The SJR 6 Joint Resolution Promoting the 3rs Framework of Rights, Responsibility, and Respect in Classrooms, if you go by the sound of it, seems like a bill that could inspire folks from both sides of the aisle to shake hands over. But if you click through the Utah 3Rs Project website, you’ll see a pattern emerge that isn’t all that tolerant of religious diversity, despite claims to that fact.
The Utah State Legislature should be very cautious before promoting “vendor-specific” legislation on which to base teacher instructional training , and the Utah 3Rs Project is the case in point.
In 2022, a Utah teacher testified in a legislative hearing to the anti-LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) nature of the training she and other teachers received from Utah 3Rs representatives. At one point in the training, the picture that follows was shown to teachers, who were forbidden to look away, and further instructed to “sit in their discomfort.”
Also telling is Scenario 3 from the website. Scenario 3 describes the following:
A Latter-day Saint (Mormon) parent has a child being bullied. Parent wants to pass anti-bullying legislation. A gay pastor hears about the legislation. Pastor is more concerned that kids being bullied because they are gay will be outed to their parents (and end up rejected and homeless) if the reason for the bullying is revealed, which she considers worse than kids being bullied in the first place.
How is this scenario “resolved?” The parent appeases the pastor’s concerns and makes an exception to not outing bullied gay kids to protect those kids from…their religiously intolerant parents.
The baseline assumptions underlying this video are both patently anti-LDS as well as anti-parent. But somehow this is considered a model example of “respectful” religious dialogue.
This is just one among many examples on the Utah 3Rs site curriculum, which raises the question: why would the state legislatively endorse a curriculum that undermines religion as intolerant through the subtext of its training materials?
Critical Race theory training through 3Rs
This article, from Place for All Utah, affirms some of the key underlying goals of 3RsUtah.org, among which is that:
“Teachers will also explore Utah’s changing demographics and learn how to recognize and counter their own unconscious bias.”
This next image demonstrates the Utah 3Rs Project’s embracing of identity politics and intersectionality as a key dynamic of “religious identity formation.”
The dogmatic strategy and practice of relabeling people’s personally-held religious convictions as “unconscious bias” and of invoking sectarian Critical Race Theory philosophies of “intersectionality” is something the State of Utah will be subsidizing, ideologically and infrastructurally, through our children’s schools should this resolution pass.
