Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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1. 

   You get drivel about aliens, abduction etc from all sorts of people, not just Christians – there are atheists, agnostics…

2. 

   […] last time I had had occasion to write about Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, above, was three years ago…

3. 

   Whatever is presented on the BBC, and I must admit I do not watch the TV, the fact is that…

4. 

   “The curriculum had already drawn tensions among the county’s religious parents, with some worrying about appropriateness and arguing the material…

5. 

   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

AS result of a decision by the UK’s Teaching Regulation Authority, “elder” Robert Headley, inset above—sacked by an East London school for the abhorrent views he expressed on his YouTube channel—has been prohibited from teaching indefinitely and “cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England.“

According to My London Headley had taught Design and Technology at Rokeby School for boys in Canning Town from 2008 but was suspended under investigation in 2019 after another teacher at the school discovered his YouTube channel and watched a video where he called the LGBTQ+ community and white people “evil”.

In a video called the “DNA of Satan”, Headley said: “Black people like me are the only people who don’t have the DNA of Satan, everyone else does have the DNA of Satan, white people and LGBTQ+ people are evil.”

In another video called “DNA of the Wicked Part 2”, Mr Headley said, “…you do not have to continue following in the religion of Christianity or this Jew religion that these people have made up, because that is of the seed line of Satan.”

In 2018, another staff member known only as Witness C had urged Mr Headley to remove the videos from his YouTube channel after they noticed some of the content had been filmed in one of the school’s classrooms and saw he was wearing an identifiable school badge on his lapel.

Headley was sacked on July 16, 2019 after a panel with the school governors, but he bought forward a claim that he was wrongly dismissed. An employment tribunal report published this month found Headley was not wrongly dismissed as his views do, as the school claimed, go against the school’s values of inclusivity.

The report reads:

We accept that it would be difficult if not impossible to promote values of plurality and openness to students when it was known that a senior teacher publicly denounced LGBTQ+ people, Jews and Catholics as being evil or the descendants or followers of Satan.

There was evidence, which we accepted, that there were a number of openly gay students at the school. We find that there were reasonable grounds for finding that students were aware of the channel.

Headley also taught ‘flat Earth theory’

In his attempts to claim unlawful dismissal, Headley argued he was teaching flat Earth theory to “teach students perspective”. He brought a claim that his dismissal was an act of unlawful direct discrimination because of his religious beliefs

To this end, the employment judge wrote:

We conclude that the treatment of the claimant was not because of religion or belief. The reasons for the dismissal are in our view entirely [separate] from the beliefs themselves and are solely because those beliefs were manifested in a manner entirely inconsistent with [Mr Headley’s] position as a senior teacher at a multicultural secondary school. Had he chosen to express himself in other terms the outcome might have been very different.

The school was entitled to conclude that its own interests in promoting pluralism and the welfare of its students were a sufficient reason for restricting the claimant’s rights to manifest his religious beliefs and/or express his opinions in public in the manner that he did. He must bear responsibility for the way he has chosen to express himself.

Primary port of call for “persecuted” Christians in the UK is the fanatical Christian Concern, renowned for providing legal help to hatemongers such as Headley. I was therefore surprised to find that the teacher is not mentioned by either CC or its sister outfit, The Christian Legal Centre.

Too hot a potato, methinks.

Hat tip: Nigel Jones

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