Scholars call for gender ideology to be removed from public education in Puerto Rico

San Juan, Puerto Rico, Dec 12, 2008 / 21:49 pm

The president of the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Marcelina Velez de Santiago, together with other academic scholars, is supporting a request from various organizations that the government revoke a memo that obliges public schools to include the controversial gender ideology in their curricula.

 

Since it was issued last July, the memo has generated protests from numerous religious and civil groups.

 

In a letter sent to the current governor and to the governor-elect, Velez de Santiago said the memo should be revoked for the good of Puerto Rican children and young people. 

 

She noted that “gender equality” is “not a term that is clearly defined” and is “strongly disputed, criticized and even rejected in the academic environments of America and Europe because of its anthropological, psychological, philosophical and theological implications.  To aim to restructure all curricula in light of a disputable and elusive theory is to launch public schools into a chaotic and anarchic reform in which subjective opinions and arbitrary decisions will prevail,” she said.

 

Likewise, Velez de Santiago warned that “by reducing the sexual difference to a social construct” gender equality goes against “the most elementary evidence of reason that has in reality, and not in theories, its proper object.” Education and social pressure, she said, “can mold different ways of being men and women, they never define being a man and a woman, which is data that is inscribed in nature and in human reality.”

 

She went on to say that to introduce “this theory into public schools would only be justified if the sole purpose were to educate the young generation in the self-determination of their own sexual identity, independent of any objective data, opening the door to the acceptance of any form a affective relationships and sexual practice (homosexual, bisexual, transsexual).”