George Washington University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter gathered on campus in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10 “for a vigil in honor of our [Hamas] martyrs” who attacked Israel days earlier. Organizers encouraged students to wear masks to hide their faces. (Photo: The Daily Signal)
WASHINGTON — George Washington University students held a “Vigil for the Martyrs of Palestine” on Tuesday evening where they mourned the Hamas terrorists killed attacking Israel. The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter gathered in Kogan Plaza as dusk fell on Washington, D.C., “for a vigil in honor of our martyrs.” Organizers encouraged the students to bring posters, flowers, flags, and a mask or keffiyeh (Palestinian headdress) to hide their faces.
Video footage captured by The Daily Signal team shows the leader of the group chanting various pro-Palestine and anti-Israel slogans into a megaphone, including “Zionism has got to go,” “Intifada! Intifada!” (Arabic for uprising or rebellion), and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free.”
As of February 2023, student Lance Lokas was the president of George Washington University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. Lokas was named in a federal civil rights complaint filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights accusing the university of perpetuating anti-Palestinian racism.
His allegations against the university were related to a pro-Palestine protest that the university said “appeared targeted to members of our community based on their Jewish faith or their affiliation with Hillel” with signs and slogans such as “DECOLONIZE PALESTINE” and “SETTLERS F— OFF. STOP THE ANNEXATION OF PALESTINE.”
“We were trying to disrupt the event to make clear that we don’t support war criminals and Israeli military leadership on our campus,” Lokas told Jewish Currents earlier this year.
Students attending Tuesday evening’s events largely covered their faces with medical face masks, apparently to obscure their identities. One young woman who attended the vigil with her hair and face covered told The Daily Signal that the masking would make it more difficult for authorities to track any attendees down.
George Washington University has not responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal regarding the protest or a controversial statement put out by Students for Justice in Palestine.
“This past weekend, we witnessed them break free, tearing down the prison walls and making it known to the world: WE WILL BE CAGED NO LONGER,” said a statement from the student group aligning itself with Hamas. That statement praises the invasion as “history in the making” and “the beginning of a new era in our struggle.”
“GW Students for Justice in Palestine maintains unwavering support for our people’s resistance, in all its forms,” the statement said. “Every single act of resistance moves us closer to the liberation of our homeland. We will never capitulate to the colonizer or his sympathizers, and we stand firm and steadfast in support of our people’s right to resist. We call upon all our people and those in solidarity with us to join us in this struggle.”
After the Palestine Vigil concluded at George Washington U, @MaryMargOlohan and I tried to ask the leaders if they would explain why their bullhorn had a “pride” flag when you would be killed for being LGBT in Palestine.
Additionally, a toolkit released by the national Students for Justice in Palestine organization calls for the student movement to organize a national day of resistance on college campuses across the U.S. and Canada. The organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“We as Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement,” the toolkit messaging says in bold. “This is a moment of mobilization for all Palestinians. We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of Palestinians on the ground.”
At least six chapters of the student group have already announced such events for Oct. 12, according to the Anti-Defamation League: Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Butler Universityin Indiana, University of Louisville in Kentucky, University of Binghamton in New York, and the University of Virginia.
“We must continue to resist directly, through dismantling Zionism and wielding the political power that our organizations hold on our campuses and in our communities,” the toolkit says. “We are asking chapters to host demonstrations on campus/in their community in support of our resistance in Palestine and the national liberation struggle—one which they play a critical role in actualizing.”
If a protest is not possible, the national Students for Justice in Palestine encourages other forms of engagement, such as a sit-in, “disruption,” or “educational event.”
The Anti-Defamation League expressed concerns about such tactics: “Although these are all nonviolent tactics, they raise the real possibility of creating a hostile environment for Jewish students, and the confrontational spirit that permeates the toolkit raises the concern that these actions could lead to acts of harassment or vandalism targeting Jewish students and organizations.”
Jesus Jara, school superintendent for Clark County, Nevada, signed a Defense of Democracy pledge supporting “educators” over parents when it comes to class and library materials. Defense of Democracy has demonized the parental rights group Moms for Liberty. Pictured: Jara speaks at a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Ranch for Children in Boulder City, Nevada. (Photo: Clark County School District)
As Moms for Liberty galvanized concerned parents across the country, a left-leaning group called Defense of Democracy sprouted up to oppose the growing parental rights movement. Now, a Nevada superintendent has become the first top school district leader to sign this new organization’s pledge to put “education professionals” ahead of parents when it comes to class materials.
“We serve all families and all kids from all walks of life,” Jara, who leads the fifth-largest school district in the country with more than 300,000 enrolled students, said upon signing the pledge.
The pledge doesn’t explicitly oppose parental rights groups, but Defense of Democracy, the organization behind it, has compared Moms for Liberty to the Ku Klux Klan. A member of the Clark County school board also has condemned Moms for Liberty as a “cancer.”
Jara didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s multiple requests for comment on the pledge, Defense of Democracy, and Moms for Liberty.
The pledge opens with a declaration of diversity and states: “I recognize that our LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and families of color [sic] face significant threats from extremist groups. I pledge to represent and protect the civil rights of all members of my constituency” [emphasis original].
The pledge emphasizes that an “excellent public education system” is the “cornerstone of a fully functioning society” and declares support for “teachers, librarians, and other educators.”
It notes that “parents should be involved in and have input regarding their own child’s education,” but insists that parental input “does not extend to other children within the school system” [emphasis original].
“By signing this pledge I acknowledge that our education professionals are best qualified to make decisions regarding materials included in their classrooms and libraries,” the pledge concludes.
Parents across the country have raised the alarm about sexually explicit books in school libraries. Although Defense of Democracy doesn’t take a position on a specific book, its prioritizing of “education professionals” over parents when it comes to educational materials suggests a stance aligned with groups such as PEN America and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Those left-leaning organizations claim books have been “banned” in schools over their racial or LGBTQ+ content, even though a Heritage Foundation report found that the books in question remain widely available in schools. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
Karen Svoboda, president and CEO of Defense of Democracy, told The Daily Signal that her organization “does not endorse candidates.”
“Our Pledge to Protect our Public Schools is a promise that any candidate or elected official should be comfortable making, as it is simply a promise to give a voice to every constituent in their district, regardless of race, gender, religion, or political party,” Svoboda said. “We are grateful to everyone who has made this promise.”
Defense of Democracy’s “Statement of Beliefs” stipulates that although the group “does not take stands regarding specific books,” it does stand with “educators who are trained to decide which books are appropriate for their classrooms.” The group also states that “information about the human experience—including gender identity, differing spiritual beliefs, and accurate historical facts—should be part of all levels of education.”
According to the “About” page on its website, Defense of Democracy launched as a response to Moms for Liberty, which the organization brands a “hate group.”
Last month, the organization shared a meme comparing Moms for Liberty to the Ku Klux Klan.
Karen Svoboda, president and CEO of Defense of Democracy, cited the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision to brand Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist” group.
“In June 2023, Moms for Liberty was declared an ‘anti-government extremist organization’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Defense of Democracy agrees with this assessment,” Svoboda said, linking to the SPLC’s website.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents.
In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward to call the organization’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Seven years earlier, in 2012, a terrorist with a gun used the “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the organization targeted by the gunman on its “hate map.”
The SPLC put parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education on its “hate map” in June, condemning them as part of an “anti-student inclusion movement.” This attack built on a previous article in which an SPLC analyst compared the parental rights movement to the “uptown Klans” of white southerners who supported segregation after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation of schools is unconstitutional.
FOR THE RECORD. The Ku Klux Klan was formed by slave owning democrats in the South in rebellion over Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Not only did Jara sign Defense of Democracy’s pledge, but Clark County school board member Linda Cavazos also demonized Moms for Liberty. Cavazos shared an article about Moms for Liberty online, commenting: “Founded in Florida—what a surprise. They will not win here.”
“Their hateful comments about our gender diverse students and our educators will not be tolerated here,” the school board member added. “They are a cancer that we absolutely will not allow to spread in our community.”
Founded in Florida-what a surprise. They will not win here. Their hateful comments about our gender diverse students and our educators will not be tolerated here. They are a cancer that we absolutely will not allow to spread in our community. pic.twitter.com/rVaxfJCSDP
Neither Cavazos nor the other six members of the school board responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice defended her organization from these attacks and questioned the motives of Defense of Democracy.
“In the fight for the protection of parental rights there will always be those who choose to call names and point fingers,” Justice told The Daily Signal. “We will continue to stand up for the rights of parents and the protection of our children.”
She drew attention to Moms for Liberty’s own pledge advancing parental rights:
I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents including, but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach, and secure parental rights at all levels of government.
“Our parental pledge is focused on supporting and protecting children and parents, and we will continue to encourage our elected officials to sign our pledge,” Justice added. “We will not stand down in this fight. We do not coparent with the government.”
“Why are the teachers unions and Defense of Democracy opposing parental rights?” she asked.
The Defense of Democracy pledge in full (emphasis original):
I acknowledge that my constituency is made up of individuals from all religions, cultural backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, and walks of life. I recognize that our LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and families of color face significant threats from extremist groups. I pledge to represent and protect the civil rights of all members of my constituency.
I acknowledge that an excellent public education system—including access to information—is the cornerstone of a fully functioning society. I pledge to support and, when necessary, advocate for teachers, librarians, and other educators within my public school system.
Parents should be involved in and have input regarding their own child’s education. However, this right does not extend to other children within the school system. By signing this pledge I acknowledge that our education professionals are best qualified to make decisions regarding materials included in their classrooms and libraries.
The complete Moms for Liberty pledge:
I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents including, but not limited to, the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach, and secure parental rights at all levels of government.
A Waukesha County Circuit Court ruled Tuesday in favor of Wisconsin parents, deciding that a Wisconsin school district “abrogated” parents’ rights when it decided to socially affirm their child against their wishes. Stock photo, Getty Images.
A Waukesha County Circuit Court ruled Tuesday in favor of Wisconsin parents, deciding that a Wisconsin school district “abrogated” parents’ rights when it decided to socially “affirm” their daughter as a transgender boy against their wishes.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, two sets of Wisconsin parents had sued Kettle Moraine School District, accusing the district of violating their parental rights by “adopting a policy to allow, facilitate, and affirm a minor student’s request to transition to a different gender identity at school without parental consent and even over the parents’ objection.”
Circuit Court Judge Michael Maxwell granted the parents’ motion for summary judgment Monday, ruling on the merits of the case without a trial. His ruling and order, which the clerk filed Tuesday, said that the case dealt with “whether a school district can supplant a parent’s right to control the healthcare and medical decisions for their children.”
“The well established case law in that regard is clear,” he ruled. “Kettle Moraine can not.”
The judge concluded: “The current policy of handling these issues on a case-by-case basis without either notifying the parents or by disregarding the parents’ wishes is not permissible and violates fundamental parental rights.”
Maxwell ruled in favor of the parents and issued an order preventing Kettle Moraine School District from “allowing or requiring staff to refer to students using a name or pronouns at odds with the student’s biological sex, while at school, without express parental consent.”
The parents’ lawsuit, filed in the Waukesha County Circuit Court in November 2021, alleged that Kettle Moraine School District violated the constitutionally protected rights of one set of parents when it allegedly pushed their 12-year-old daughter toward a significant life decision she was not prepared to make by socially affirming her claimed gender identity against her parents’ wishes.
Another set of parents mentioned in the suit expressed concerns that the district would push their two children towards gender transition in the same fashion.
“I am so grateful the Court has found that this policy harms children and undermines the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” Tammy, the mother of one of the children named in the lawsuit, told The Daily Signal. (She asked that her last name be withheld to protect the family’s privacy.)
“Our daughter experienced increased anxiety and depression and her school responded to this by disregarding our parental guidance,” she explained. “Since leaving the school and allowing our daughter time to work through her mental health concerns, she has been able to healthily thrive and grow. Parents should be concerned when school districts disregard their concerns and override the voice and role of parents.”
That 12-year-old girl began experiencing “rapid onset gender dysphoria” as well as “significant anxiety and depression” in December 2020, attorneys from ADF and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said in a May 2021 letter to members of the school district.
Her parents temporarily withdrew her from Kettle Moraine Middle School so she could attend a mental health center and process what was going on, but the center allegedly affirmed to her that she was actually a boy and encouraged her to transition. So, in early January, according to the letter, she told her parents that she wanted to use a boy name and boy pronouns at school.
The girl’s parents decided that “immediately transitioning would not be in their daughter’s best interest,” the letter said, and they told their daughter that they wanted her to explore the cause of her feelings before taking such a significant step. They also asked the staff at the school to continue using her legal name and female pronouns.
“But the District refused to honor their request,” the attorneys wrote, and the parents “were told that, pursuant to District policy, school staff would be required to address their daughter using a male name and pronouns if that’s what she wanted.”
The parents then had no choice but to withdraw her from the school district and to distance her from the mental health center and therapist she had been seeing, the letter said, “concerned that daily affirmation of a male identity could harm their daughter.”
Kettle Moraine School District did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. But the parents’ legal teams hailed the news as a “groundbreaking legal victory” for parental rights.
“This victory represents a major win for parental rights,” said Luke Berg, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty deputy counsel, said in a statement Tuesday. “The court confirmed that parents, not educators or school faculty, have the right to decide whether a social transition is in their own child’s best interests. The decision should be a warning to the many districts across the country with similar policies to exclude parents from gender transitions at school.”
Kate Anderson, director of the ADF Center for Parental Rights, emphasized that “parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children is one of the most basic constitutional rights every parent holds dear.”
“We are seeing more and more school districts across the country not only ignoring parents’ concerns but actively working against them,” she warned. “The court was right to respect the serious concerns of these parents by holding that Kettle Moraine School District’s policy, which undermines parents and harms children, violates the Wisconsin Constitution.”
Mary Margaret Olohan is a senior reporter for The Daily Signal. She previously reported for The Daily Caller and The Daily Wire, where she covered national politics as well as social and cultural issues. Email her at marymargaret.olohan@dailysignal.com.
The secretary of the Department of Education criticized some parents who protested against controversial curricula at school boards, and he was taken to task on social media for it.
Miguel Cardona made the comments during an interview with the Associated Press when asked if the criticism aimed at school boards had gotten worse in recent years.
“I’ve never seen it where it is now. There was civility. We could disagree. We could have healthy conversations around what’s best for kids,” said Cardona.
“I respect differences of opinion. I don’t have too much respect for people that are misbehaving in public and then acting as if they know what’s right for kids,” he added.
“Or people that have a problem when we’re trying to provide some support for folks who are buried in debt and complain about a $10,000 support for thousands of their constituents, but are OK taking over a million dollars in loan forgiveness themselves as an elected official,” Cardona said. “That hypocrisy, I want to call it out.”
Cardona had made similar comments in the past when he tweeted that teachers knew what was best for children.
“Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers,” he wrote in May.
Cardona was lambasted at that time for those comments, and he was similarly pilloried over his new comments.
“Secretary Cardona has shown us through his actions that he has no respect for parents or parental rights. Now he has sealed the deal with his words,” responded the account for Moms for Liberty.
“This is how Biden’s Secretary of Education views parental rights. The Left thinks the government knows better than parents when it comes to the education and upbringing of our children,” replied Jessica Anderson of the Sentinel Action Fund.
“Secretary Cardona says he doesn’t respect parents who think they know what’s best for their kids. Huh? This is disqualifying. He should be fired today,” read another critical missive.
Cardona was also roundly mocked and ridiculed in April when he was challenged to provide the definition of a woman during a congressional hearing and he refused to provide one numerous times.
Here’s the video of Cardona’s comments:
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on attacks on education and teaching slaverywww.youtube.com
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The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing into so-called “book bans.” My message to Congress was simple: books aren’t being banned, and it’s good that they are.
For years now, the left has been having a field day crying foul over parents who are concerned about what they’re finding in school libraries. Democrat pollsters have convinced their clients that this is a winning issue, and President Joe Biden even featured it in his re-election launch video. But Republican Senator Kennedy and I demolished that narrative with one simple trick: we read the books out loud.
When Fox News played clips of Senator Kennedy, it had to bleep out so much of it that it sounded like an emergency broadcast message. I took no pleasure in (probably) being the first, and hopefully the last, to read words like “butt-plugs” and “strap-on dildos” into the Congressional Record. But if discussion of these items have no place in the U.S. Senate, then maybe they also have no place in public schools?
Amazingly, by the end of the hearing even the Democrat Senators seemed to agree. Senator Durbin, who called the hearing, insisted that no one supported having obscene or pornographic materials floating around in school libraries. So, it really should be case closed, then. Because that’s what this issue is truly all about.
The Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene, Madison Marino, and I published a report closely examining so-called “book bans.” The term itself is deeply misleading, as the media has accepted the expansive definition of “ban” offered by PEN America, a leftwing advocacy organization. According to PEN, if a book is removed, reviewed, and then put back on the shelves, it has been “banned.” And if the school moves the book to a guidance counselor’s office, or places a parental permission requirement on it, it has been “banned.” So, we set out to determine how many of PEN’s alleged 2,532 “banned” books were actually still available. The answer: about three fourths of them.
Don’t believe it when the media tells you that “book banning” has anything to do with race. Parents have certainly objected to books dealing with race. For example, PEN America listed the Black Lives Matter-inspired The Hate U Give as the fifth-most banned book. But we found it available in every single school library in question. Parents might object, but school districts aren’t obliging.
And don’t believe it when the media tells you that “book banning” is all about LGBT issues. As the Washington Post documented, only seven percent of book challenges contained the term “LGBT” without also containing the term “sexual.” (Although those challenges may have contained terms like pornographic or obscene.) All of the top 10 most removed books contained extremely sexually explicit passages, and more than half regarding heterosexual relations.
Why are we even having this debate, then? Well, part of the answer is that the Democrats thought they had a winning rhetorical issue. “Book banning” certainly polls badly. And it’s hard to argue against when the media won’t even allow you to say what’s actually in these books. So, you can understand the cynical calculus behind Democratic politicians lining up to effectively insist that anyone who objects to porn in school libraries is a bigot.
But there’s actually something deeper and more intentional to it. Senator Mike Lee played a clip of Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Caldwell-Stone advocated for: “sustained messaging that reframes this issue, that takes it away from the idea that these are inappropriate for minors, or sexually inappropriate for minors, and promote them as diverse materials and programming that are about inclusion.”
Why reframe obscene material as “diverse” or “inclusive”? Because of a political agenda. Emily Drabinski, the head of the American Library Association, is a self-proclaimed “Marxist” who recently declared that “public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing [and] I think libraries really do too. … We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”
A hundred years ago, Marxists pursued a strategy of leveraging sex education to break familial bonds and refashion society. It might sound too strange to say that something similar is going on today. And yet, America’s most prominent sex education organization is literally named “SEICUS: Sex Ed for Social Change.”
Most parents would not embrace the notion that public employees should teach their children lessons about sex on behalf of political agendas. Indeed, most parents would not approve in general of public employees providing their children with sexually explicit material for any reason. And yet, Democrat politicians and the media have been running defense on behalf of porn in school libraries for their own partisan gain.
Maybe that will stop soon. But sadly, too many in public education are ideologically committed to the proposition that exposing kids to sexually explicit material is good because it’s “inclusive.”
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on education reform, specifically K–12 and early childhood education.
Hundreds of students in the Perkiomen Valley School District north of Philadelphia staged a walkout on Friday, in response to the school board allowing students who identify as transgender to use whichever bathroom they like. (Photo: FroggyFrogg/Getty Images)
High school students in the Keystone State are protesting transgender ideology in their bathrooms. Hundreds of students in the Perkiomen Valley School District north of Philadelphia staged a walkout on Friday, in response to the school board allowing students who identify as transgender to use whichever bathroom they like.
A policy barring students who identify as transgender from accessing bathrooms that don’t correspond to their biological sexes was proposed at a school board meeting Monday of last week. After a four-hour board meeting, five board members voted against the policy and four voted in favor of it.
John Ott, the student who organized the subsequent walkout, explained, “Kids were upset. Girls—we wanted to protect them. They were upset. They didn’t want men in their bathroom.”
Ott’s mother, Stephanie, added, “The safety of females is so important and these students that stood out that walked out, they are to be commended. They have courage and they exercised their First Amendment rights. This is about protecting our children and our privacy and boys and girls. It’s simple biology.”
Student Victoria Rudolph said, “There needs [sic] to be some changes. It’s just uncomfortable, seeing 19-year-old men or 18-year-old men in the bathroom.”
The Perkiomen Valley walkout comes in the midst of a nationwide debate over the transgender agenda in classrooms, including in school bathrooms.
In California, for example, the state’s attorney general is suing school districts for implementing parental notification policies, requiring staff and faculty to alert parents when students attempt to socially transition genders, including when students use bathrooms that don’t correspond to their biological sexes.
Despite this, a growing number of Golden State school boards are implementing these policies, and parents have introduced ballot initiatives to combat pro-trans legislation. Those ballot initiatives make parental notification policies mandatory and require students who identify as transgender to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams that correspond to their biological sexes.
In August, a judge in New Jersey also barred Garden State school districts from implementing parental notification policies, despite a wide number of New Jersey residents—including a majority of Democrats—favoring such policies. In Maryland, a federal judge ruled that parents can’t opt their children out of LGBT propaganda sessions in elementary schools, even when invoking religious liberty.
Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia first drew national attention to the transgenderism-in-schools debate back in 2021 after implementing numerous pro-trans policies and firing or suspending teachers for refusing to go along with the program.
Perhaps most notably, the school board was intensely criticized for allowing at least two female students to be raped and sexually assaulted by a male student who identified as “gender fluid,” and attempting to cover up the assaults.
The first rape occurred in a women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School, when a 12-year-old girl was forcibly sodomized by a male student. Later, when attempting to approve a policy allowing trans-identifying students to use the bathrooms of their choice, the school board denied any knowledge of the rape, even when questioned by the victim’s father.
Just as students are now doing in Pennsylvania, students at Broad Run High School in Loudoun County staged a walkout after the school board’s complicity in the rape was revealed.
YouTube video, Fellowship of Christian Athletes – Screenshot
A Christian student athletic club in California was denigrated, protested, then thrown off campus in 2019 on account of its traditional views on marriage. When the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and student leaders’ requests to have their club reinstated fell on deaf ears, they took legal action with the help of the religious liberty group Becket and the Christian Legal Society.
In a major upset for LGBT activists and other cultural imperialists in the San Jose Unified School District, a federal court delivered the evangelical FCA a decisive win Wednesday, ordering the reinstatement of its chapter at Pioneer High School.
Rigo Lopez, the local FCA leader for Bay Area schools, responded to the victory for religious liberty, stating, “FCA is excited to be able to get back to serving our campuses. … Our FCA teams have long enjoyed strong relationships with teachers and students in the past, and we are looking forward to that again.”
Daniel Blomberg, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said, “This is a huge win for these brave kids, who persevered through adversity and never took their eye off the ball: equal access with integrity.”
“Today’s ruling ensures religious students are again treated fairly in San Jose and throughout California,” added Blomberg.
No room for Christian beliefs
The Fellowship of Christian Athletes student club, founded in 1954, seeks to “lead every coach and athlete into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and His church.”
Despite meeting at San Jose Unified School District schools in California for over a decade without incident, the group was thrown off campus after a single social studies teacher at Pioneer High School denounced the organization during class time, claiming its views on marriage were “bulls***.”
Peter Glasser, the teacher in question, had learned that while all students were welcome to participate in FCA events and to join its ranks, chapter leaders were required to affirm the group’s statements of faith and sexual purity, reported the Washington Examiner.
Among the statements of faith, listed on the FCA’s website, are the declarations that: the Bible is the word of God; there is “only one God who eternally exists in three persons”; Jesus Christ is God; and “acceptance of Jesus Christ and the corresponding renewal of the Holy Spirit is the only path to salvation.”
The sexual purity statement required that leaders affirm that “sexual intimacy is to be expressed only within the context of marriage,” defined as “exclusively the union of one man and one woman.”
According to court documents, in April 2019, Glasser obtained these statements, posted them on the whiteboard in his first period class, and appended a note to them which read, “I am deeply saddened that a club on Pioneer’s campus asks its members to affirm these statements. How do you feel?”
Extra to inviting criticism of Christian students’ beliefs by other students, Glasser, who reportedly suggested the FCA’s beliefs were tantamount to harassment, pressed principal Herb Espiritu to take action.
A school leadership committee, which included Glasser, met on April 30, 2019, determining the FCA’s “pledge” clashed with the “core values” of the high school.
Espiritu brought the decision to the attention of SJUSD administrators, then two days later informed the student leaders of the Pioneer FCA that the district had stripped the group of its approval.
Within weeks, all three FCA student clubs in the district had been labeled as “discriminatory” and similarly booted off campus whilst identitarian groups, LGBT activist groups, and even the Satanic Temple Club remained unscathed, notwithstanding their own dogmatic views and rules.
Battle in the courts
Two students filed a lawsuit in April 2020, seeking to restore the club’s equal access to meet on campus. A district court shut them down. They nevertheless persevered and appealed the decision.
On Aug. 29, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in the Christian students’ favor, concluding that the “plaintiffs [were] likely to succeed on their Free Exercise claims alleging that the defendants have selectively enforced their non-discrimination polices.”
Accordingly, the Ninth Circuit Court reversed the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California’s earlier denial of the FCA’s motion for a preliminary injunction and directed the district court to order the group’s reinstatement.
The San Jose Unified School District did not handle the decision well.
Rather than accept that it could no longer flout the First Amendment and the Equal Access Act by way of discriminating against the FCA’s religious leadership standards, it shut down all student groups for the fall 2022 semester and appealed the decision.
Christian virtue prevails
On Jan. 18, 2023, the the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case before a panel of eleven federal judges.
In a 9-2 decision issued Wednesday, the court killed perhaps the SJUSD’s last hope of boxing out the Christian group, ruling that the FCA and other such clubs do not have to surrender on matters of faith to enjoy equal access to campus.
“The District, rather than treating (the Fellowship of Christian Athletes) like comparable secular student groups whose membership was limited based on criteria including sex, race, ethnicity and gender identity, penalized it based on its religious beliefs,” said the ruling.
The court stressed that “[i]ndividual preferences based on certain characteristics and criteria serve important purposes for these groups”; that just as the “Senior Women club” can have all-female members and various honor clubs can require benchmarks pertaining to members’ moral character, “it makes equal sense that a religious group be allowed to require that its leaders agree with the group’s most fundamental beliefs.”
In her opinion, Judge Consuelo María Callahan noted that while anti-discrimination policies “serve worthy causes … those policies may not themselves be utilized in a manner that transgresses or supersedes the government’s constitutional commitment to be steadfastly neutral to religion.”
Accordingly, “[u]nder the First Amendment’s protection of free exercise of religion and free speech, the government may not ‘single out’ religious groups ‘for special disfavor’ compared to similar secular groups,” wrote Callahan.
Judge Danielle J. Forrest called the SJUSD’s treatment of FCA student members “shocking and fundamentally at odds with bedrock principles that have guided our Republic since the beginning.”
Concerning the FCA’s win Wednesday, Steve McFarland, director of the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom, said, “Public schools should respect every student’s religious beliefs and treat every student with dignity. … We are grateful the court has reaffirmed this foundational right of every student.”
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Public schools across the country are using politically one-sided questions to ideologically screen potential teachers, according to a survey of nearly 70 public schools by the National Opportunity Project (NOP). Instead of merely selecting the most qualified candidates, these discriminatory hiring practices evaluate would-be teachers by their alignment with so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) goals.
Documents obtained by NOP show public schools advertised ideological requirements in their job postings with coded language seeking “equity-literate educator[s]” who will work at “dismantling systemic racism” with a “commitment to social justice.” Denver Public Schools dictated that applicants should “have an anti-racist mindset and will work to dismantle systems of oppression and inequity in our community.”
These standards invite educators of a particular ideological affiliation to pursue jobs in public schools while deterring other candidates. “They position teachers as soldiers who share responsibility for upending societal barriers,” the report noted. “Their message to applicants is clear: Be prepared to join our crusade, or don’t apply.”
Kristen Williamson, communications director at the National Opportunity Project, told The Federalist schools are “possibly breaking the law” by ideologically filtering potential teachers.
The vetting continues in the interview process, in which candidates may be asked “loaded and presumptive” questions. Some of the questions NOP uncovered asked applicants how they would lead conversations about race in the classroom and incorporate unscientific fads like “gender diversity.”
“Perspectives that diverge from or fail to mesh with the district’s views on equity” are “judged poorly,” NOP concluded.
According to a Fairfax County Public Schools screening rubric, an “outstanding candidate” is someone who “provides concrete examples of strategies of their commitment to serve to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and understands “their role in breaking down barriers.”
One prompt from City Schools of Decatur in Georgia asks how applicants would shut down parents who object to their racially divisive curricula:
An upset parent emails you regarding a classroom discussion with your students about Critical Race Theory. They accuse you (the teacher) of anti-Americanism, changing ‘real history,’ and of making White children feel marginalized and attacked. Please discuss your course of action and draft a response to this parent.
The hiring team then must ensure “that there is at least one person of color and one woman or gender-fluid person” involved in scoring the response. NOP uncovered several other identity quotes for hiring panels and committees like this one.
“The effect of these policies is that teachers in many of the country’s K-12 schools are selected partly based on subjective, quasi-political, and sometimes illegal criteria that have nothing to do with reading, writing, and math,” Williamson said, noting that these teachers are “handpicked based at least in part on their acceptance and evangelism of one side’s political and social orthodoxy.”
Sometimes applicants aren’t just filtered by their beliefs, but by their physical characteristics. Hinsdale Township High School District 86 in Illinois insists that employees reflect the student body in terms of “race, cultural background, linguistic skill, physical abilities, and disabilities, sex, and sexual identity.”
“Parents and taxpayers must hold school districts accountable regarding teacher hiring standards,” Williamson said. “Ultimately, these same teachers are recruited to be partisan political activists for teachers unions, forcing policies they teach in the classroom on the rest of the country through strikes, lobbying, and electioneering.”
Meet DeDe Duffy. A preschool teacher in Cape Coral, FL. She says she teaches her students that if they don’t like their parents, they can find another family.
Let me cut to the chase: Now more than ever we need to protect parents’ voices inside the classroom. I know I join parents across southern Indiana, and across our country, in feeling increasingly worried as soon as we send our children off to school. It wasn’t always like this. However, as a mother to three school-aged children, I have experienced it myself throughout the years. Conversations surrounding education have evolved, especially conversations about a parent’s voice when they are advocating for their children.
Recently, it feels like the communication lines have been strained, or even severed, between home and school – where our children spend most of their day.
Rep. Erin Houchin proposed the “Parent’s Bill of Rights” to protect schoolchildren. (iStock, File)
Some changes became painfully obvious to parents during the pandemic, as our living rooms became classrooms. Quickly, parents came to realize exactly what their children’s days looked like. Many parents have told me that they were surprised and disappointed by what they learned about their children’s educational experience. And when parents vocalized these concerns in school board meetings, they were often met with silence or dismissed.
As I said on the floor of the House of Representatives, sending a child to a public school does not terminate the parents’ rights at the door. When I worked in child services, I assisted with the care of children in foster care. I saw how the process worked firsthand. When foster parents are caring for children in custody of the state, they can’t give those kids a haircut without permission from the child’s biological parents. Why shouldn’t the same rules apply to our students’ well-being in the classroom?
Here in southern Indiana, we’re lucky. Most of our school districts go above and beyond to communicate with parents and inform them about, and empower them in, their children’s education. Tragically, this is not a universal experience across our country. In fact, one father in Virginia had to learn his daughter was assaulted in a high school bathroom from his child, not the school.
Just last month, a New Jersey judge ruled to block multiple school districts from notifying parents of a child’s gender identity change. Stories like these shouldn’t become the new normal.
That is exactly why House Republicans made commitments to address this problem and pushed for legislation that culminated in H.R. 5, the “Parent’s Bill of Rights.” We heard the pleas of parents across America and knew we couldn’t stand by as parental rights are being eroded in our public schools. I was proud to be an original champion of H.R. 5 and support its swift passage in the House. This bill reaffirmed the fundamental relationship that had long existed between parents and teachers in America – that parents have the right to make informed decisions about their children’s education.
As we highlighted extensively during the House Education and Workforce Committee’s consideration of the bill, The “Parents Bill of Rights” contains five basic principles to ensure: that parents have the right to know what their children are being taught; that parents have the right to be heard; that parents have the right to see the school budget; that parents have the right to protect their children’s privacy; and that parents have a right to keep their children safe.
Furthermore, I was happy to add to this legislation during the committee process with an amendment to require notification of parents when their student isn’t reading at a grade-level proficiency by the end of third grade – an important time when kids start to transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Our child literacy rates are falling behind, and the more parents can help the better. But to help they must be informed.
Years ago, we had no need for this kind of legislative action. But unfortunately, in today’s world this bill is necessary because school districts across the country have failed to deliver on these basic principles. The American education system is failing us. This debate has inspired my colleagues and me to continue to take steps to strengthen our schools and empower parents. For me, this includes actions to expand choices for parents. This is why I will always be a strong supporter of school choice and education savings accounts, which keep parents squarely in the driver’s seat.
Parents know what is best for their student. As members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce say, it’s time to apply our most fundamental principle, freedom, to our most fundamental system, education. This bill reaffirmed the fundamental relationship that had long existed between parents and teachers in America – that parents have the right to make informed decisions about their children’s education.
Now, as a member of the committee, I have a seat at the table for parents inside the committee room. It’s important that we protect and restore parents’ original role in their children’s education, because in the vast majority of cases, no one will be a better advocate for their children than parents. And I, along with my House Republican colleagues, won’t stop until we achieve this mission.
Thankfully, we fought for and delivered a bill to put parents, not bureaucrats, in charge of their children’s education by ensuring access to information, but the fight doesn’t stop there. We will continue to look for partners in our Senate colleagues and other opportunities to restore educational excellence in every school in America.
I won’t stop contending on behalf of my fellow parents because the rights of parents don’t stop at the classroom door.
Congresswoman Erin Houchin represents the 9th Congressional District of Indiana.
Fealty to DEI dogma has become practically mandatory at all levels of higher education, a report in The New York Times shows. Pictured: Students at UC Berkeley, whose DEI hiring requirements have been adopted by universities and colleges throughout the U.S., pass under Sather Gate on campus April 17, 2007. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
College campuses have been dominated by the Left for generations. That’s hardly news to anyone. But a recent news report sheds light on how higher education has been transformed from a general haven of left-wing ideology into an engine of radicalism and revolution in the name of DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The lengthy report in The New York Times, of all places, highlights how the use of DEI statements essentially has allowed schools to create ideological loyalty oaths for new faculty. These tests aren’t being applied only in humanities departments, they’re the norm in science departments and all others too.
California—upholding its reputation for being at the cutting edge of anti-civilizational lunacy and tyranny—has predictably gone all in on the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime. Fealty to DEI dogma has become practically mandatory at all levels of higher education.
The Times notes that the faculty senate at the University of California, San Francisco urged professors to apply an “anti-oppression and anti-racism” lens to their coursework. On its website, UCLA’s public affairs school pledged to “decolonize the curriculum and pedagogy.” And the faculty senate of California Community Colleges instructed teachers on their duty to “lift the veil of white supremacy” and “colonialism.”
“Professions of fealty to DEI ideology are so ubiquitous as to be meaningless,” said Daniel Sargent, a professor of history and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times. “We are institutionalizing a performative dishonesty.”
It’s not just that school administrators enforce a pervasive, left-wing culture on campus. That’s been happening for generations. These schools also are hiring with strict DEI-style parameters, to the near total exclusion of merit. In one study, according to the Times, researchers found that at Berkeley “a faculty committee rejected 75% of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements.”
It seems this may have been a racial test too. From the Times’ report:
Latino candidates constituted 13% of applicants and 59% of finalists. Asian and Asian-American applicants constituted 26% of applicants and 19% of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14% made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3% of applicants and 9% of finalists.
That makes sense, given what’s in the diversity statements. Many schools, including Berkeley, publicly post their standards online. Among the answers that will produce a low score is saying that you will “treat everyone the same.” To get the highest scores, you need to be explicitly racial in thinking and demonstrate that you’ve not only participated in or will participate in campus DEI programs but will be actively leading new initiatives.
