to remove their children from school.

To respect a culture’s right to implement laws and customs in opposition to women’s rights, racial equality, sanctity of life, child labor, and yes, LGBT+ rights simply because there are less of those who subscribe to that culture within the dominant culture of the west, is to not believe in those things at all. If all it takes is for an ethnic minority of religious folks to put the damper on LGBT+ lessons in primary school education, then perhaps those who formulated the lessons don’t really believe it. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they stand up for it against the Muslim parents the same way as they stood up for it against the British ones?

To hold the dominant Western culture to one set of standards, but to hold a culture that opposes the grounding views of Western culture to a different set of standards is to have no basis upon which to hold fast the standards that are essential for free life in a democracy. The West must hold fast to the standards of individual freedom, not group identity, as a driving factor for law making and social interaction.

It is okay to have standards. Without moral standards, liberally applied, there is no way to make judgments, and no way to stand up for what we believe.