Amber Parker, a former English teacher at Franklin High School, was unanimously fired by the El Paso ISD school board after an 18-second clip was posted online. In the clip, she can be heard telling her students not to judge pedophiles and to call them Minor Attracted Persons.
"Stop calling them that. You're not allowed to label people like that. Stop it, Diego," Parker says. "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."
I have to say that I was shocked about this happening in El Paso: not that a teacher would say this, but that she would be fired for it.
While Texas as a whole opposes this sort of nonsense, El Paso is the home of Robert "Beto" O'Rourke, and the district that voted him into Congress.
They're woker than woke.
To hear the El Paso ISD condemn what is widely becoming a leftist talking point gave me some hope.
But a student in the class says the video doesn't give the context of the conversation, which was regarding the play The Crucible, a dramatic retelling of the Salem Witch trials, largely seen as a critique of McCarthyism and the failed attempt to root out communism in the 1940s and 1950s. The student explained,
"She was expressing how it was ridiculous how we might not be able to call people pedophiles. That we will probably have to start calling them MAPs because it can be offensive to them. The class agreed."
So, while the clip gets parents and conservatives riled up and call for the teacher's head, the actual investigation by the school board showed that Parker was teaching her students to ridicule and mock the move to call pedophiles Minor Attracted Persons.
Daniel Call, a member of the board of trustees, initially defended Parker because she was modeling for the class how easy it was to be pressured into taking a position you might not believe, the same way it happened in The Crucible.
"After hearing from some of the students that were in the class, including my own nephew, I believe now that the teacher that appeared to be promoting and normalizing pedophilia was pretending to advocate a position she didn't actually believe in order to challenge the students in preparation for them reading the book The Crucible," Call wrote.
After the board completed its investigation, it seems that Call decided to vote to fire Parker after all. After the vote, he said,
"She should not have strayed as far as she did. Hypothetically, I could have the best lesson plan in the world. But if I don't follow the lesson plan and I deviate into some areas, I shouldn't be teaching about or talking about the lesson plan is kind of pointless."
According to The Post Millennial, he also said "any reasonable person" would have voted to terminate her employment after hearing the evidence.
However, after the investigation, he has since changed his stance and voted in favor of Parker's termination, stating, "Any reasonable person that heard what the seven trustees heard would've voted to terminate Amber Parker."
Parker will have the chance to appeal her firing.
Her husband, Jason, wrote this on a Facebook post by Call.
I happen to be the husband of the teacher in question. I can tell you that we were shaken to the core about these accusations. It is both scary and disturbing that an edited 18 second clip could destroy a 30 year career when taken completely out of context.
She is exemplary as a teacher and truly cares about the students. Needless to say we have spent many sleepless nights because of this cruel release to social media of the 18 seconds. We pray that you and the rest of the board will see this for what it is and not allow and edited video destroy an innocent woman, her career and her family in the process.
So in the end, El Paso is as woke as ever, and we're all reminded that you can't judge a person by an 18-second clip posted on the internet.
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