Nick Clegg: 'Faith schools should be forced to tackle homophobia'

8.41.12pm GMT Wed 13th Jan 2010

Lib Dem Leader, Nick Clegg, has called on Faith Schools to do more to tackle homophobic bullying.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg's interview with gay magazine Attitude has received widespread coverage in the mainstream media over his stance on faith schools and their attitude to homosexuality.

Clegg stated that all schools - including faith schools - must implement anti-homophobia bullying policies and teach that homosexuality is "normal and harmless".

He also went on to support gay marriage (as opposed to civil partnerships): "If we don't want to discriminate, why do we make differences in language? Language is a hugely important signifier of how we segment society and how you seek to create differences between people. Since we don't want to make differences on this and the law has moved a great deal to do that, we should be linguistically the same too."