Laura Pidcock
© Alberto Pezzali / Global Look Press
A string of MPs have been targeted with anti-LGBT leaflets suggesting gay- and trans-inclusive education in schools comes with the same risks as activities such as smoking, adultery and violence.

The pamphlets blasted an "oversexualized" society for promoting LGBT relationships among children in schools, something they branded "thoroughly bad." The leaflets, fronted with a picture of a cigarette package, and which are understood to have been sent to MPs from various parties, debase trans and gay people by comparing the discussion of their activities to "smoking, adultery, lying, violence, stealing or overeating."

According to LGBT news site PinkNews, a distressed parliamentary staff member who received the sheet of paper said it was in"response to the call for evidence on the new compulsory 'Relationships' subjects for every English school."

"I am merely pointing out that the current fashion for praising and promoting a gay or transgender lifestyle among schoolchildren is not a good thing, but a thoroughly bad thing, like promoting smoking, adultery, lying, violence, stealing or overeating, etc," the text reads.

Last year, minister Nick Gibb pledged to make Sex Relationship Education (SRE) inclusive of the LGBT community. SRE became statutory in all schools in 2017.

The leaflet claims that "most gay partnerships are unstable and have a strong tendency to be unstable." They go on to describe the supposed detrimental effects LGBT-inclusive sex and relationship education could have on children, to the extent that it claims it "borders on institutional child abuse."

"The influencing of impressionable young minds brought about by the teaching of such lifestyles erodes the ability to form future stable male/female relationships," it reads.

"Therefore, to encourage or facilitate a child to consider opting for a gay lifestyle or to undergo a medical sex change procedure is bordering on institutional child abuse, which will leave the individual unable to function properly as either sex.

"Contrary to popular opinion, it is far kinder to confirm a child in their true biological sex than in pander to destructive notions in a child's mind; bought on mainly by living in an over sexualised society."

North West Durham MP Laura Pidcock was among the parliamentarians who received the leaflet. She condemned the "homophobic and transphobic" smears, and tweeted: