A Texas Teacher Was Fired for Making a Remark About Pedophilia. But It's Not What You Might Think [UPDATED]

See below for an update to this story. 

Last week, 53-year-old Amber Parker was fired from her job as a teacher at Franklin High School in El Paso, Texas. No, she did not refuse to use a student’s preferred pronouns. She did not have a Trump flag in the classroom, and she didn’t fail to meet DEI requirements. In this instance, the El Paso Independent School Board of Trustees decided to terminate Parker over a classroom discussion, part of which was recorded and then posted to social media.

KFOX14 reports that a student recorded Parker saying, “Stop calling them [pedophiles] that. You’re not allowed to label people like that. Stop it, Diego. We are not going to call them that. We’re going to call them, MAPs. Minor Attracted Persons. So don’t judge people just because they want to have sex with a 5-year-old.”

At first blush, it may look like Parker was attempting to indoctrinate her students with a healthy dose of DEI. But a student in her class tells a different story, indicating that the clip was taken out of context. The station quoted junior Ryann Ruvalcaba as saying, “She [teacher] was expressing how it was ridiculous how we [society] might not be able to call people pedophiles. That we [society] will probably have to start calling them MAPs because it can be offensive to them [pedophiles]. The class agreed,”  The class was getting ready to read The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller.

The Crucible came out in 1953. It is about the Salem Witch Trials, but the play was also an allegory for McCarthyism. This was a period in American history in which the government investigated many people for alleged ties to the Communist Party. I know that there are people out there who can give me mounds of evidence that the threat was real, but that it is another story for another time. Miller was talking about the dangers of “witch-hunting.” And you can ask anyone about witch-hunting who has been the target of the Twitter mob, higher education policies, or any number of things.

If Parker was advocating for pedophiles, then she was rightly shown the gate. But according to her students, she was not. And we only have 18 seconds’ worth of footage to go on. If what the student said is true, Parker was pointing out how language and thought police, along with the hair-trigger outrage machine, have made public debate in America difficult, if not impossible. Parker was highlighting how the proponents of DEI have become so deluded that they refer to pedophiles as “Minor Attracted Persons” to remove the stigma. And it is true. The loudest voices in America now defend and foster all sorts of madness, flood our media and our homes with pronouns and lifestyle choices, and immediately set out to destroy anyone who questions the morality of their agenda.

In other words, it was the right debate but a horribly wrong example.

If the student is correct, Parker should have thought more carefully about her lesson plan and taken a moment to think before she spoke. But we should be teaching more students to think about how language can be distorted, co-opted, and weaponized for an agenda, preferably before they dye their hair magenta, pierce every part of their body, think up their own pronouns, and mutilate their bodies.

Update: The Daily Mail reports that El Paso Independent School District trustee Daniel Call was originally supportive of the teacher but changed his mind. He stated, “There were more things that the public may not know about that was included on the closed findings.” So, according to Call, there was fire to go along with the smoke, and the move by the district seems to be apropos. As I mentioned above, if there was a serious problem, Parker should have been shown the gate. And apparently, there were, and she was.

But it raises another question: If Parker’s actions were that egregious, don’t the parents have a right to know? And how long were these things going on in the classroom without anyone’s knowledge? Moreover, how did these things stay hidden for so long? When it comes to the care of children, there should never be “things” that the public, and in particular the parents, do not know. The parents should know everything. As I have said before, every parent has or should have the right to walk into their child’s classroom at any time and know everything that is going on. If this was more than a debate in which the teacher was playing the devil’s advocate, parents, and for that matter, the people who pay the taxes that fund the district deserve, to know.