Catholic Educators’ Group Bans Books with Same-Sex, Divorced Parents — Pope Should Say Something

book_banA Catholic educators’ group responsible for developing Catholic school curricula based on the Common Core State Standards has removed three books from its first-grade plan because they include same-sex and/or divorced parents.

The Cardinal Newman Society’s Catholic Education Daily reports that the National Catholic Educational Association’s Common Core Catholic Identity Initiative (CCCII) has removed The Family Book by Todd Parr, Who’s in a Family? by Robert Skutch, and All Kinds of Families by Norma Simon from its Common Core-based plan for first-grade students, the first two after parental protest. The Common Core State Standards are being adopted by many types of schools; CCCII is working to develop a version for Catholic schools.

Pope Francis was recently named Person of the Year by both TIME magazine and LGBT magazine The Advocate. Maybe he could take a step towards justifying those honors by stating that it is not wrong for children to learn about the very real types of families in the world around them. I’d love for him to go the extra distance and say that these family types are acceptable — current Catholic teaching says they are not — but for a start, he should at least say Catholic schools can indicate that they exist, by allowing books that depict them.

It may be a good sign, however, that the books made it onto the lesson plan in the first place, before they were removed. Does that in itself indicate a sort of progress?

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