Parents from northern Italy are planning a massive demonstration this weekend to protest new educational programs aimed at helping children overcome “gender stereotypes” by playing role-model games and dressing up as the opposite sex.

Breitbart is reporting on the protest scheduled to take place in Saint John Lateran Square in Rome over new school programs which parents believe are designed to blur the gender identity of their children.

\The parents, who hail from the northern Italian city of Trieste, say a taxpayer-funded elementary school is having children engage in an exercise called “the game of respect” which supposedly adopts guidelines from the European standards on sex education.

The game includes a box containing cards depicting figures of both men and women assuming roles such as housewife and plumber to teach the children that men and women are interchangeable.

Another game called “If he were she and she were he” involves making children exchange the clothes they are wearing in order to experience how they feel as the opposite sex.

Even more infuriating, the school district attempted to conceal the program and its contents from them. The parent of one child specifically asked about gender-based activities at a PTA meeting in February and was told by school administrators that there were none at the school.

The parents are banding together to demand the enforcement of European Article 26 which allows parents to be informed before their children are introduced to courses with themes like those regarding gender theory.

“Parents are also protesting a sex education program for kindergarten students intended to highlight the similarities and differences between boys’ and girls’ bodies,” Breitbart reports.

“The program involves one child lying down and the others placing their hand first on the child’s heart to feel how it beats, then on the diaphragm to feel it rise and fall. The text reads that ‘obviously in the genital area children can see that they are made differently from one another.’ Though the text does not specifically state that the children are to touch each other in the genital area, parents are complaining that it is ‘understood'."

One of the parents, Amedeo Rossetti, calls the demonstration “absolutely essential” because it’s up to parents to defend their right to oversee the education of their children.

The parents will find a very prominent supporter in Rome – Pope Francis – who has repeatedly spoken out about the dangers of gender ideology. Just last weekend he spoke about children who “are beginning to hear strange ideas, a sort of ideological colonization that poisons the soul and the family: we must act against this.”

He went on to describe a recent case where a good Christian couple had to “re-catechize” their children in the evenings to counteract what their children were learning from teachers and textbooks at school.

“This ideological colonization does great harm,” he said, “and can even destroy a society, a country or a family.”

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