[ad_1]
Photo: Isac Nóbrega / PR
Three weeks after Abraham Weintraub was ousted from the Education Ministry, President Jair Bolsonaro chose Presbyterian Pastor Milton Ribeiro to replace him in office.
Connected to Mackenzie University and with a Ph.D. in education from USP, Ribeiro assumed the MEC on July 17; his appointment was attributed to Jorge Oliveira, then minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency.
Despite the measured start – quite different from its predecessor – two old videos of the pastor’s remarks were unearthed and immediately became the subject of discussion.
In one of them, published in 2016, Milton asserted that rigor and severity in education is necessary and argued that children should “feel pain”.
“There must be rigor, sorry. Gravity. And I’m going to go one step further, maybe some mothers are mad at me, (the children) must be in pain.“
In another recording, from 2018, Ribeiro said that after the birth control pill was created, sexual freedom caused society to lose its “reference of what is right and what is wrong”.
After a wave of criticism on social networks, the minister deleted the video in which he defended physical punishment.
Nor did he take well a statement in which, under the pretext of defending the teaching profession, he stated: “Today, being a teacher is almost having a declaration that the person could not do anything else”.
When Milton Ribeiro took over the MEC, schools had been closed for four months due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Public school students complained about difficulties in following content remotely and complained of connection problems, among other things.
Commenting on the impact of the pandemic on education and the increase in inequality between rich and poor students, the minister said in an interview: “This is not a MEC problem, it is a Brazilian problem”.
He also said that homosexuality is not normal and attributed it to “misfit families“.
Two days later, the Attorney General’s Office asked the STF to open an investigation to investigate the minister for any crime of prejudice against homosexuals.
For the PGR, the statement could characterize a crime by inducing or inciting discrimination.
Subsequently, Ribeiro tried to justify his statement, apologized and stated that, as a pastor, he has his “own convictions“, But that is”minister of all“.
“I never intended to discriminate or encourage any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation.“He stated.
In early December, Minister Dias Toffoli, of the STF, ordered the Federal Police to take Ribeiro’s testimony about a possible crime of homophobia. The minister rejected the agreement proposed by the PGR to get rid of the investigation.
More news
[ad_2]