What’s clear is that these schools aren’t focused simply on weeding out conservatives. People anywhere vaguely on the Right clearly don’t have a ghost of a chance of getting through the application process. No, these schools are about finding active, devoted leaders of social justice causes. If you aren’t a DEI revolutionary, schools don’t want you to teach about science or engineering or anything else at their institution.
Remember, when the Left says, “believe the science,” what it’s really saying is “believe the left-wing activist with institutional backing next to his/her/zir name.”
Unfortunately, what started in California didn’t stay in California, as many schools around the country copied the Golden State model. Among the methods schools use to promote DEI goals is what John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, called “cluster hiring.” Universities hire applicants in bulk, using DEI statements to weed out most unwanted applicants.
Sailer noted how in 2021, Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology undertook a cluster hire that “eliminated approximately 85% of its candidates based solely on diversity statements.”
The federal government exacerbates this problem.
“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has allocated $241 million in grant money for cluster hires at universities around the country—with the condition that every search committee must require and heavily weigh diversity statements,” Sailer wrote.
The DEI racket is a national phenomenon, but this bleak environment includes signs that change may be coming.
It seems that some school systems are reconsidering their DEI litmus tests. For instance, Georgia’s public university system eliminated DEI requirements in July. It put out a statement saying that hiring decisions should be “free of ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.”
I’d like to ascribe this change to a genuine change of heart, but it’s telling that this policy shift came right after the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial preferences in college admissions are unlawful. It goes to show how much of a game changer that decision is. Schools now have reason to be concerned about lawsuits from applicants claiming discrimination.
Creating ideological litmus tests that appear to discriminate and actually tell faculty that not discriminating is bad surely won’t help the cause of colleges and universities.
This small retreat won’t exactly fix what ails higher education in America, but it does represent an opening for a recalibration.
Larger change will happen when more schools return to a classical learning model and jettison the DEI regime altogether. That seems unlikely to happen without outside pressure.
But outside pressure is building as institutional trust declines. If more states reject the California model, a genuine new birth of freedom in education may not be so far-fetched as it seemed just a few years ago.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten cited the Southern Poverty Law Center in demonizing the parental rights movement. Pictured: Weingarten speaks during March for Our Lives 2022 on June 11, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images/March For Our Lives)
A top teachers union boss cited a far-left smear factory in demonizing the parental rights movement by comparing it to the “Uptown Klans” that opposed the end of racial segregation in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
“Those same words that you heard in terms of wanting segregation post Brown v. Board, those same words you hear today,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a podcast interview published Tuesday.
“I was kind of gobsmacked when I was talking to Southern Poverty Law Center, and they showed me the same words, ‘choice,’ ‘parental rights,’ and an attempt to divide parents versus teachers,” Weingarten added. “At that point, it was white parents versus other parents, but it’s the same kind of words.”
The AFT president went on to describe former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, conservative commentator Chris Rufo, and Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, as “extremists” who want “the end of public education as we know it.”
“A Rufo will say we need to create universal public school distrust to get to universal vouchers,” Weingarten said. “Others want it because they hate knowledge or they fear broad-based knowledge.”
“They want to have a basically, a Christian ideology—their particular Christian ideology—dominate the country, as opposed to a country that was born out of the free exercise of religion,” she added.
Weingarten’s talking points heavily echo the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization notorious for branding mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits as “hate groups” or “antigovernment extremists” and placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents. In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward, calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.” In 2012, a terrorist used the “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. While the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the attack’s target on its “hate map.”
Earlier this year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, to the “hate map,” branding them “antigovernment groups.”
Before the SPLC released its updated map in June, an SPLC researcher compared the modern parental rights movement to parents who supported segregation after Brown v. Board. The researcher, Maya Henson Carey, wrote about “a massive resistance countermovement that birthed such groups as white Citizens’ Councils or ‘Uptown Klans,’ comprised mostly of middle- to upper-class white Southerners seeking to preserve their segregationist way of life.”
“Today, groups like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and Parents Against CRT work diligently with politicians, right-wing celebrities, and extremist groups to spread their messages of hate, lobbying for anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ legislation and making sweeping changes by influencing school boards to fire superintendents, constrain diverse curricula and ban books,” Carey wrote. “Our country, communities, and schools are again under attack by the descendants of hate groups of decades past, spewing the same hateful messages dressed up with fresh political rhetoric.”
Carey did not acknowledge the legitimacy of parents’ concerns, which center around divisive ideologies teaching kids to judge one another on the basis of their skin color, pornographic books and transgender lessons for young children in school, and the repeated closures of school altogether during the COVID-19 pandemic. Weingarten echoed the SPLC’s rhetoric, framing the parental rights movement as an attack on education. Yet in recent years, public schools have adopted an astonishing hostility to parents, such as blatant attempts to hide their children’s health concerns—and potential gender “transitions”—from them.
The teachers union boss claimed that Rufo is trying to “create universal public school distrust,” but she has it backward. Rufo has focused on exposing the divisive ideologies that have taken over public education across the United States, and his message resonates because so many Americans have alreadylearned to distrust public education because it alienated them first.
The American Federation of Teachers did not respond to a request for comment on whether Weingarten considers the SPLC reliable and endorses its attacks on groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.
The Rocklin Unified School District in California has adopted a policy requiring teachers to notify parents if their children begin to identify as a member of another sex. (Photo: damircudic/Getty Images)
Parental rights triumphed over the transgender agenda in the shadow of California’s capital overnight, as the state’s fifth school district adopted a policy requiring teachers to notify parents if their children begin to identify as a member of another sex. Parents burst into cheers as the Rocklin Unified School District board of trustees adopted the policy by a 4-1 vote Thursday morning around 12:40 a.m. local time. The regulation stipulates that schools must contact parents within three school days if their child requests to use a name, pronouns, or sex-segregated facilities “that do not align with the child’s biological sex.” Trustees also clarified that a student’s gender identity remains confidential to everyone “except the student and their parent(s).”
“We trust our parents to know what is best for their children,” said Rocklin school trustees shortly after the vote. “We believe that the best way to address these challenges is together, with open communication and clear expectations. The board’s action to strengthen parental notification and communication reinforces our commitment to include parents in school activities and decisions related to their child.”
The new measure is aimed at “strengthening the relationship between our staff, students, and family,” they stated.
The vote came after hundreds of people crowded into a grueling, six-and-a-half-hour meeting that included more than four hours of public comments that ranged from heartrending to hot-headed.
“This policy is violent,”asserted an LGBTQ activist wearing a rainbow cape, a cloth COVID-19 mask, and hoisting a handheld transgender flag. “You are waging war, and we will not take it quietly. … We’ll shame you in public! … Take our kids’ futures and we’ll take your livelihood!”
“We don’t take threats up here,” replied RUSD Board President Julie Hupp, who favored the policy. “Threatening the board members is not how we work up here.”
“It’s not a threat. It’s a promise!” said the speaker, who identified as Jay Smith, to the cheers of rainbow flag-waving audience members.
The X Below is a great example of these people whose mental illness they want shoved down our throats. This biological man, identifies as a woman, CLAIMING TO BE A LESBIAN. A LESBIAN! GET IT? HE’S SCREAMING HE WANTS SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH WOMEN AS A HETEROSEXUALL MALE, DRESSED IN A DRESS. Notice the bulge in the front of his/her dress.
This person identifies as a lesbian. How would you feel if he was in the bathroom with your daughter? pic.twitter.com/pYJdRT1OKZ
More than one speaker wore an LGBTQ cape in the manner of a superhero. Teachers in the school district reportedly passed out rainbow ribbons to oppose notifying parents. Mothers and fathers asked those teachers not to lock them out of knowing the most fundamental facts of their children’s lives.
“Please support parental rights. Basic safeguarding of children means not keeping secrets from parents,” pleaded concerned parent Beth Bourne.
One of the district’s concerned parents, California Assemblyman Joe Patterson, a Republican, thanked the trustees for their service, empathizing with those who received “really hateful comments.”
“What this whole issue is about is: Who gets to raise our kids? Who gets to raise the next generation of Californians? Is it the government, or is it their parents?” declared Assemblyman Bill Essayli, a Republican who has championed a similar policy at the state level (AB 1314).
“The central question is: What authority does a school have to withhold information from parents?” asked Essayli. He noted that courts have ruled “there is no right to privacy between children and their parents.”
Liberals promised swift political retaliation against RUSD and its four pro-parent trustees.
“Hit me up if you want to run for school board next year,” said Jonathan Cook, the executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance. (RUSD trustee Michelle Sutherland cast the lone dissenting vote on Wednesday night. Julie Hupp, Tiffany Saathoff, Rachelle Price, and Dereck Counter voted in favor.)
One political communications specialist urged LGBTQ activists to nullify or counter messages that parental notification policies validate parents’ love for their children. But messages of support also poured in from those unable to attend. “Parents have every right to know what’s happening with their kids. State politicians need to stay in their lane and stop meddling in parents’ efforts to raise their children,” said former state Sen. Melissa Melendez, a Republican.
Many of those who opposed the policy reportedly came from outside the district, while some who supported it cited their faith.
Hupp took a moment during the hearings to address a “controversy” over a social media post in which she invited “Christ-centered, family-focused individuals” to attend the proceedings, noting that she posted a second message inviting all families to take part.
The lopsided passage constitutes an act of defiance on the part of Rocklin, which is located in Placer County—a mere 22 miles outside Sacramento, where the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has made a full-court press against parental notification policies.
California State Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, won a temporary restraining order Wednesday morning against the first district to approve a parental rights policy, Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County.
Sonja Shaw, Chino Valley Unified School District president, who has endured disturbing and specific death threatsfor her stand in favor of parental rights, objected that the policy “simply says that parents have a right to know what is going on at school and not be the last person informed.”
Judge Thomas Garza’s order, which applies only to Chino Valley, represents “a temporary setback in the ongoing struggle to affirm parents’ God-given and constitutionally protected right to direct the upbringing and education of their children,” said California Family Council President Jonathan Keller.
Bonta’s threats and legal intimidation amount to little more than “a political gimmick to intimidate school boards,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs at the California Policy Center.
“Gov. Newsom and other state officials are on a mission to strip parents of their rights and give control over their kids to the government,” he continued. “Bonta is using the power of his office to scare other school boards that are considering adopting parental rights policies. They should not be intimidated.”
“Despite the court’s decision, we stand undeterred by intimidation tactics from legislators, executives, and bureaucrats,” vowed Keller. “This is not just a legal battle; it’s a defining moment for our culture, drawing a line between government overreach and the sacred realm of family.”
Both see the lawsuits as an attempt to blunt the momentum in favor of parents’ rights and pro-family policy in deep-blue California.
A middle school in California socially transitioned an 11-year-old without her mother’s knowledge or consent. (Photo: Maskot/Getty Images)
California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent. The school district still refuses to admit that it’s at fault.
Many are calling this a landmark case, saying it will make other school districts across the country think twice before transitioning kids behind their parents’ backs.
Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand, “This is a great development in the overall move to stop mistreating children based on gender identity declarations at school. When California is debating the issue of whether or not to inform parents if their child makes a declaration or is accommodated as the opposite sex, this is also timely.”
At the beginning of her sixth-grade year, a friend invited Alicia to the school’s Equality Club, headed by two seventh-grade teachers, Lois Caldeira and Kelly Baraki. While there, the teachers told her that she was bisexual and later on identified her as transexual. (Alicia wasn’t sure what either of those terms meant, but trusted the teachers, was given more material to read, and believed them.)
Later, in the spring, Alicia went to the school counselor because she was depressed and stressed. She had weekly meetings with the counselor as well as Caldeira and the principal. Alicia was informed that she was depressed and stressed because she was “not being who she was” and that if she became her “true self,” she would get better.
According to the legal complaint, Caldeira and Baraki identified students for the school’s Equality Club “based on comments students made to them, comments that they overheard students make to others, and their own observations of students in the classroom setting, and otherwise. Once they identified students for the club, Caldeira and Baraki would invite them to participate.”
In a leaked recording from a 2021 California Teachers Association conference, these teachers discussed how they kept meetings private and “stalked” students online for recruits.
“When we were doing our virtual learning—we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work,” Baraki admitted. “One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”
Before you read the following, let me assure you, I checked this one out myself first. It’s true. Still think you can trust Google?
Spreckels Union School District adopted a “Parental Secrecy Policy,” ensuring that staff at Buena Vista would “conceal from parents that their minor children had articulated confusion about their gender identity, evinced a desire to change their gender identity, or assumed or expressed a new gender identity, unless the student expressly authorized the parents to be informed.”
Remarkably, Spreckels Union would “intentionally deceive parents regarding students’ new gender identity and expression by, among other things, not publishing the Parental Secrecy Policy on the Spreckels Union website, using students’ birth names and pronouns in communications with parents despite using students’ new names and pronouns when parents were not there, instructing students they were not to tell their parents about their new gender identity or expression because their parents ‘couldn’t be trusted,’ and otherwise concealing those facts from parents.”
Devastatingly, the school’s actions drove a wedge between Konen and Alicia.
These are tactics promoted and encouraged by teachers unions such as the California Teachers Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association, as well as the union for school counselors, the American School Counselor Association.
They result from common attitudes among the education establishment and others on the political Left who view parents as potential threats to their own children if they don’t accept LGBTQ ideology.
For example, Peter Renn, an attorney for the LGBTQ legal organization Lambda Legal, said, “Outside of school, these students may similarly face potential hostility at home because of who they are. For example, involuntarily outing a student as LGBTQ to their parents can very well lead to them getting kicked out of the home in some circumstances.”
Thankfully, during Alicia’s eighth-grade year, she was learning at home due to COVID-19 school shutdowns. This is when, in Alicia’s words, she “ended up being out of control of the school” and figured out who she really was—a girl.
Now, five years after Alicia started being transitioned by her school, she and her mom have received counseling, and their relationship has been restored.
Konen and Alicia’s lawyer, Mark Trammel, are calling on parents across the country to be pro-active and realize that this is not just something that happens in California. He says that his office has likely received calls from parents in all 50 states who have gone through something similar to Konen’s situation.
Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for biblical worldview and strategic engagement, told The Washington Stand:
This situation is further evidence that many in the education system view parents as a threat to children. Parents need to be very careful about the environments and people they entrust their children to. There are a lot of ‘nice’ people who will do terrible things to you and your children.
Konen advises parents to be fully involved in their children’s lives; do their research on their school’s faculty, curriculum, and clubs; and listen to their intuition.
Backholm said, “I am encouraged by the result of this lawsuit, not only because it is appropriate under the circumstances, but because it will hopefully deter other schools from doing something similar in the future. When significant things are happening in a child’s life, parents need to be the first to know, not the last. Schools that do not believe that should quickly be reformed or cease to exist.”
Kilgannon agreed. “No one can ‘do over’ even one second of childhood, never mind the years that can be consumed by this evil and the irreparable harm that is done. Let’s celebrate this victory and remember it is but one battle in the ongoing war to protect children and parents.”
The LGBTQ+ community might try to say they’re not coming for your children, but their actions often reflect the opposite — and an Oklahoma City elementary school is making that incredibly clear. The school hired a new principal who happens to moonlight as a drag queen during his time off and has been doing so for almost the last 20 years.
However, if putting on ladies’ clothing when the lights go down weren’t bad enough, Dr. Shane Murnan was also arrested and charged with possessing child pornography and drugs in 2001. Murnan was 30 years old and teaching fifth grade at Will Rogers Elementary School in Stillwater, Oklahoma, at the time. The child pornography charge was later dropped, but that was only because a judge later determined that prosecutors had not proven that the victims in the images found on his devices were underage.
Understandably, Sara Gonzales of “The News and Why It Matters” and contributor Jaco Booyens aren’t convinced this man is fit for a position around children.
“Of course, at the time of this taping, the school has not yet commented on their child-pornography-possessing principal who moonlights as a drag queen,” Gonzales says, clearly disgusted.
“Demand the firing, picket the school peacefully, go to the school board, or pull your kids out of the school to the point where the school is bankrupted. This is unacceptable,” Booyens adds.
While Oklahoma is among the most conservative states in the nation, Booyens and Gonzales are aware that the leftist agenda is most important to spread in deep red states.
“What does Nancy say? ‘We want Texas purple,’” Booyens comments.
John Doyle is in agreement.
“There’s literally not something that could be on his past that would be more disqualifying,” Doyle says. “You’re putting somebody in a position where they’re around children and they have a history of exploiting children sexually.”
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Image Source: KGO-TV YouTube video screenshot composite
A mom in California says she was the victim of “cancel culture” over her politically incorrect comments made during a school board meeting about LGBTQ materials being included in other school curricula.
Janet Roberson told KGO-TV that she lost her job 10 days after speaking at a meeting of the Benicia Unified School District school board in April. She has three children attending schools in the Benicia school district.
“It’s not a choice. People are not gender fluid, and to teach our children this is not okay,” she said during the meeting.
Roberson said that people who disagreed with her contacted her employer, a large real estate company based in New York, and publicized her comments. She said she was called bigoted and racist over the comments.
“I thought, gosh, as a mom speaking at a school board meeting, you should be able to do that without losing your job,” said Roberson.
The company, Compass, released a statement denying that its staffing decision had to do with her political beliefs.
“Compass does not make decisions about agents’ affiliations with the company based on their personal political or social beliefs,” the company said.
Roberson said that, as an independent contractor, she had no legal recourse.
“We should all be able to have our opinions without trying to cancel each other. I think I’m really trying to come out strong against this whole kind of cancel culture,” she explained.
Benicia Unified School District Superintendent Damon Wright defended the district’s policy to include LGBTQ materials in school curricula by saying, “Parents and guardians have the right to opt out of all or part of sexual health instruction.”
Roberson told the Daily Wire that she would have done it all again.
“For me to lose a job is horrible and not okay, but I would be willing to do it again,” she said. “Absolutely. To speak the truth and to stand for freedom and for what our Constitution stands for — 100%.”
Roberson says she was able to find a new job.
Here’s a local news report about the incident:
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Critics called out American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten on Thursday after she attacked Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis during the GOP debate on Wednesday, claiming he was a “disaster” on education in Florida.
“DeSantis has been a disaster on education. They’re banning history, they’re banning books, banning AP psych, and have a terrible teacher shortage. Nobody should be taking advice form him on schools,” Weingarten posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Critics quickly pushed back on Weingarten’s claim, accusing her of trying to keep schools closed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Weingarten testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in April to address her union’s role in influencing public policy on school lockdowns. She alleged that President Biden’s transition team was the first to contact her union for guidance on school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Weingarten has been repeatedly criticized over her stance on school closures throughout the pandemic.
Florida GOP Vice Chairman Evan Power reacted to Weingarten’s claim and said she had been a “disaster for education.”
“She wanted kids locked out of schools and forced to wear masks. The learning losses start and end with her,” he wrote.
You know who was a disaster for education? @rweingarten is, she wanted kids locked out of schools and forced to wear masks. The learning losses start and end with her https://t.co/h5XmwEJnm7
“The people who banned *school* don’t get to talk about this,” another wrote in response to Weingarten. The AFT president wrote a forceful letter to her critics in the Wall Street Journal, which published an editorial in 2022 headlined, “Randi Weingarten Flunks the Pandemic.”
“This tweet brought to you by the lady who enthusiastically supported banning…checks notes…school itself,” author and podcast host Mary Katharine Ham wrote.
This tweet brought to you by the lady who enthusiastically supported banning…checks notes… ✨school itself.✨ https://t.co/CliHHRa8gn
“She’s still mad she couldn’t force Florida schools to close and she only got to hurt poor kids in blue areas,” Karol Markowicz responded.
Others argued it was a strong endorsement of DeSantis, who during the GOP debate on Wednesday criticized former president Donald Trump’s handling of COVID-19. DeSantis said he would have fired presidential adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the White House COVID-19 pandemic response under the Trump administration.
“Why are we in this mess? Part of it and a major reason is because how this federal government handled COVID-19 by locking down this economy,” DeSantis said at the debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to Iowa voters (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Fox News’ Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report.
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media.
“At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school,” Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon says. Pictured: Books are on offer at a school board candidate’s event Oct. 16, 2022, in Vero Beach, Florida, from Jennifer Pippin, president of the Indian River County chapter of Moms for Liberty. (Photo: Giorgio Viera /AFP/Getty Images)
A new report sounds the alarm on the growing number of schools embracing transgender ideology and keeping parents in the dark. According to Parents Defending Education, at least 1,040 U.S. school districts have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents.
Those districts include over 18,000 schools responsible for nearly 11 million students. The vast majority of those school districts (593) are in California.
“I am grateful to Parents Defending Education for their attempt to quantify this problem,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “It is important to support with evidence what many parents know by instinct or experience: Our educational system that is supposed to work with parents will often work around parents instead.”
“At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school,” Kilgannon said.
Commonly called “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies,” such dictums have been the subject of controversy and even protest across the nation, with parental rights organizations such as Moms for Liberty and Mama Grizzly forming to combat the policies and others like them.
“[I]f we have the ability to do so, we must engage with people and systems that view this parental deception as good for children,” Kilgannon said of the role of parental rights groups. “Obviously, something is very wrong if some people can believe the answer is government first, parents second or never.”
A recent example of the controversy may be found in New Jersey, where a state judge last week blocked a trio of school districts from enforcing a policy requiring faculty and staff to inform parents of students’ gender identities at school, effectively forcing the school districts to keep parents in the dark.
Those policies would require teachers, coaches, and other school staff to inform a student’s parents if that student used a bathroom that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex, requested different pronouns be used in addressing him or her, or asked to play on a sports team that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex.
The controversy over “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies” comes as debate continues on why an increasing number of children are identifying as transgender or nonbinary.
One study from earlier this year, for example, classified the increase as part of “a socially contagious syndrome,” stating that it’s likely that “common cultural beliefs, values, and preoccupations cause some adolescents (especially female adolescents) to attribute their social problems, feelings, and mental health issues to gender dysphoria. That is, youth[s] … falsely believe that they are transgender.”
Some theorize that standard peer pressure, coupled with the social popularity of transgenderism, largely is responsible for the increase in children identifying as transgender. However, others—such as Mama Grizzly founder Stacy Langton—argue that it’s largely rooted in the sexual grooming of children by teachers.
“[T]his is where our own action as parents are so important,” Kilgannon said. “We must be present to our children, engaged with them, being the most important person in their lives. … [L]ike everything in life, it starts with ourselves and our relationships to the people God has put in our lives, especially the children we are blessed with and responsible for.”
America First Legal demands answers after the Justice Department under President Joe Biden intervenes in a Virginia school district’s adoption of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s policies centering parental rights on transgender issues. Pictured: Attorney General Merrick Garland, head of the Justice Department, speaks Aug. 11 at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—America First Legal is demanding answers after the Justice Department under President Joe Biden intervened in a Virginia school district’s adoption of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s policies that center parental rights in transgender issues.
“The Department of Justice seems to suggest that protecting the constitutional rights of parents and students will lead to ‘hate crimes,’” Ian Prior, senior adviser at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Monday. “Once again, we are witnessing the top law enforcement organization in the land come unglued from reality and unmoored from its core functions, all in the name of opposing anyone that doesn’t approve of its state-approved message.”
America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act request Monday demanding Justice Department records related to Virginia’s Roanoke County Public Schools.
On July 27, the Roanoke County School Board discussed the Virginia Department of Education’s model policies on transgender issues, finalized July 18 under Youngkin, a Republican. The state policies require schools to refer to each student by his or her legal name and sex, unless a parent submits a legal document substantiating a change in either. The policies also require schools to use sex, rather than gender identity, as the benchmark for bathrooms, intimate spaces, and sports reserved for boys or girls.
Pro-transgender activists reportedly disrupted the school board meeting. Police arrested two vocal protesters who refused to leave and repeatedly yelled, “Protect trans lives” during the meeting.
Although local law enforcement and the school board were addressing the disruption, Hannah Levine, a staffer at the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, sent a July 31 email offering “conflict resolution services.”
Her agency in the Justice Department “serves as ‘America’s Peacemaker,’ preventing and responding to community tensions and hate crimes, bias, bullying, and discrimination committed on the basis of race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability,” Levine wrote in the email, which The Daily Wire first reported.
“CRS is aware of ongoing community tensions in Roanoke County following the release of the new model policies for transgender students,” Levine said in the email to the Roanoke County school system. “I’d like to connect to see if we might be able to offer support and services as you work to manage conflict in the community related to this.”
America First Legal contends that the email from Levine and the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service is suspicious.
“It is unclear why CRS would inject itself into an issue that is properly one for the Commonwealth of Virginia and Roanoke County Public Schools,” reads America First Legal’s request to the Justice Department for related records. “What is clear, however, is that CRS has positioned itself not as a neutral arbitrator of issues related to transgenders but as a government entity that is fully behind the Biden administration’s radical transgender agenda.”
The Community Relations Service says it trains law enforcement on “engaging and building relationships with transgender communities.” The agency’s home page features the White House’s “fact sheet” on actions “to protect LGBTQI+ Communities.”
America First Legal also noted the Biden Justice Department’s record of opposing parental rights in education.
In October 2021, the DOJ issued a memo asking the FBI and U.S. attorneys to investigate parents who spoke out at school board meetings. The DOJ memo followed a letter from the National School Boards Association comparing parents who protest school district policies to domestic terrorists and encouraging Biden to use the Patriot Act against those parents. Documents revealed later that the White House had worked with the school boards association to draft the letter.
The Justice Department ultimately rescinded the memo and the National School Boards Association apologized for the letter. However, the Biden White House has worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization that recently put parental rights organizations on a “hate map” with KKK chapters. America First Legal has demanded DOJ documents citing the SPLC.
Pointing to this history and Levine’s email, America First Legal demanded DOJ documents related to Roanoke County Public Schools and Youngkin’s model state policies.
“Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn’t appear to have learned any lessons after his 2021 memo directing U.S. attorneys and the FBI to investigate parents speaking at school board meetings,” America First Legal’s Prior said in a written statement on the request. “Now, the Department of Justice is seeking to intervene in another purely state and local matter, namely the Roanoke County School Board’s adoption of the Virginia Department of Education’s model policies that prohibit schools from forcing students, parents, and teachers to sacrifice their constitutional rights in the name of transgender ideology.”
“America First Legal will continue to serve as a watchdog over the Department of Justice’s continued attempts to interfere with parental rights on local issues,” Prior added.
Legislators in North Carolina overrode several vetoes by Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper on Wednesday to pass three new laws that protect children from the harmful consequences of radical gender ideology.
Thanks to the bipartisanefforts of the state’s General Assembly, men in ladyface are barred from infiltrating women’s sports, a policy decision a majority of Americans support because they know that males have an indisputable biological and physiological advantage and women have a right to privacy and safety in places like locker rooms. Teachers, under another new law, must also alert parents of their children’s gender confusion issues instead of transitioning kids secretly.
A third law, which the House and Senate also overrode a veto to pass, prohibits medical professionals from pumping kids full of neutering drugs that carry permanent consequences including sexual dysfunction, infertility, a higher risk of cancer and cardiac events, impaired vocal cords, bone density issues, and “transition” regret.
While someone can still be remotely approved to mutilate functional body parts in just 22 minutes in some American states, red states and European countries like England, Sweden, Finland, and France have significantly scaled back or completely prohibited physical transgender interventions.
Legislators and parental rights activist groups in the Tar Heel State celebrated the overturned vetoes as a victory for “women, parents, and families.”
“While Governor Cooper has tried to stand between parents and their kids, today the NC House will continue to affirm parent’s rights, protect female athletes, and advocate for the health and safety of our children,” North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore said in a statement.
Cooper, on the other hand, appeared to have no regrets that he ignored the will of his constituents by vetoing the protective legislation. Instead, he complained that legislators were focused on keeping children away from mutilative gender experiments that will wreak irreversible damage on their bodies and minds instead of passing a budget bill.
“These are the wrong priorities, especially when they should be working nights and weekends if necessary to get a budget passed by the end of the month,” Cooper said in a statement.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit dismissed a coalition of parents’ lawsuit against Montgomery County Public Schools alleging that the district’s gender support plan infringes on parental rights. Pictured: A group of parents gather outside MCPS Board of Education to protest a policy that doesn’t allow students to opt out of lessons on gender and LGBTQ+ issues in Maryland on July 20, 2023. (Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit dismissed a coalition of parents’ lawsuit against Montgomery County Public Schools alleging that the district’s gender support plan, which allows students to change their gender without their parents’ permission, infringes on parental rights.
The court ruled that because none of the parents had children who were transgender or were utilizing a gender support plan, there was no harm that allows the court to act, documents show.
“We agree with the analysis of the dissenting judge that parents have a right to complain about this school policy because it allows the school to keep secret from parents how it is treating their child at school and that such policies violate parental rights,” Frederick Claybrook Jr., the attorney for the plaintiffs, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Parents do not have to wait until they find out that damage has been done in secret before they may complain. Moreover, the policy just by being in place affects family dynamics, as the dissenting judge pointed out. We are actively considering next steps in the legal process.”
Montgomery County Public Schools’ gender support plan was adopted during the 2020-2021 school year to help students “feel comfortable expressing their gender identity,” according to the Monday opinion. The gender support plan allows students to record their change in name and pronouns while also detailing which bathrooms and locker rooms the student will correspond with their gender identity.
“MCPS [Montgomery County Public Schools] was successful in the challenge against our Gender Identity Guidelines,” a district spokesperson told the DCNF. “The appellate court returned the case to the district court and directed that it be dismissed. The case is resolved for now. MCPS supports the determination by the court.”
At least 350 students within the district have filled out a gender support plan over the past three years to change their gender at school, The Washington Post reported. The school district said they were not trying to keep student gender transitions from parents but if the student wanted privacy, “then we honor and respect that.”
“That does not mean their objections are invalid,” Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. said in his opinion. “In fact, they may be quite persuasive. But, by failing to show any injury to themselves, the parents’ opposition … reflects a policy disagreement. And policy disagreements should be addressed to elected policymakers at the ballot box, not to unelected judges in the courthouse.”
Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox Christian parents sued Montgomery County Public Schools in May after the school board alerted parents that it would no longer be notifying families of gender identity lessons and that parents would be unable to opt their children out of such lessons.
The parents allege that the school district’s policy that prohibits them from opting their child out of LGBTQ lessons violates their religious beliefs and their ability to raise their kids.
Parental rights advanced last week in deep blue California, as another school district required teachers to notify parents if their children begin to identify as transgender.
The school board of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District adopted a Parental Notification Policy by a 3-2 vote Thursday. Under it, teachers must contact a parent or guardian within three days if their child attempts to use a name, pronoun, restroom, or changing facility of the opposite sex, or compete on a sports team of the opposite sex.
Murrieta Valley school board members Paul Diffley, Nicolas Pardue, and Julie Vandergrift voted yes; members Linda Lunn and Nancy Young voted no.
“This policy is especially helpful for the younger kids who start dabbling with this,” Pardue told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., the day after the vote.
Gender transition at increasingly younger ages “has become a fad,” Pardue said, “because there are some activist teachers who push this agenda.” Families must be able to shield their children from the predatory transgender industry, said an eyewitness who regrets the brief time she identified as transgender.
“Parents deserve to know if their child is adopting a trans identity at school, because [gender] transition is not harmless. There are kids like me being seriously injured by this,” Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy at age 15 before embracing her biological sex within two years, testified at the Murrieta Valley school board meeting.
“The reality is, sex cannot be changed,” Cole told the school board. “As an educational institution, you have a duty to stand for truth. Your policies need to reflect reality and not opinion. You have a duty to stand against ideologies that are held up by low-quality research.”
“The entire trajectory of my life has been altered by delusional ideas that were pushed on me from a young age” and “weaponized by doctors to push a political agenda for monetary gain,” she added. “Socially transitioning is not benign. … It takes away years of necessary social development as your real, biological sex.”
Cole’s testimony “really stuck in my heart, because we all know that teenagers make bad choices, and it is up to us as adults to help them make better choices,” Perdue told Hice.
“I was allowed to grow up as an innocent kid,” the school board member said. “When they talk about ‘a safe space,’ the classroom should be a safe space from politics.”
Murrieta Valley is the second school district to adopt a parental notification policy in less than 30 days; neighboring Chino Valley Unified School District adopted a similar policy July 20.
“It’s exciting to see parts of California waking up,” Cole said after the vote. “Chino Hills and Murrieta schools are leading the way.”
School boards enacting such parental notification policies follow their “democratic mandate in ways consistent with medical ethics and court doctrine on parental rights,” Substack writer Wesley Yang said.
Pardue, the school board member, said every level of government should ensure that parents, not government, guide children’s formative views of controversial issues.
“Our constitutional rights are what we are supposed to defend as adults and as teachers,” Pardue said at the board meeting. “The world is surprised and shocked to know there are people who believe in the Constitution who live in California.”
If the momentum continues, Cole said, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, “will soon be forced to respect local communities and the U.S. Constitution.”
Yet school districts’ decisions to stand with parents come at a cost. Radical LGBTQ activists immediately barraged Chino Valley school board President Sonja Shaw with threats to kill and dismember her, murder her children, and slaughter her pets.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, also began investigating the Chino Valley school board—a move leftists urged him to take against the Murrieta school board six daysbeforeit voted on the parental rights policy.
“[H]ere we go again,” Voices United for CVUSD, an activist group that opposes parental rights, told Bonta. “Please continue to investigate” such “extreme school boards.”
Bonta promptly announced that he has Murrieta in the crosshairs. The attorney general said he felt “deeply disturbed to learn another school district” had adopted a parental rights policy. He described it as a “forced outing policy” that “put at risk the safety and privacy of transgender and gender-nonconforming students.”Parental notification indicates a school district will “target or seek to discriminate against California’s most vulnerable communities,” the state’s attorney general said. “California will not stand for violations of our students’ civil rights.”
“The anti-Christian rhetoric is really intense,” Pardue told Hice on “Washington Watch.”
Adherents to extreme gender ideology “assume that Christian parents aren’t going to love their children if they’re struggling with gender identity issues,” the Murrieta school board member said. “But having a good, strong relationship with your parents is really the [best] step towards making sure that the children are safe. Knowing that they’re getting a loving response from their parents is really a game changer.”
The board’s vote has brought positive feedback, as well, Pardue said
“Ever since the vote, I’ve had quite a few emails thanking me” and the entire school board for “being a strong voice [and] reestablishing a relationship between the teachers and the parents in our community,” Pardue said.
But pro-family advocates say thankfulness should extend nationally.
“Parents all across the country owe a debt of gratitude to people like Mr. Pardue, who are willing to stand in the gap for our kids,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the Family Research Council, said later on “Washington Watch.”
“We’re really grateful,” Kilgannon said.
Leaders of the Murrieta Valley school district have received national recognition for its students’ loyalty and enthusiasm. Vista Murrieta High School won a $25,000 prize and the title of America’s Most Spirited High School for the third time this year.
Pardue predicts enthusiasm for parental rights also will sweep far beyond the Murrieta district.
“We are not going to be the only district to stand on parental rights,” Pardue told fellow board members before the vote. “There are a lot of people with traditional values who are figuring out that the state of California has pulled something over on them.”
Bonta’s harsh administrative crackdown on parental rights proves that “the Left wants believers to stay on the sidelines,” Hice said.
“They want you to think that you really don’t matter. But history shows that it only takes one person to spark an enormous change, a movement.” Pardue is living proof that “it does only take one person to make a difference,” the former congressman said.
The most important person who can make a difference in a child’s life is Mom or Dad, because “no one … loves children like a parent does,” said Hice. “And government simply cannot fill the gap.”
John Wahl, chairman of the Alabama GOP, said the party’s candidates in the state for education-related offices should not accept campaign contributions from teachers unions because parents, not special-interest groups, should have control over their children’s education. (Photo: Glasshouse Images/Getty Images)
Alabama Republicans have told teachers unions to stay out of their school-related elections.
The Alabama Republican Party recently voted to ban GOP candidates for the Alabama Board of Education, local school boards, and county school superintendent from accepting donations from teachers unions. John Wahl, chairman of the Alabama GOP, says the change was needed to ensure that parents, and not special-interest groups, have control over their children’s education.
“There’s only one purpose that these education unions exist, and that’s to lobby for their facet of the education system,” Wahl says. “There’s only one reason school boards and superintendents exist, and that is to put forth the policies that regulate the school systems, so it’s a direct conflict of interest.”
