[Grammar] Refuse to be

[jigneshbharati]

"Unlike other members of staff, I was urged not to discuss my home life with students. How can we tackle homophobia when we refuse to be honest with young people?"

why do we need " to be " in the sentence? And what grammatical function does it serve?

 

[emsr2d2]

"Unlike other members of staff, I was urged not to discuss my home life with students. How can we tackle homophobia when we refuse to be honest with young people?"

Why do we need "to be" in the sentence? And what grammatical function does it serve?

Jigneshbharati, please use a larger font in your posts - I have enlarged your original and put it in black so that it can be read more easily.

Note my corrections above. It's important to start every sentence with a capital letter. Do not put a space after opening quotation marks and don't put a space before closing quotation marks.

With "refuse" we add "to + verb", because we "refuse to verb".

I refuse to speak to my mother.
Is he going to refuse to do his homework?
We refuse to be honest with young people.
How can we tackle the problem if we refuse to be honest with people?

 

[Tdol]

We can also sometimes use refuse + noun phrase, but that wouldn't work here because honest is an adjective.