The performance of the religious caucus in the controversy about the presence of gender issues at the Municipal Education Plan (PME) in Blumenau 2015

Abstract

The controversy around the theme of gender in MPE’s, in Brazil, originates in the interface between the political and religious spheres. There, the objective is to uncover the political and religious relations around the MPE of the Blumenau city – a municipal/local space of dispute and social interactions that reflected the national articulation between evangelicals and Catholics. To do so, we resorted to documentary and bibliographic research on religious political activism in Brazil and to the case study of Complementary Law no 1.463. The results show that there was an organization of political-religious activists at the federal, state and municipal levels to remove all the notions of gender and diversity of the MPE. The purpose of withdrawing notions from education documents, by the religious
bench, is a way to defend their “political flags”, to legitimize their electorate, and to delegitimize alternative flags. With that, we concluded that the “struggle” against the so-called "gender ideology" repeats the same mobilization against the "communist peril" of the 1988 constitutional period and the 1989 presidential election.