Wahl joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain what this change means for protecting parental rights in Alabama. Wahl also weighs in on the priorities of Alabama voters and what we can expect at the first GOP presidential debate on Aug. 23.
Virginia Allen: It is my pleasure to be joined today by Alabama GOP Chairman John Wahl. Chairman Wahl, thanks so much for being with us today.
John Wahl: No, it’s a pleasure to be on the show.
Allen: Well, the Alabama Republican Party just voted to ban GOP candidates for the Alabama Board of Education, local school boards, and country school superintendents from receiving donations from teachers unions. Why did you-all vote to block these candidates from receiving donations from the National Education Association or their affiliates?
Wahl: For me, it’s a really easy answer to that question. I want parents to be in charge of the children’s education. I want our elected officials to put the children first, to put parents first, above any special-interest group and especially a liberal teachers union.
We see some of these policies are coming out of the NEA and the national level. They’re so woke, they’re so progressive, and I believe they care more about indoctrinating our children than they do about educating our children. So we’re going to try to put an end to that here in Alabama.
Allen: Well, this is a big step and it’s one that I can imagine might receive a little bit of criticism because people might say, “Well, doesn’t this give Democrat candidates a strategic advantage over Republican candidates in the state since Democrat candidates will still be allowed to receive campaign donations from teachers unions?” What’s your response to that?
Wahl: Once again, I have a good response for that. This is Alabama. I’ve worked very hard building the state party here. We just did our summer dinner. We had President Donald Trump as a guest speaker. We raised $1.2 million at that dinner. My winter dinner, we raised 700,000.
So I told all the school board candidates this simple fact: I will have your back. Who would you rather take money from? A Liberal teachers union or the state Republican Party?
So our candidates are not going to have to worry about any missed funding in the general elections. We’re going to have their back. We’re going to make sure no missed money and we’re going to win every one of these seats we can possibly win.
Allen: So, give us a little bit of a sense of the landscape in Alabama, specifically around the issue of education.
Obviously, in my state of Virginia, I live in Northern Virginia, the fight around education has made national news in Loudoun County. Everyone’s very familiar with policies being pushed in California schools that are incredibly far left. What has the fight looked like in Alabama to make sure that leftist policies aren’t making their way into the classrooms?
Wahl: Well, I think that’s the battle we’re under. Because, especially in a super-red state like Alabama, the assumption, as you know, we should have a better education system as far as these woke policies.
But what people forget is most of our curriculum is coming down from a federal Department of Education that, in all honesty, has completely lost touch with the American people and the values of America—this idea that America is special, that our Founding Fathers had this great concept of we the people and freedom, and that America is an exceptional nation.
It’s a test, if you will, of, can a nation actually be founded on freedom and put people first and individual liberty first and limited government, and really stand up for these principles and create a new nation that really had never been tried before in human history?
The federal Department of Education has just lost sight of those concepts. We’ve seen them grow so woke and so out of touch with the American public, and that’s coming down through that department into our education system. Whether it’s California, whether it’s New York City or whether it’s Alabama, we’re kind of getting this cookie-cutter education system and I think that’s what’s really wrong across the country.
Allen:With this move to say those who are running for these education positions within the state of Alabama, whether it’s the State Board of Education, local school boards, or county school superintendent, what are the responses that you’re receiving from teachers and parents in Alabama over this change?
Wahl: The general public is incredibly excited about it. A lot of parents feel like they are out of touch. Some of them don’t have access to the curriculum that their children are being taught or their children are bringing home material that they just really are not happy about.
I’m excited to also report, a lot of our local teachers have the same sentiment. You know, in Alabama, most of our teachers are Republican and they believe in these core values and so when they see some of this curriculum, they’re not wanting to teach it, either.
I’ve actually had a very good response, even from some of the school board members, they’ve been tremendous. They’re actually excited because this frees them from having to worry about being tied down by these education unions that for so long have controlled the education system.
Allen: Have you spoken with any GOP candidates, folks who are looking to run and who maybe are now having to rethink where some of their donations are going to come from? What do you anticipate to hear from them?
Wahl: I have spoken to a couple of the incumbents who are up for reelection this time and some of those that I spoke to were actually some of those that were excited about this change. They really felt like this is something that frees them to really put the people first and they don’t have to worry about undue influence from a special-interest group.
Guys, let’s be honest. There’s only one purpose that these education unions exist, and that’s to lobby for their facet of the education system. There’s only one reason school boards and superintendents exist, and that is to put forth the policies that regulate the school systems so it’s a direct conflict of interest.
That’s what this is really about, good policy and taking that direct conflict of interest out. I’ve been very impressed with how many people are excited to see that, that they understand the problem and they’re very grateful to have this done.
Allen: How big of an impact do you think that this will have on really keeping a lot of the woke agenda out of our schools? Because I think, at the end of the day, so many parents are opting to pull their kids out of the public schools because they can’t know for sure, they can’t be certain that their child is not going to be receiving really an indoctrination education. So with this shift in Alabama, can you confidently tell parents, “You can send your child to a public school and have peace of mind”?
Wahl: This is really just one piece of the puzzle, and I think there’s so many things that are needed. This is a great step.
I also am very supportive of school choice, the idea, the tag, once again, go back to the parents. Who should have control of a child’s education? It’s the parents, not the government. Who cares more about what their children are facing than the parents do?
So this is really just one piece of a puzzle and it’s going to be a long, hard process to really get our education system back where it needs to be and I think, hopefully, this moves us in that direction.
Allen: Let’s talk a little bit about school choice because you have been such an advocate for school choice in the state of Alabama. The Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card ranks Alabama 27th on school choice. What school choice programs are you advocating for in Alabama?
Wahl: I want to see, I almost hate to use the word universal because that’s more of a Democratic term, but a universal school choice system.
It should not be based on where anyone lives. It should not be based on economics or anything else. Every student should have access to school choice. They should have access to equal funding that the state would spend on their education if they want to opt out and spend that money otherwise.
You know, this goes back to giving control back, not just to parents. This is a Republican concept of giving control back to the people. “We the people” is the beginning of the Constitution. I very much view a system that is 100% of the funding the state would spend and that every single student in the state has access to it.
Allen: Of course, we have an election coming next year and a lot of folks are asking, what are those issues that are on the hearts and minds of Americans? In the state of Alabama, how highly does the education issue rank among voters, would you say?
Wahl: Oh, I think it’s No. 1. So, it’s actually interesting. Here at the state party—I love information, I love statistics and looking at polling data, and one of the things I wanted to see was, literally, ask the question you just asked: What issue is most important to you?
As I did this, I did tend to something a little bit different because I’ve noticed this trend that education issues seem mid-table when that question is asked, what most consultants asked. They would throw a question in, like, “What issue is most important?” You name off a few things—the economy, creating jobs. In our state, lottery would be on that list and then on there would be improving schools.
So I asked similar questions that would be normally asked in that range of questions, but I took out just “improved schools” and, instead, I put in the term “protecting children from woke policies.”
When I did that, we got a fascinating return in the polling. It went from a mid-table issue, just schools in general, but when you ask the question, “protect children from woke policies,” it was No. 1. It was No. 1 amongst Republicans, it was No. 1 amongst independents. And even amongst Democrats, protecting children from woke policies was the third-most important issue.
That really highlights to me just how far we’ve gotten and how far out of touch the national Democrat Party and the Biden administration have gotten on this issue.
What was most encouraging to me was the response from African Americans for the survey because it was within the margin of error being the most important issue to African Americans in the state of Alabama.
Allen: Well, Chairman Wahl, I want to get your thoughts on some of the coming debates and what we might be seeing, specifically from Republican candidates.
The Alabama Republican Party is likely to co-host a GOP debate sometime this fall. The first GOP debate, though, is on Aug. 23. What do you think that the American people are going to be watching for and looking for in that debate?
Wahl: You know, it’s a great question because I think a lot of the candidates are going to say the same basic thing. This is a Republican primary. They’re going to be talking about fiscal responsibility. They’re going to be talking about even the pro-life issue. They’re going to be talking about protecting children from woke policies.
I think what the Republican primary voters are looking for is not so much a candidate who has the best rhetoric, because they’re all going to be very similar. They’re looking for which candidate do they trust to actually deliver and I think that’s something that is getting ignored.
It almost doesn’t matter, I think, what the exact issues are, what the No. 1 issue to voters right now is, do they have faith in that candidate to be able to—does that candidate truly believe these things and do they have the will to stand up and the backbone to fight when they’re put into a foxhole on these important issues?
Allen:Any predictions of what we’re going to see on Aug. 23 during this first GOP presidential candidate debate?
Wahl: I think it’s going to be an extremely interesting thing and, of course, right now all questions are, does Donald Trump come? I think that’s going to be very much a game-changer in that. And if he doesn’t, what do the other candidates do? Do they still target him and kind of go after him even though he’s not there? I don’t know. It’s going to be very, very interesting to see.
This first debate is going to be where people really get to see, the first time, a lot of these candidates. Will we see shifts? Who kind of comes out of this as a dark horse, if you will?
Allen: It’s going to be really fascinating to watch. Mr. Wahl, thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate your time.
Wahl: No, it is a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the work that so many conservatives do across the country, and glad to be a small part of the fight, as our Founding Fathers would’ve said, the animated contest for liberty.
A preschool teacher repeatedly attacked the idea of “childhood innocence” and claimed that topics considered “inappropriate” can be shared with children, according to his scrubbed social media accounts. The California teacher, William “Willy” Villalpando, has said the idea of “childhood innocence” is a “myth,” and claimed topics deemed “inappropriate” – such as “queerness” – can be suitable for the pre-K age group. The district has repeatedly ignored Fox News’ requests for comment.
The Rialto Unified School District was asked months ago whether Villalpando was currently employed there and working with its schoolchildren. They did not respond. However, after receiving a tip from a concerned source – it can now be confirmed the teacher works at Trapp Preschool.
“There is a common mythology that children live in this world of pure innocence, and that by introducing or exposing them to the real-world adults are somehow shattering this illusion for them. Therefore, there is a banning of topics and issues that children should not be exposed to, as if they are not experiencing them already,” he said.
William Villalpando is a teacher at Trapp school in Rialto Unified School District. (Fox News Digital | TikTok/screenshot | iStock)
Villalpando describes himself as an expert at developing a child’s gender identity, according to his scrubbed website reviewed by Fox News. He stated on his website, “While I absolutely love working with young children, my passions really lie in teaching others why we do the things we do, and advocating on behalf of young children and their families. My research and interest areas is in gender development in young children, and the impact that early educators have on that development.”
Villalpando also answered a question about whether speaking to preschool kids about gender and sexuality is inappropriate.
Willy Villalpando’s website. (Fox News Digital)
“Absolutely not,” Villalpando said, defending the topics. “Infants begin making gendered association by the time they are 10 MONTHS OLD! By the time they are 3 most children can label what gender they believe they identify with and by 4 they can tell you what that gender means for what they can or cannot do.”
He went on to claim that 3-year-olds can be discriminating agents in society.
“With race, when a child is 3 months old they begin to visually discriminate based on race, favoring those that are the same race as their caregivers. Children as young as 2 begin to use race to reason about people’s behaviors,” he claimed.
Critical race theory teaches that society is rigged against minority groups and the only cure is present-day discrimination to combat historical wrongs. (Fox News Digital)
He concluded, “Children experience gender and race everyday. They need (and deserve) [to see] themselves to feel seen, and them to see others not like them.”
On another occasion, he said on his Instagram, “I’m tired of the ‘Childhood Innocence’ argument… Stop blaming a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.”
He went on to attack the idea that children shouldn’t be exposed to “sexuality,” claiming that “such a view is a very white, Christian, upper-class, cis-gendered, and hetero-centric.”
“Not talking about Queerness in the Classroom, is NOT Letting Children be Children. It’s Telling Those people They Do Not Deserve to Exist,” he said in September 2021. “Kids are never too young.”
Willy teacher pre-k (iStock | TikTok/screenshot)
“Let’s work to deconstruct some of our own biases. (Adults incorrectly link discussions on sexuality and gender as equating to discussions about sex.),” the early childhood educator said.
He said in a November 2022 podcast of “Rainbow Parenting” that “we have so many people who tell us that this is inappropriate stuff we can’t talk about. And so I’m like, hey, no, we can talk about this.”
Gender identity unicorn illustrates gender and sex is on a spectrum. (YouTube/screenshot)
The teacher went on to say that if parents didn’t have the conversations with kids, it was up to teachers to foster classroom environments that “may make others uncomfortable.”
“Children who are exposed to environments with more fluid understandings of gender, are more likely to understand that gender is fluid.”
“Parents haven’t already had conversations about these things with their kids, that kids don’t know, that they might be intersex, that they might be agender… non-binary. And really, children have a right to see themselves in our classrooms. It’s not okay to just forget about them or push them out just because it might make us uncomfortable or may make others uncomfortable.”
“This goes alongside teaching children to ask others for their pronouns. Trust me when I say children get this so much faster than adults give them credit for. Let kids practice with you,” he said.
Willy Villalpendo discusses ‘Queerness in the classroom.’ (Fox News Digital)
“[C]hildren are exploring and understanding gendered association before they say their first words,” he said. “Around 3 to 4 months old, infants [sic] show a sex and gender preference in who they look at.”
“At 3 years old, a child can label their perceived gender identity,” he added . “By 4 years old, children have a stable sense of their gender identity and have assumptions and beliefs of what they can and cannot do based on their gender (i.e. dolls are for girls, cars are for boys).”
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media
Hannah Grossman is a Reporter at Fox News Digital.
The Eau Claire Area Wisconsin School District is actively hiding a script read to students about a teacher’s upcoming gender transition, and one mom is fighting back to protect her kids and parental rights.
In early June, several elementary, middle, and high school classrooms in the Eau Claire Area School District were read a statement informing students that the orchestra teacher, Jacob Puccio, would be undergoing a gender transition.
Additionally, middle school orchestra students were reportedly subjected to a discussion with Puccio and the District’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion director, Dang Yang. Students were apparently instructed to refer to Mr. Puccio as Ms. Puccio from now on, and Puccio informed the students that from a young age, he was traumatized by his parents and friends, who did not accept he was female. Puccio also allegedly made reference to a transgender medical procedure that he would undergo in the future.
Leah Buchman, who has a child in elementary school, twins in middle school, and a teen in high school, learned about the middle school discussion and scripted announcements from her kids. Buchman said she was completely taken off guard, as the district never asked for parental consent, nor did it notify parents.
“If my daughter needs to take an aspirin or if they need to go on a field trip, I need to sign a consent form,” Buchman told The Federalist. “I was really frustrated because my daughter especially had lots of questions, and I had no idea what was said, so it was really hard to walk her through this.”
Buchman promptly contacted the school to request a copy of the script but was denied. She then filed an open records request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) but was denied again. “It feels like the school district is pushing parents out and having secrets with my children, and that’s wrong,” said Buchman.
The school claims that the “document could not be disclosed because an investigation was underway into whether any employee acted improperly,” but Buchman isn’t buying it. Last Monday, she sued the district for violating the open records law.
According to Buchman’s representation, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the district has not disclosed the start date of its investigation or who was being investigated. “At this point in time, I don’t really trust my school district,” said Buchman. “To me, it almost makes it almost seem like they’re trying to hide something.”
Buchman explained to The Federalist that part of the problem is many parents are not even aware of the middle school transgender discussion or the scripted announcements. Some students never told their parents, so many parents only learned about what took place because of Buchman’s lawsuit. “People are extremely frustrated with the lack of transparency our district has with parents,” said Buchman.
“One thing that we really want to get across is that if this is happening in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, it’s happening all over the country,” Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty Associate Counsel Cory Brewer told The Federalist.
Likewise, Buchman said that while she has accumulated many silent supporters, she wants to encourage others to speak up. “I don’t mind putting my name out there and being that person advocating for our kids’ rights,” said Buchman, but she also wants more parents “around the country to not be afraid to speak up, be heard, and get engaged in the process.”
“You have options, you can push back, you don’t have to accept the status quo,” Buchman insisted.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
A former high school snowboarding coach filed a federal lawsuit last week alleging his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired for expressing his views on transgender-identifying athletes. The 31-page complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — a faith-based legal advocacy group — on behalf of David Bloch, along with a motion for preliminary injunction seeking Bloch’s immediate reinstatement.
“On February 8, 2023, Coach Bloch and his team were waiting in the lodge for a competition to start. That day, his team was to compete against a team that had a male snowboarder who identifies as a female and competes against females,” the lawsuit states. While in the lodge, Bloch says he overheard a conversation between two of his student-athletes and briefly joined in.
Bloch “affirmed that as a matter of biology, males and females have different DNA, which causes males to develop differently from females and have different physical characteristics.” He added that “biological differences generally give males competitive advantages in athletic events” — something you must pretend is deeply controversial, despite the fact that a large majority of Americans agree.
According to a new Gallup survey released in June, nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults believe transgender-identifying athletes “should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender” as opposed to their “current gender identity.” Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center study from last year found that 6 in 10 Americans “say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”
“The conversation was respectful among all parties and lasted no more than three minutes. It took place entirely outside the presence of the transgender-identifying snowboarder,” the lawsuit states. “Coach Bloch’s team and the team with the male who identifies as a female competed without incident. After the competition, the two teams and their coaches, including Coach Bloch, shared a bus home.”
But it didn’t matter. Bloch had committed wrong-think.
The coach was allegedly handed a notice of termination the very next day by Windsor Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Sherry Sousa. He was accused of violating the school district’s harassment, hazing, and bullying (HHB) policy as well as a related policy of the Vermont Principals’ Association (VPA), which oversees high school sports in the state. Bloch was also “barred from future employment” with the district.
“No one should lose their job for speaking the truth. The First Amendment protects the rights of all Americans to peacefully share their beliefs without fear of government punishment. This means that government officials cannot terminate an employee simply because he expresses a belief that they do not like,” ADF said in a statement.
Specifically, the lawsuit argues that the HBB and VPA policies, as well as a Vermont statute requiring school boards to adopt such policies, “contain content and viewpoint discriminatory, overbroad, and unconstitutionally vague definitions of harassment that … censor protected speech.”
The complaint notes that Bloch is “a practicing Roman Catholic who believes that God creates males and females with immutable sex. His understanding of science complements his religious beliefs. Coach Bloch believes, based on scientific evidence, that there are only two sexes, which are male and female, and that sex is determined by a person’s chromosomes.”
