Loudoun County Public Schools has designated October as LGBTQ+ History Month and is encouraging students, staff and the wider community to celebrate it.

The school board adopted the proclamation in Virginia’s third-largest district. It encourages the school community to “honor and celebrate the rich history and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community.”

The language runs past the month itself. The proclamation asks for that celebration “during LGBTQ+ History Month and throughout the school year.”

It also commits the district to a “safe, supportive, inclusive and affirming environment” and states that the district “rejects discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation or gender expression.”

The observance includes National Coming Out Day, which fell on October 1.

The district told Fox News Digital that the proclamation contains no requirements for students.

That defense is accurate and it is also beside the point, which is the whole argument in this district compressed into one sentence.

A proclamation is not a curriculum mandate. No child will be graded on it and no teacher is obliged to build a lesson around it.

What it does is tell every principal, teacher and student in the system what the school board’s official position is. The word in it is celebrate, not tolerate, and not respect.

Parents who object are not objecting to a requirement. They are objecting to a government body that teaches their children instructing those children on which views to hold about human sexuality.

The district’s answer is that nobody has to participate. The parents’ answer is that a nine-year-old cannot tell the difference between what the school celebrates and what the school expects.

Loudoun is not a random choice of venue for this fight either. It has spent years as the national example of what happens when a board and its parents stop speaking the same language.

The district has faced sustained parental criticism over transgender facility policies and over students socially transitioning at school.

Some of that history runs directly into the Justice Department report released the same day on the FBI opening assessments of parents who spoke at school board meetings.

The proclamation stands. The next board meeting will be louder than the last one.