Foreign teachers at Indonesian international schools must complete a psychological exam that includes a range of questions related to LGBTQ views and behaviors.
The exam asks teachers whether they agree or disagree with statements such as, “A sexual education curriculum should include all sexual orientations” and “I can be sexually attracted to anyone in the right circumstances.”
Schools just began asking teachers and teacher candidates these questions over the past few weeks, The New York Times reports. While homosexuality is not illegal in most of Indonesia, the questions are legal because a 2015 government regulation prohibits international schools from hiring foreigners who have “an indication of abnormal sexual behavior or orientation.”
The regulation applies to 168 schools that offer an international curriculum. Teachers at these schools are required to take the exam before they are hired and every six years after that.
“For foreign teachers, if the psychologist declares that a candidate has a deviant sexual orientation, certainly the school will not hire that person,” Waadarrahman, an official with the Ministry of Education and Culture, told the Times.
Teachers are also being asked whether they agree with some more explicit statements: “The gender composition of an orgy would be irrelevant to my decision to participate” and “I wouldn’t want to die without having experimented sexually with both men and women.” Another statement concerns Pride: “Celebrations such as gay pride day are ridiculous because they assume an individual’s sexual orientation should constitute a source of pride.”
Each school determines which questions are on the exam and which psychologist administers it. “The recent wave of testing has alarmed some foreign teachers,” the Times reports, but many are too afraid to speak out against it.
Indonesia is becoming increasingly hostile to LGBTQ people, despite once being one of the most accepting countries in the Islamic world. The country has the largest Muslim population in the world, and newly elected vice president Ma’ruf Amin supports the criminalization of homosexuality. In the autonomous province of Aceh, homosexuality is illegal and punishable by caning.
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