Views like these terrify elites and the corporate press. In a May article, The Washington Post bemoaned that “Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth” and worried that (God forbid) some in the country “have become more conservative on these questions.”
It’s worth highlighting the irony that those requiring you to deny the reality of sex today are often the very same people who spent the past three years demanding you “follow the science!”
Suffice to say, these are not good-faith actors; they’re liars and propagandists interested only in advancing a political agenda. Regard them as such.
Kiyan Kassam is a conservative writer. Follow him on Twitter at @kiyankassam.
Chino Valley Unified School District President Sonja Shaw tells a woman who disrupted the school board meeting to leave the room at Don Lugo High School in Chino, California, on Thursday night. The CVUSD board voted 4-1 on a parental notification policy requiring schools to notify parents if their child changes his or her pronouns. Death threats from left-wing extremists have ensued. (Photo: Will Lester/Media News Group/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/Getty Images)
A local school board president in California has been inundated with threats that left-wing activists will dismember her, kill her children, and slaughter her pets. Her crime? Saying that teachers should not keep parents in the dark if their children begin to “identify” as transgender.
The new Chino Valley (California) Unified School District Board of Education policy states that school officials will notify parents in writing within three days if a child seeks to “identify” as a gender “other than the student’s biological sex,” use different pronouns, adopt a different name, or use the restroom or join a sports team of the opposite sex. The board adopted the resolution Thursday by a 4-1 vote, with member Donald Bridge casting the lone dissenting vote.
“The next morning, our district got a phone call” from an anonymous caller threatening “to kill me, and they said that they were going to dismember” school board president Sonja Shaw, the official revealed on “Washington Watch With Tony Perkins” on Monday. Police alerted Shaw to the threat shortly before a previous interview on the show last Friday.
Then Shaw looked at her district email account, where she said she saw messages stating, “You’re going to die,” with a series of profane epithets. “Your children are going to die, and your animals are going to die.” For a “point of reference, they would name what kind of animals I had,” Shaw added.
“I also got notification that people who identify as being in the terrorist organization Antifa posted on their website, ‘We declare war on Sonja Shaw,’” Shaw told Perkins, adding that the group posted her address. “They said, ‘We know where you sleep,’” the same message an angry mob screamed outside the home of then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2018. “They said things like, ‘Use all force possible to stop her.’”
“I’m not going to lie. I was shaking,” Shaw confided on Monday. Police had beefed up patrols around her home to ensure security, she said.
While she had been “hesitant” to share the details of her ordeal, “God reminded me that these are the people that are after our children.”
“Sacramento has waged a war on parental rights, and a lot of it has to do with the perversion of our children,” Shaw told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, a former Georgia congressman, on Friday.
“We have to put up safeguards. That’s why I was put here,” Shaw told the school board meeting on Thursday.
After being alarmed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s top-down imposition of radical education policy as a parent, Shaw ran for school board, and “God opened the doors” to implement the new policy, she told Hice. When the Newsom administration learned of the impending policy, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond arrived at the district meeting Thursday night.
“It was a political stunt. He was trying to scare us,” assessed Shaw.
Thurmond requested a private meeting with Shaw prior to the meeting, but declined to follow through when he learned she would not withdraw the policy, Shaw has said. He instead addressed the board meeting, speaking as the first of 83 Californians to make their voices heard. Video footage shows the attendees booed when Thurmond concluded, as Shaw asked everyone to “be respectful” toward the official. Thurmond exceeded his one-minute speaking slot, then returned to the podium demanding a “point of order,” although he is not a board member. Police eventually escorted him out of the building.
Thurmond later claimed he “stayed within the one-minute limit,” and tweeted, “When done speaking, the board president verbally attacked me an [sic] instructed police to remove me.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who authored a bill allowing out-of-state children who identify as transgender to flee to California and be injected with cross-sex hormones against their parents’ wishes, alleged, “The QAnon school board president cut him off.” But his former colleague, ex-state Sen. Melissa Melendezpointed out that “Thurmond militantly enforced the rules for speakers when he was in the legislature.”
The district’s newly enacted policy has won the support of parental rights advocates and education experts nationwide. “The school board in Chino Valley is making parental involvement and inclusion a priority. State level officials interested in a healthy school system should follow their lead,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.
But the policy drew instant backlash from the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, which announced its members are already “actively working on new approaches” to override the democratically enacted resolution. The liberal caucus added that parents who represented the near-unanimous consensus of the Chino Valley school board “will not stop us.”
“It appears some state legislators are scheming to make the newly passed CVUSD policy illegal with a future bill,” said Jonathan Zachreson, a member of the Roseville City School District school board and the founder of Reopen California Schools.
Parents in the district have expressed enthusiastic approval. “I think it’s crucial that we keep parents in this conversation. I think that the worst thing you can do to a child is to ostracize their parents from such an important conversation,” Amy Davlin, a parent in the district, told Newsmax on Tuesday morning.
“Groomers and pedophiles are the ones who attempt to gain the trust of children and encourage them to keep secrets” from their parents, said Davlin. A school district should “not encourage children to deceive and lie to their parents.”
More than two-thirds (68%) of Californians agree that parents should be notified if their minor children change their gender identity, according to a poll taken by Protect Kids California.
“I believe there is an all-out agenda against our children,” said Davlin, adding the new policy sends a message to activists who have weaponized education against parents: “You have crossed a red line. The red line is our children.”
Democrats have indicated a legal fight will ensue. California State Attorney General Rob Bonta threatened that the pro-parental rights policy “may violate California’s anti-discrimination law” in a letter to the Chino Valley school board seeking to sway Thursday’s vote. Disclosing a child’s transgender identification to his or her parents “is very likely to result in significant emotional, mental, and even physical harm,” Bonta asserted.
Parents and board members reject that talking point. “Why are you assuming that parents are dangerous?” asked Shaw.
“If you want a lower suicide rate, bring the parents into the conversation,” said Davlin. “We are the ones who love the kids the most. We are the ones who have their best interests at heart, not their teacher who is with them a few hours a day.”
As Newsom and Thurmond focus on social issues, California students fall further behind. California ranks 38th nationwide in K-12 education, according to U.S. News and World Report—behind such Republican strongholds as Florida (14), Virginia (13), Indiana (7), Utah (9), Nebraska (11), and South Dakota (24). Education levels may improve if teachers focused on fundamentals rather than indoctrination, said Kilgannon. “We’re just trying to get the crazy out: To not have children taught wrong history, not have children taught that they could be born in the wrong body, not have children shown sexually explicit images,” she told Perkins on Monday.
Meanwhile, a potential 2024 Democratic presidential hopeful, Newsom, “plays the biggest part” in fueling the vitriol, hatred, and potential violence directed toward the Chino Valley school board, said Shaw. “But I’m glad that they’re exposing themselves,” she continued.
“My daily prayer is for those to be revealed, exposed, and removed that don’t have the best intentions and that have ill-intent for children,” Shaw told Perkins. Thanks to their voluble radicalism, “More people are starting to realize what we’re up against.”
“They’re literally driving a wedge between parent and child,” said Perkins on Monday. “This is evil. It’s just pure evil.”
Columnist Dennis Prager attends the premiere of the documentary film “No Safe Spaces,” in which he is featured, at TCL Chinese Theatre on Nov. 11, 2019, in Hollywood. “No Safe Spaces” chronicles the intolerant, anti-free speech mentality of the Left on college campuses, which Prager experienced firsthand at Arizona State University earlier this year. (Photo Michael Tullberg/Getty Images)
In February, I was invited along with Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and Robert Kiyosaki, author of the bestseller, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” to speak at Arizona State University at a conference titled “Health, Wealth and Happiness.” The invitation came from the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, an independent center affiliated with Barrett College, the honors college of ASU.
About a week before the scheduled event, 34 (Ann Atkinson — see below — counted 39) of Barrett College’s 47 faculty members signed a letter to the dean of ASU condemning the event on grounds that Charlie Kirk and I are “white nationalist provocateurs … purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] institutions of our democracy.”
In June, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that went viral, the then-director of the Lewis Center, Ann Atkinson, wrote, “The faculty protests extended beyond the letter. Professors spent precious class time denouncing the program.”
In addition, the “administration’s position … was no secret. All advertising about ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ was scrubbed from campus walls and digital flyers. Behind closed doors, deans pressured me to postpone the event indefinitely. I was warned that if the speakers made any political statements, it wouldn’t be in the Lewis Center’s ‘best interests,’ which I interpreted as a threat.”
The consequences? The faculty’s illiberal tantrum was devastatingly effective on two fronts.
First, the scare tactics worked on undergraduates. Many students told me they were intimidated by professors into not attending. Some would attend only if we promised that cameras wouldn’t face the audience …
Second, the event cost its organizers dearly. Shortly after ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness,’ Lin Blake, the events operations manager at ASU Gammage Theater, was fired … And as of June 30, ASU will dismantle the Lewis Center and terminate my position as its executive director.
As will be clear, these 34 professors epitomize the low moral and intellectual level of nearly all our universities.
I will not address the specious attacks on Kirk. I will only note that this alleged “hater” devoted his entire half-hour speech to explaining why he, though a Christian, observes the Sabbath each week from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. He spoke about the enriching benefits to his life and to his marriage and family of abstaining from work one day every week, an abstention that includes turning off his cellphone for 24 hours.
Does that strike you as something a hater, let alone a white supremacist, would talk about to students? Furthermore, wouldn’t any student benefit from hearing such a talk, especially from a young person?
Here are some of the accusations of the 34 ASU professors:
“During Black History Month, Barrett is hosting two white nationalist provocateurs who have decried the social prohibition on using the ‘n-word’ and called for the cancellation of Black History Month.”
Their primary “proof” of my being a white nationalist is a statement I once made on my radio show. I told a caller that I believe it is ludicrous that one can never say the N-word — unless, of course, one calls or refers to a black person using that word, in which case, I said, “it is despicable.” You can hear me say it is despicable to call a black person the “N-word” on the broadcast linked to the professors’ letter. The context of my statement about the “N-word” was my saying on the air the word “kike” in quoting the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning David McCullough biography of President Harry S. Truman. A caller asked me why people can say “kike” — the “N-word” for Jews — but never the “N-word.”
That is when I made the commonsense point that there are times when enunciating awful words is warranted — as when one wishes to condemn its use or quote literature, to cite two examples.
In fact, The New York Times recently published an op-ed piece by Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter on the “N-word,” in which he and The New York Times repeatedly spelled out the word — precisely to show that sometimes it is entirely legitimate to say or write the word. In short, the professor (who is black) and The New York Times (which is as left-wing as the 34 ASU professors) essentially said what I said about the “N-word.”
The 34 provided two other examples of my being a “white nationalist provocateur”:
One is that I said in 2020, “If you see the entire video, [George Floyd] is sort of hysterical from the beginning of his encounter with the police, who were completely decent with him. He says he can’t breathe; he can’t breathe before they touch him.”
The other is that I condemned Black Lives Matter.
On the basis of these three examples — none of which is in any way racist — the ASU professors labeled and libeled me as a “white nationalist provocateur.”
They owe me a public apology. More importantly, they owe ASU and their students an apology. Should they not apologize and retract their libels, if ASU has any commitment to truth, it should censure every one of the 34.
Every other example the 34 cited to smear me was equally specious and intellectually dishonest. Every example they used to condemn me was taken from a left-wing group called Media Matters, whose raison d’etre is to smear conservatives. Media Matters is as far left as Proud Boys is far right. Imagine if a conservative group condemned liberals using only Proud Boy sources. That would be the equivalent of what the 34 professors did.
This is important to understand because the professors based their entire smear of me on one, radical source. They clearly never read any of my work.
The charge of my being a “white nationalist” is as vicious as it libelous. It would be impossible to find a written word in my 10 books or more than a thousand columns (all available on the internet) or an uttered sentence in 40 years of broadcasting that expresses sympathy with “white nationalism.” I am a religious Jew who hates white nationalism, the doctrine that killed 2 out of every 3 of Europe’s 9 million Jews just a few years before I was born.
My father, an Orthodox Jew, joined the U.S. Navy and risked his life to fight that evil. As anyone who has heard or read me can testify, the motto of my life, taken from Viktor Frankl’s classic “Man’s Search for Meaning,” is that “there are only two races: the decent and the indecent.”
Unlike the 34 professors and the rest of the Left, I divide people by morality, not race or class.
So, given the dishonesty of the smears, why did the 34 professors condemn ASU for having me come to speak at ASU? The reason is that left-wing professors, deans and students are terrified of articulate conservatives coming to their campuses. They rightly fear that if students are exposed to one of us for just 90 minutes, we can undo four years of leftist indoctrination. And here’s one proof: It is almost inconceivable any one or — for that matter, 10 — of these professors would invite me to ASU to debate them.
Meet a few of them — exactly as described on their individual pages on the ASU website.
Dagmar Van Engen, a ‘non-binary’ individual whose preferred pronoun is ‘they,’ and whose “current project argues that transness is central to queer and feminist science [and is the] author of ‘How to F— a Kraken: Cephalopod Sexualities and Nonbinary Genders in EBook Erotica.’”
Lisa Barca, whose “area of expertise includes … Feminism and Gender Studies and (whose) recent research uses an ecofeminist approach to the intersections of speciesism … and other forms of discrimination.”
Alex Young, “a scholar of transnational settler colonialism.”
David Agruss, who has done “research in gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, and animal studies” and who “filed a lawsuit against Montana State University, saying he was denied tenure and fired because he is gay.
Joseph O’Neill, who “recently led a seminar on the ‘whitewashing of Ancient Greece and Rome.’
Rachel Fedock, whose “research interests include … feminist ethics, Black feminism, abolition, gender, race … .”
Rebecca Soares, an editor of “The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s.”
These are the people who teach your children at Arizona State University — in their “honors” college, no less.
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Dennis Prager is a columnist for The Daily Signal, nationally syndicated radio host, and creator of PragerU.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Image Source: KCAL-TV YouTube video screenshot composite
A shocking report linked the brutal beating of a 14-year-old female student at a California middle school with the defunding of police. The KCAL-TV report featured an interview with the mother of the victim from Sun Valley Middle School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“It’s very heartbreaking, and it makes me upset every time I watch it,” said the unnamed mother to KCAL.
The video was posted to social media and shows two female students beating and kicking the victim numerous times. A teacher at first tried to separate them but eventually he gave up and watched on as the beating continued. The report said she received as many as 35 blows.
“I’m at a loss of words, this is disgusting,” said the mother.
KCAL reporter Ross Palombo confronted the teacher, Evan Diamond, but he did not want to speak to them about the incident. When asked if he had seen the video that was posted all over social media, he said he didn’t want to see it.
“I don’t want to see it, it was a terrible experience,” said Diamond.
The victim’s mother told KCAL that the teacher had spoken to her and admitted that he didn’t know what to do when the girls became violent.
“He said ‘I tried to do what I could, I cannot touch the students, and I would like more training on how to restrain a child, or what can I do in this situation?'” the mother said.
The report went on to document how the police force had been defunded over the last two years.
… from 2020 to 2022, the L.A. Unified School Board defunded its police force, dramatically cutting its budget from $73 million ($72,533,821) down to $59 million ($59,149,486) — nearly 20 percent (18.45%). The number of sworn officers was also cut by 33 percent. The entire police department was cut from 468 to 321 employees.
The family of the victim said that they intended to sue the district over staff negligence that allegedly led to their daughter being harmed.
Here’s the video report from KCAL-TV:
KCAL Investigates: 14-year-old brutally attacked in front of teacher at Sun Valley school www.youtube.com
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Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
California Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to use the power of the state to overturn a decision by a local school board to reject a social studies book that taught about a gay political activist. Newsom released a video of himself promising that the state of California would purchase the social studies books and send them to Temecula, a city in southern California east of Los Angeles.
“A school board in Temecula decided to reject a textbook because it mentioned Harvey Milk. CA is stepping in. We’re going to purchase the book for these students—the same one that hundreds of thousands of kids are already using,” the Democrat tweeted.
A school board in Temecula decided to reject a textbook because it mentioned Harvey Milk.
CA is stepping in.
We’re going to purchase the book for these students—the same one that hundreds of thousands of kids are already using.
“If these extremist school board members won’t do their job, we will — and fine them for their incompetence,” he added.
Temecula Valley Unified District governing board members said they did not object to Milk being included as part of the curriculum because he was gay but because he had admitted to having a relationship with a 16-year-old when he was in his 30s. Defenders of the gay rights activist argue that at the time, 16 years was the age of consent in many states.
Politico reported that Democrats are secretly trying to pass a bill that would fine school districts that rejected curriculum aligned with state standards, including those related to “inclusive and diverse perspectives.” The bill is opposed by the California School Boards Association.
Opponents of the social study book made their arguments at an event in June.
“As a father, I find it morally reprehensible to include someone in the content of [kindergarten through fifth grade] curriculum that was a known pedophile,” said Temecula Valley School Board member Danny Gonzalez.
“I would express the same sentiments at any adult being offered as an example in K through 5 textbooks had admitted to a sexual relationship with a minor, that is the source of my objection to his example,” said Temecula Valley School Board President Dr. Joseph Komrosky, “not his sexual orientation.”
Komrosky also responded to Newsom’s statement and claimed that he had received a threat as a result.
“Governor Newsom, I’m glad that I have your attention,” Komrosky said, according to KTLA-TV. “Now you have mine, as I received my first death threat after your tweet.”
The Montana State Library Commission voted 5-1, with one abstention, on July 11 to withdraw from the American Library Association. (Photo: AzmanL/Getty Images)
The Montana State Library Commission voted Tuesday to withdraw from the American Library Association based on that organization’s new president, who is a “Marxist lesbian” by her own description.
The lopsided vote (5-1, with one abstention) represents the first time a state entity has withdrawn from the 147-year-old nonprofit.
“Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” the commission told the ALA.
After winning an election to become the president of the ALA from 2023-2024, Emily Drabinski celebrated in a now-deleted tweet, “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of the @ALALibrary. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! And my mom is SO PROUD[.] I love you[,] mom.”
Drabinski later confirmed in an interview that the “Marxist lesbian” label is “very much who I am and shapes a lot of how I think about social change and making a difference in the world.”
“Queer theory informs new strategies for teaching the library catalog from a queer perspective,” Drabinski wrote in 2013, in an article titled “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” which was published in the peer-reviewed quarterly journal Library.
Drabinski speaks frequently on topics such as “organizing for change,” “teaching the radical catalog,” “decolonizing the library catalogue,” “herstory through activism,” and “critical librarianship.”
In 2019, she co-authored a research article in Transgender Studies Quarterly documenting “a collective effort by a handful of catalogers” to revise library catalogue practices “so that binary gender was not encoded into the metadata of library records.”
“The ALA has been promoting progressive ideology for many years,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand. “Their annual conference has had breakout sessions on how to feature racist and sexualized content frequently. The reelection of an openly Marxist president, who ran for the job promising to inject her militant views into the organization, was the last straw in Montana.”
At the commission’s June 22 meeting, Commissioner Tom Burnett proposed to consider withdrawing from the ALA at a special meeting, which was scheduled for Tuesday.
“Marxism stands in direct opposition to the principles of the Constitution of the United States,” said Burnett. “It’s fair to discuss and learn about Marxism, not to affiliate with Marxist-led organizations.”
“I believe that the national association has been polarized,” agreed Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen, another commissioner. “We do not need to be tethered to a national organization that does not honor our great state, our values, or our nation as being America.”
Kilgannon said public libraries are especially important in a state like Montana, a mostly rural state with long months of winter weather.
“The public library is where movies are checked out, books are checked out, community fellowship happens, especially when the weather is bad,” she said. “When politics enter this space or ideology takes over, it alienates the people libraries are supposed to serve.”
During an hour of public comment, many speakers supported the decision to withdraw from the ALA.
“I think this is a really good move to send a really clear signal to our national organizations that we are not in agreement with the direction they are taking these organizations,” said parent Cheryl Tusken.
Tusken drew a parallel to the Montana School Boards Association’s withdrawal from the National School Boards Association last year. After NSBA leadership conspired with the Biden administration to draft a letter asking it to investigate concerned parents as domestic terrorists, 30 of its 49 member state associations “distanced themselves from the NSBA’s letter,” and 26 states took “further action … to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.” Even though the NSBA appointed a new CEO and issued an apology, many of those state associations formed their own alternate interstate association instead of returning.
“We are grateful to them for their leadership in setting a standard other states should follow,” said Kilgannon. “The National School Boards Association learned this the hard way. Amazingly, other education groups have failed to learn from that example or the millions of parents across the country who are speaking out.”
The Executive Board of the Montana Library Association issued a statement opposing the decision to withdraw from the ALA. However, not every Montana librarian shared its position. One Montana librarian submitted an email comment, concealing his identity “due to fear of retribution.” He complained that he had watched “my profession go from honorable to shameful,” as “libraries all over the country and within Montana have shifted from serving communities to serving power.”
The anonymous librarian lamented that he noticed a “change in my co-workers who had become aggressive to the point of supporting violent acts (I have evidence of this I am not willing to share in an email).” He said he had “become fluent in critical pedagogy” to “adapt to the rapidly deteriorating conditions in my workplace and surroundings.”
In April, Montana found itself embroiled in a tense cultural controversy that drew national attention when the Legislature worked to enact a law to protect minors from irreversible, harmful gender-transition procedures. A trans-identifying lawmaker accused his colleagues of having “blood on your hands” and urged on protesters who were disrupting proceedings. The protests only grew more heated after the Legislature censured the representative because he refused to apologize.
It “said a lot” that the librarian was afraid to use his or her name, Commissioner Tammy Hall noted, “because of the personal attacks this person would be open to if they didn’t follow what I would call ‘the woke agenda being promoted by the ALA to our librarians.’”
“Parents all over the country are waking up to the fact that many in organizations like ALA are not willing to entertain other ideas or accommodate differences,” Kilgannon added. “The best course of action now is to leave the organization, take your funds and brain power with you, and use that money to serve the people in your state.”
Children’s books are one of the most powerful tools parents have to help teach their kids how to be good humans. From picture books being read at bedtime to novels being read by flashlight under blankets, kids flourish in the safety of stories as they develop their belief systems. Resilience, empathy, respect, and many other noble traits are portrayed and experienced vicariously through books. What a powerful tool!
Having been a part of the children’s book publishing industry for several decades, and as a passionate participant, I have watched in growing dismay as the children’s literature, or “kidlit,” world has shifted and changed, and most recently taken a drastic plummet. Parents need to understand the destructive path this industry has taken, or they will discover too late as the damage hits home.
Seeing the Shift
This shift in kidlit has been happening for a long time. About 25 years ago, novels that portrayed kids as environmental activists began to win awards. About 15 years ago, the award-winning books showed shocking, disturbing scenarios. Ten years ago, books that depicted sexualization and abuse at younger ages began to win awards. Then, five years ago, it shifted a bit more to where books focused on systemic racism and sexual identity won awards. Today, if books don’t include any of the above depictions, they are rarely published by medium and large publishing houses.
And it’s the medium and large publishing houses that supply schools, libraries, and bookstores.
Eight years ago, I organized a statewide writer’s conference for children’s book authors. We brought in several high-powered industry members from major publishing houses. One editor’s words threw open the window to this shifting world. She asked a writer at our conference, who was a leftist himself, about his story. He explained that in his manuscript, his main character learns that his hero is gay. The protagonist is troubled by this and works through his feelings to come to acceptance later in the book.
The respected editor stopped the writer mid-explanation and said, “No.” She explained that in kids’ books, we must present the ideal as if it already exists. There can be no “being troubled by” gayness. There can be no “coming to terms with” sexual identity. The characters in our stories must immediately accept with positive responses any representation of modern social constructs. This immediately laudatory reaction to woke ideology is now required in kidlit. If an author doesn’t portray it as such, his book will not be published.
This pronouncement by the editor shocked me and many other writers there. The line had now been drawn. As writers, our hope of publication rested on our willingness to positively portray woke ideology.
Shortly after this conference, as a part of several online writers’ groups, I started to see comments like this: “We have a duty to save children from conservative, Christian thought,” and “It’s our responsibility as writers to right the wrongs of past traditional thinking.” In their minds, they were in a strategic position as writers of kids’ books to influence young minds in the direction they wanted. These groups soon canceled me.
“We have a duty to save children from conservative, Christian thought,” and “It’s our responsibility as writers to right the wrongs of past traditional thinking.”
A Normalization Campaign
In the past three years, there has been another dangerous shift. In 2020, the Publisher’s Weekly list of Best Middle Grade Books of the year featured 14 titles. These are books for kids ages 9 to 13. Out of the 14 books, nine on that year’s list openly spoke about racism and sexual identity. Each book’s description clearly identified these themes. Of the 14 books on the 2021 Best Books list, nine of the 14 again included topics of racism and sexual identity, but this time, some were clearly identified and others subtly presented. On the Publisher’s Weekly list of Best Middle Grade Books for 2022, nine of the 14 books discussed racism and sexual identity, but only one clearly stated so in the book description. Publishers no longer openly tell readers about the portrayal of radical social agendas in their books. They are subtly inserting the concepts that they want to teach young kids without letting parents know they are there.
Any more questions about why reading and math score are so awful?
This shift frightens me more. We have moved from the inclusion of liberal social agendas in kids’ books — and flaunting it — to sneaking them in under the radar of parents. This is called normalization. The goal is to include these ideologies in exciting, adventurous stories so they become commonplace. Woke ideology has shifted from being the make-up of a book’s plot lines to the fabric of the setting — the normal backdrop of the story as if it exists that way in real life. This normalization leads to acceptance, which leads to embracing. By weaving these social agendas into the “normal” background of a story, a child who feels shocked at a scene or description immediately shifts to feeling shame for being shocked in the first place. Kids will seek to replace their shame with acceptance. This is the power of normalization.
When I know what a book is about, I can make sure my child doesn’t read it. When I’m being kept in the dark, these ideologies may slip past me and fall directly into my child’s hands and mind. Strong storytelling mixed with normalized social agendas creates a book that will influence my child in ways I don’t want. This is the power the industry holds.
We can no longer walk into a library or bookstore, grab a children’s novel off the shelf, and expect it to be clean, based on traditional values, or to contain age-appropriate material. It won’t.
The Library Lurch
And not only books and publishers pose a problem. After the seismic cultural shift that happened in 2016, libraries across the nation purged their shelves of anything “old.” This weeding out pulled many classics, which got some attention, but the deepest cuts were made in the children’s departments. Traditional values were ejected to make room for new, modern left-wing values — from board books for babies to young adult novels.
Many homeschool families use literature extensively in their programs because of the versatility of the media. But these families have increasingly become dismayed at what they are finding at the local libraries they have depended on for so long. I have heard from many parents that they no longer go to the library at all. What a shame! Even when well-meaning people donate clean books with traditional values to their local libraries, in the hopes of spreading light, many new library acquisition policies dictate that the donations be thrown away.
Of 12,000 librarian donors to the 2020 presidential campaign, 93 percent went to President Joe Biden. The vast majority of public and school librarians across the nation are leftist in their personal beliefs and are more than happy to join the publishing industry in promoting their ideals. We see this in children’s book promotional displays, in the way librarians arrange books on shelves, and in the books they order. In your library, you may find more than a dozen different children’s biographies on Ruth Bader Ginsberg, but not even one on Amy Coney Barrett. This has become typical.
On Feb. 25, 2023, conservative children’s book publisher Brave Books, hosted a story hour at the Hendersonville, Tennessee Public Library. Kirk Cameron, Missy Robertson, and Riley Gaines went to read their traditional-value books to kids. When the librarian learned who they were, he tried to stop the story hour, saying he “didn’t want their movement” in his library. This librarian had previously hosted drag queen story hours. But Brave Books had arranged the story hour according to the library’s policies, so it couldn’t be stopped. So instead, the head librarian, along with his two assistants, did everything they could to disrupt the event. They blasted music, banged tables, and tried shouting them down.
Fortunately, Hendersonville is a very conservative community. Almost a thousand families came to the library for the story hour and appreciated the opportunity to stand up for traditional values in kids’ books. Due to public outcry, within a few weeks, the librarian had been fired.
This is what we’re up against. The entire children’s book publishing industry — from authors to publishers to librarians — believes it should have the power to control your children’s minds. And it has systematically and progressively gained that access.
Kiri Jorgensen is the Publisher and Senior Editor at Chicken Scratch Books.
Columbus City Schools (CCS) shelled out more than $24,000 taxpayer dollars to a consulting firm that taught staff how to sneak radical gender ideology into classrooms without parents’ permission, a public records request made by Parents Defending Education revealed.
The two-day training in September 2022 was conducted by Q-inclusion, now known as “Hey Wes,” an organization led by a woman disguised as a man that boasts of partnering “with schools, healthcare clinics, businesses, and communities in order to support queer & trans belonging.”
Before the symposium, CCS had policies allowing students “affirming name and pronouns” to be “on all other documents, so long as this does not out them or put them in danger.” Some gender-bending students were also granted access to opposite-sex bathrooms and lockers.
During the sessions, CCS staff such as speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, school psychologists, and school counselors were schooled on methods and tools such as “gender support plan” sheets they could use to further their campaign to quietly force the LGBT agenda on children without parents’ knowledge.
CCS hires were specifically instructed what to do “when a student is out to you but not to their family” and how to handle “caregiver concerns and pushback” with conversation tactics while still hosting sexual conversations with children.
“Transgender and nonbinary students have a FERPA-protected right to privacy; this extends to students’ gender identity, birth name, sex assigned at birth and medical history. This includes privacy rights from parents/caregivers,” a Q-inclusion handout used for the training states.
Another set of slides boldly asserts that “children are not too young to talk about or know their gender” and that “gender expansiveness” should be discussed with toddlers.
Other slides used during the training included infamous imagery such as the genderbread person iteration, “the gender unicorn,” and the “wheel of power and privilege,” which argues that a mentally and financially stable, white, heterosexual, educated male in good health is the epitome of societal “privilege.”
The session hosts cited phony statistics from the Trevor Project, which not only promotes the mutation and castration of children but was recently caught hosting online, anonymous conversations about sex between adults and children.
Any religious staff who believe marriage is between a man and a woman and may have taken issue with some of the training’s content were educated on “What to do when your personal/religious beliefs don’t align with LGBTQ+ inclusion.” Q-inclusion’s suggestion for staff looking for ways to promote “LBGT inclusion” starts with displaying pride flags, wearing pronoun pins, and calling boys and girls “Friends, scholars, learners, children, mascot/community name.”
The consultants also encouraged CCS staff to fill their offices and classrooms with sexually explicit books.
“Families assume that when their children’s teachers attend professional development sessions, educators learn how to be more effective. But as these documents show, taxpayer dollars were instead spent encouraging school officials to treat pupils differently on the basis of superficial characteristics, hide information from parents, and discuss adult content with young students,” President of Parents Defending Education Nicole Neily told The Federalist. “It’s appalling that Columbus City Schools would choose to spend its finite resources on a consultant pushing such toxic content on teachers — particularly because less than half of all students in the district are proficient in reading and math.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
University professor addresses his students during a lecture. | Getty Images
An Ohio gender studies professor was formally reprimanded and ordered to complete free speech training after giving a student a failing grade on a project centered around women’s rights in sports that used the phrase “biological women.”
Melanie Nipper, an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati, received an official reprimand from the school in June after she gave her student, Olivia Krolczyk, a zero out of 20 on a May final project in a Gender in Popular Culture class, stating that “biological women” is an “exclusionary” term.
A copy of the reprimand obtained by The Cincinnati Enquirer stated that Nipper’s actions violated the university’s Campus Free Speech Policy. The letter also stated that any other violations of the university’s policies may result in termination.
“To prevent any further violation of this policy, you must complete training on the requirements of the Campus Free Speech Policy,” Ashley Currier, head of the Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC, wrote in the letter. “Through the end of Academic Year 2024/2025, you must submit all syllabi to me at least two weeks prior to the beginning of classes for review and approval.”
Nipper appealed the reprimand in a June 19 letter to UC’s Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Margaret Hanson. She argued that the restriction on what she referred to as “harmful speech” was necessary to “ensure a safe learning environment.” The professor defended her actions, stating that she informed the student that her project was “inappropriate” because she believed it framed trans individuals as oppressors.
“My language in the Canvas comment informed the student that the term “biological women” was the issue; however, in follow-up emails with the student, I answered her questions and explained that the context of the topic with the phrase was the issue, rather than the isolated phrase itself,” Nipper wrote.
The adjunct instructor felt it necessary to tell the student to change her project topic or alter the language to include “all women.” Another reason the professor cited for the failing grade was that the project failed to use in-class sources, which she noted do not support “trans-exclusionary feminism.”
“Additionally, as the class has students that identify as gender non-conforming and/or trans, I felt it was necessary to educate her regarding inclusive language to ensure a safe learning environment for other students in the course discussion boards,” Nipper added.
Nipper concluded her letter by requesting that the interim dean reconsider the reprimand, expressing confidence that she can continue teaching students without violating the school’s policy on freedom of expression.
The University of Cincinnati did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
In May, Krolczyk shared her final project grade and the professor’s comments in a TikTok video. The student’s video featured a screenshot of Nipper’s remarks on her project, saying that she’d regrade the assignment if Krolczyk edited it to focus on “women’s rights (not just females).” In addition to deriding the phrase “biological women” as “exclusionary,” Nipper said that the term is not allowed in the course because it reinforces “heteronormativity.”
Krolczyk’s project focused on women’s rights in sports, from securing a spot for women in the Olympic Games to the current challenges female athletes face when biological men are allowed to compete as women. The student questioned in the video how she was supposed to complete her project if she couldn’t use the phrase “biological women.”
More evidence of the Transgender-Agenda sickness is disrupting our society, but even more, our colleges and universities. How many centuries of biology has been taught that there are TWO GENDERS. Now, these are the same people that tried to shame us when we stood our ground about all the COVID-19 propaganda, shouting, “FOLLOW THE SCIENCE”. “BELIEVE THE SCIENCE”.
In years past, the term, “mental illness” would be associated with this kind of conduct.”
Women’s sports advocates such as Riley Gaines have repeatedly addressed the impact that allowing biological men into women’s spaces has had on female athletes. Last month, Gaines testified during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “Protecting Pride: Defending the Civil Rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.”
Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer and University of Kentucky graduate, discussed her experience competing against Will Thomas, a biological man who identifies as a woman named Lia Thomas. Thomas previously competed as a man for three seasons at the University of Pennsylvania before he started competing on the girls’ team during the 2021-’22 season.
Besides being forced to share a locker room with Thomas, the women athletes watched Thomas beat multiple female swimmers. Gaines accused the NCAA of discriminating against women by allowing a man to compete against them and claim their awards.
The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the Biden administration’s $400 billion student loan bailout in response to a legal challenge by Job Creators Network Foundation. This ruling sets the stage for long-overdue bipartisan action to address the underlying reason for this debt crisis: unaccountable colleges that have raised tuition by more than double the inflation rate over the last generation.
The court ruled that the cancelation program was a clear act of executive overreach, a position that both President Biden and Nancy Pelosi have taken in the past. Congress neither authorized broad student loan forgiveness nor indicated intent to do so. In fact, Congress has repeatedly rejected student loan cancelation bills in recent years. The president is not a king and cannot usurp lawmakers’ authority.
With this ruling, the Supreme Court has protected hardworking Americans who have paid back their student loans or never went to college from having to unfairly cover the college debt of others.
The Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
A student debt jubilee would have let colleges off the hook for their role in this crisis and given them a blank check to keep on raising costs, secure in the knowledge that the federal government will step in when debts get out of hand. Lawmakers can now begin to address the problem’s root.
The average annual tuition at private, nonprofit universities has grown to $50,000. As a result, American colleges are sitting on $700 billion in endowments. They are taking advantage of their “nonprofit” status and favorable opinion from Democrats and the media to price gouge ordinary Americans.
A lot of fat can be cut from colleges and returned to students through lower tuition. For instance, colleges have hired an army of high-paid administrators that provide little to no educational value. Some colleges now have around the same number of administrators as students, and most have more administrators than faculty.
College sports coaches can make more than $10 million per year, and college presidents can make over $1 million.
President Biden’s plan to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for qualifying individuals was struck down by the Supreme Court. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
This begs the question: Have colleges become glorified jobs programs funded by students and taxpayers?
Colleges have launched dozens of expensive humanities degree programs that don’t provide students with marketable skills. These sociology-adjacent majors generally teach postmodernism, identity politics and a victim mentality that leave students unprepared to succeed in today’s competitive economy. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has vowed to end such low-value degrees in his country.
Colleges have also engaged in a decades-long building boom that has added expensive resort-style amenities to campuses. Features like state-of-the-art dorm rooms, lecture halls and sports facilities don’t improve learning but cost a lot of money for students and taxpayers. These aren’t the college campuses you remember attending.
The Supreme Court took action Thursday, striking down President Biden’s student loan bailout plan. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for We, The 45 Million)
Under the status quo, where the federal government backs all student loans, there’s little check on such college profligacy. Yet smart reforms can reverse runaway college tuition and spending.
Recent legislation introduced by Senate Republicans helps get to the root of the problem by imposing student loan transparency and eliminating inflationary Graduate PLUS loans, but more needs to be done.
Broader reforms such as requiring colleges to take over some responsibility for making student loans will incentivize them to ensure students don’t take on too much debt and graduate with skills to succeed. Talk about a win-win.
Democrats have long stood against price gouging, institutional greed and preying on vulnerable folks. They can do so again by joining with Republicans to take on the college cartel. Many top Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have railed against corporate excess, and they should stay consistent by also calling out colleges.
Thanks to the court’s decision, lawmakers can now come together to finally reduce escalating college costs burdening so many. Everyone agrees student loans are a crisis. It’s time we all identify colleges as the true culprit and pursue bipartisan reform to hold them accountable.
Elaine Parker is president of the Job Creators Network Foundation.
Alfredo Ortiz is President and CEO of the Job Creators Network, a non-partisan organization founded by entrepreneurs.
Universities take note — the Supreme Court will not tolerate the fanatical and wanton reliance on race that has become the norm in admissions.
In Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court held that Harvard and North Carolina had gone too far with racial preferences in weighing student applicants. Too many universities, said Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion, “have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
While this is a key win for individual rights, the court did not go far enough. The court should have held that race can play no role in university admissions whatsoever. Instead, the court has opted to prop up a feeble precedent that leaves the door ajar for ongoing discrimination.
While the Supreme Court added a few supporting beams to its rickety case law on racial preferences in admissions, it should have torn down the whole structure.
In 2003, the Supreme Court decided Grutter v. Bollinger, holding that universities can consider race in admission decisions (which is another way of saying they can discriminate based on race) to build student body diversity. The court said universities have a compelling interest in the “educational benefits that flow from” racial diversity, which — according to the court — promotes “cross-racial understanding” and combats racial stereotypes “because nonminority students learn there is no ‘minority viewpoint.’” How ensuring admission to racial minorities promotes viewpoint diversity when there is “no minority viewpoint” is a mystery.
But the court set limits. Universities cannot set quotas, they cannot racially balance the student population, and they can only resort to racial preferences if race-neutral methods of achieving a diverse student body won’t do the job. And there’s a time limit. Once racial preferences are no longer needed to achieve diversity, they must be retired.
These safeguards may sound strict, but Grutter also told courts to “presume” universities are acting in “good faith.” In other words, if the universities say they’re playing nice and plaintiffs can’t prove otherwise, the courts shrug and move on.
Grutter also declined to resolve how much diversity is enough diversity. Universities can discriminate until they reach a mystical “critical mass” of racial minorities. Once again, courts defer to universities on the question of how much is too much.
Grutter’s presumption of “good faith” is an unsettling echo of Plessy v. Ferguson, the case in which the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation on trains by accepting the government’s claim to be acting “in good faith for the promotion of the public good, and not for the annoyance or oppression of a particular class.”
Despite Grutter’s blustering about its “strict” scrutiny of university admissions, the decision was little more than an indulgent wag of the finger that has left universities free to discriminate. The Supreme Court’s failure to fire this sleepy sentinel of equal rights will allow universities to continue to put skin color above achievement.
Yet Harvard and North Carolina’s wanton discrimination was blatant enough to raise the alarm even under Gruttter. Both universities rely on race in student admissions to a startling degree. For example, an Asian American student in the highest tier of academic performance has less chance at Harvard admission than an African American in the fourth-lowest tier. An African American student in the top tier has well over a 50% chance of admission, while an Asian American in the same tier has about a 10% chance. North Carolina is similar. These universities are not alone; many schools view Harvard’s approach as the gold standard for admissions.
Trial evidence indicated that neither Harvard nor North Carolina had considered race-neutral alternatives as Grutter requires (subject to that pesky presumption of good faith, of course). Plaintiffs, for instance, demonstrated that Harvard could increase racial diversity if it jettisoned preferences for legacy candidates (children of alumni, donors and faculty), who are overwhelmingly White and wealthy. Likewise, an increased focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged students would lead naturally to greater racial diversity. Neither university has bothered to try these alternatives.
According to Chief Justice Roberts, Harvard and UNC have engaged in unlawful stereotyping by assuming skin color says something about the content of someone’s character. As the chief justice put it, “The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating someone differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well.”
All said, Students for Fair Admissions is a step forward toward racial equality, if not the leap that many court watchers hoped for. It puts universities on notice that courts will not just take universities at their word that they are behaving themselves. It also patches up a few of Grutter’s more glaring flaws. For example, it rejects the idea that universities are owed unlimited deference in their racial gerrymandering as Grutter had implied.
If courts do begin to take Grutter more seriously, as Thursday’s decision does, we could see universities slink toward more covert methods, such as proxy discrimination — where schools adopt “neutral” methods such as zip code quotas with the intent to discriminate. This is already happening in admission-only K-12 schools. For example, at Thomas Jefferson High School, school administrators adjusted their admissions process in an underhanded effort to reduce Asian American admission. A lawsuit against the high school brought by my employer, Pacific Legal Foundation, will soon ask the Supreme Court how to address this discrimination by proxy.
Students for Fair Admissions offers hope that the Supreme Court will continue to side with genuine equality.
Ethan Blevins is an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, which litigates nationwide to achieve court victories enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee of individual liberty.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down race-conscious student admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in a sharp setback to affirmative action policies often used to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and other underrepresented minority groups on campuses.
The justices ruled in favor of a group called Students for Fair Admissions, founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, in its appeal of lower court rulings upholding programs used at the two prestigious schools to foster a diverse student population.
The decision, powered by the court’s conservative justices with the liberal justices in dissent, was 6-3 against the University of North Carolina and 6-2 against Harvard. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not participate in the Harvard case.
In major rulings last year also spearheaded by the conservatives justices, the court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion nationwide and widened gun rights in a pair of landmark rulings.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority said, “Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” referring to the U.S. Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law.
Roberts said that students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
“At the same time,” Roberts said, “as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
Many institutions of higher education, corporations and military leaders have long backed affirmative action on campuses not simply to remedy racial inequity and exclusion in American life but to ensure a talent pool that can bring a range of perspectives to the workplace and U.S. armed forces ranks. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissent that the decision “subverts” the constitutional guarantee of equal protection and further entrenches racial inequality in education. “Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote in a dissent joined by Jackson and Liberal Justice Elena Kagan.
Sotomayor added, The “court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Blum’s group in lawsuits filed in 2014 accused UNC of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants and Harvard of bias against Asian American applicants. Students for Fair Admissions alleged that the adoption by UNC, a public university, of an admissions policy that is not race neutral violates the guarantee to equal protection of the law under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The group contended Harvard, a private university violated Title VI of a landmark federal law called the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on race, color or national origin under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. According to Harvard, around 40% of U.S. colleges and universities consider race in some fashion.
Affirmative action had withstood Supreme Court scrutiny for decades, most recently in a 2016 ruling involving a white student, backed by Blum, who sued the University of Texas after being rejected for admission.
The Supreme Court has shifted rightward since 2016 and now includes three justices who dissented in the University of Texas case and three new appointees by former Republican President Donald Trump.
Harvard and UNC have said they use race as only one factor in a host of individualized evaluations for admission without quotas – permissible under previous Supreme Court precedents – and that curbing its consideration would cause a significant drop in enrollment of students from under-represented groups. Critics, who have tried to topple these policies for decades, argue these policies are themselves discriminatory.
AMERICAN HISTORY
The United States is a nation that long has struggled with issues of race, dating back to its history of slavery of Black people that ended only after a Civil War, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and in recent years racial justice protests that followed police killings of Black people.
Reaction to the ruling was swift.
“The Supreme Court ruling has put a giant roadblock in our country’s march toward racial justice,” said Democratic U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement.
“Affirmative action is systemic discrimination,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton wrote on Twitter. “I’m thankful the Supreme Court held this discrimination violates the constitution. Admissions should be decided on merit – not by color of skin.”
Many U.S. conservatives and Republican elected officials have argued that giving advantages to one race is unconstitutional regardless of the motivation or circumstances. Some have advanced the argument that remedial preferences are no longer needed because America has moved beyond racist policies of the past such as segregation and is becoming increasingly diverse.
The dispute presented the Supreme Court’s conservative majority an opportunity to overturn its prior rulings allowing race-conscious admissions policies. Lower courts rejected the group’s claims, prompting appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court asking the justices to overturn a key precedent holding that colleges could consider race as one factor in the admissions process because of the compelling interest of creating a diverse student body.
ROCKVILLE, Md.—Here at the crossroads of Mannakee Street and College Drive in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Outside the headquarters of Montgomery County Public Schools, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox church stood in a white turban, gold-colored robe, and church insignia. Like Seyouman Getahun was in an interfaith crowd of about 1,000 parents, students, and community members. The crowd of largely “brown and black” people, as equity warriors so often colorize minorities, rallied for the right of parents to opt children out of age-inappropriate sex education in local public schools.
Meet Like Seyouman Getahun, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He told me why he was at the Montgomery County MD rally. I am putting 7 minutes of our chat here so you can hear from people in the trenches. Watch his reactions to Gay BCs and Gender Queer at the end! pic.twitter.com/SoCLuFlqrF
Co-organized by a new group called Coalition of Virtue, these parents are the “intersectional” answer to the Woke Army. The Woke Army are the leftist activists who exploit “black, indigenous, people of color” (BIPOC) to put children in the crosshairs of the “rainbow mafia” in K-12 schools. These parents who defy their stereotypes are the Woke Army’s worst nightmare.
Hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians from an estimated 40 local churches, including Getahun’s, rallied beside Muslim immigrant families from a dozen mosques and other area community members. Their ranks included a Filipino-Puerto Rican-American Christian dad and a Peruvian-American Catholic mother.
All were here to protest the refusal of the local school board, all affiliated at some point with Democratic Party politics, to allow parents to opt their kids out of sex ed that includes an introduction to homosexual behavior and gender identities that contradict one’s natural sex.
“This hill is where the democrats have chosen [to] die. Bizarre. Totally bizarre,” said a Twitter user.
Today, at the corner of Campus Drive and Mannakee Street, in Montgomery County, Maryland, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Today, June 27, about 1,000 Arab Muslims, Ethiopian Christians, Peruvian Catholics and so many other brown and black immigrant families outflanked the… pic.twitter.com/G623Q6Sw7x
From Rockville to Glendale, Calif., where Armenian American parents oppose school board indoctrination, a new “intersectional” rejection of wokeism includes voters up for grabs by Republican politicians and efforts like No Labels, which may advocate for a third-party presidential candidate in 2024.
“Vote them out!” the Rockville crowd chanted, packed shoulder to shoulder.
The protestors’ demands were simple enough: “Protect families’ rights!” “What do we want? Opt out! When do we want it? Now!” “We want freedom! We want rights!”
Across the parking lot, about a dozen all-white leftist activists stood, chatting with each other. They looked awkward and out of place, with rainbow umbrellas over their heads but no rain yet and soap bubbles from a party machine streaming by.
Later, inside for public comments at a school board meeting, local activist Laura Stewart complained about a video I had posted from a protest of Muslim parents early last month. She objected that it “was retweeted by Elon Musk,” the owner of Twitter.
In video testimony, Stewart omitted a critical detail from her resume: she has been an officer and leader in the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club. She has also been vice president of advocacy for the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations and just received the “National PTA Lifetime Achievement Award” from the local council.
The rallying parents are mostly new American citizens. Their lifetime achievement is immigration, acculturation, employment, and parenthood in a new nation where they enjoyed no legacy, no property, no bank account, and no “privilege,” except the inherited grit to navigate a new society with a new language and culture.
If you can believe it, the night before this rally filled with immigrants, the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club issued a statement with a newly formed group, “Coalition for Inclusive Schools” that Stewart now leads. It condemned “outside influences” seeking to opt-out children from age-inappropriate sex ed.
The #WokeArmy is dealt a lethal blow. The battlefront: Montgomery County, Maryland. TODAY. The hard-left came after the kids and Muslim parents aren’t having it. 🧵
Montgomery County Public Schools recently refused to allow parents to opt out of indoctrination that relates to… pic.twitter.com/KIMTI1fAIM
This multicultural crowd was anything but “outside influences.” It was filled with recent immigrants who live locally. These parents made an argument that parent groups are increasingly expressing around the country and in Canada, asserting religious freedom rights.
“Our beliefs! Our choice! Religious freedom, raise your voice,” they chanted.
Peruvian-American mother Norma Margulies carried a handmade sign that read: “Respetemos el derecho de las familias a compartir su cultura y religión con sus hijos e hijas!” “Respect the rights of families to share their culture and religion with their children, sons and daughters,” she translated, adding, “It’s a basic right.”
Margulies joined the protest from her home in nearby Fairfax County, Va., with a friend, Tony Sabio. He’s the son of parents from the Philippines and Puerto Rico and a military veteran who rescued a boy from Ukraine.
Sabio said he is running for school board in Fairfax County because of the disenfranchisement of parents. “I’m here for these parents,” Sabio said over the crowd’s chants as he carried the American flag over his shoulders.
In recent years, woke activists have exploited “intersectionality.” That’s a concept critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw invented in 1989 to look at injustices through the prism of an “intersectionality” of various allegedly oppressed social identities. While the idea had some merits, far-left activists and politicians have weaponized it.
In recent days, Maryland and Virginia parents have held sign-making events and parent educational seminars at local places of worship including mosques like the Islamic Center of Maryland and affiliates of the Medhanialem Orthodox Church. Holding signs that read “Respect Our Values” and “Parents Know Best,” they voiced concerns about the sex curriculum being taught to their children.
Across the street from the school system’s offices, a strip of locally owned storefronts showcased the diversity in this suburb community. On Hungerford Drive, an Ethiopian restaurant sits beside Island Pride Jamaican Restaurant, Yunnan Rice Noodle, Aria Halal Supermarket, and 5-10 Quick Mart.
In the crowd, Getahun, the Ethiopian Orthodox cleric, told me he was there to support parental rights as enshrined in the 14th Amendment and the U.S. Constitution. He flipped through copies of the books “The Gay BCs” and “Gender Queer” tucked in my “Mary Poppins” bag of inappropriate books in public schools and furrowed his brow at the images.
“T is for TRANS,” he read, not the usual “trains” in most books teaching the ABCs. “It’s a brave step to take,” he continued, “to take to live as the gender you know is innate.”
The book is meant for toddlers, as young as three.
While the rally primarily focused on the right to opt out of sex curriculum, the attendees also saw the school board’s refusal to address their concerns as an infringement on their religious freedom.
Nearby a rally organizer, Ismail Royer, a director of Islam and religious freedom at the Religious Freedom Institute based in Washington, D.C., said: “This is the intersection, this is the alliance that really matters. This is the moral consensus that is at the heart of the American moral tradition and virtue tradition.”
By about 5 p.m., the rally ended, with Getahun among the last leaving the rally off Mannakee Street and College Drive, as members of this new intersectional alliance chanted, “We will prevail!”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, she is also the author of “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance Destroying America’s Freedom.” She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at Independent Women’s Network. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com or @AsraNomani on Twitter.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D) administration has sued three school districts in the state over policies that require staff to inform parents if their children show signs of changing their “gender identity.” The lawsuits against the school districts were reportedly filed on Wednesday by Attorney General Matt Platkin, a Democrat. In the lawsuit, he alleged that the Manalapan-Englishtown, Marlboro and Middletown school districts violated the state’s law against discrimination (via Politico):
“‘Outing’ these students against their will poses serious mental health risks; threatens physical harm to students, including risking increased suicides; decreases the likelihood students will seek support; and shirks the District’s obligation to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all,” reads the Marlboro lawsuit. “Indeed, LGBTQ+ students in New Jersey and elsewhere have died by suicide after being outed.”
The lawsuits, which seek to stop the districts enforcing the policies, come as some of the most intense battles of the culture wars, nationally and in New Jersey, play out in suburban and rural school districts. Middletown is also where Murphy resides.
Last month, New Jersey filed a similar lawsuit against the Hanover Board of Education. The two sides are currently at an impasse over how to amend the Morris County district’s parental notification policy.
Guidance from the state says schools “shall ensure” students be addressed by their preferred names and pronouns, be allowed to dress “in accordance with their gender identity” and that “parental consent is not required” for the district to accept the student’s “asserted gender identity.”
“School policies that single out or target LGBTQ+ youth fly in the face of our State’s longstanding commitment to equality,” Sundeep Iyer, director of the Attorney General’s Division on Civil Rights, said in a statement. “Our laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression, plain and simple, and we will not waver in our commitment to enforcing those protections.”
Marc Zitomer, an attorney for Marlboro’s school board, told Politico in a statement that “we vehemently disagree with Attorney General’s argument that it is somehow discriminatory or improper to notify a parent that their minor child is changing their gender identity or expression.”
“It is our position that keeping parents in the dark about important issues involving their children is counterintuitive and contrary to well established U.S. Supreme Court case law that says that parents have a constitutional right to direct and control the upbringing of their children,” Zitomer added.
Reportedly, each school district makes exceptions to the parental notification policy if there is reason to believe that doing so would put the student in harm’s way.
Townhall has covered several instances of school districts across the country attempting to keep parents out of the loop when it comes to their child’s gender identity, including in Colorado, Virginia, Kansas, Ohio and California. Last year, Republican Sen. Tim Scott (SC), who is running for the White House in 2024, introduced legislation that would prevent schools from hiding information about a student’s gender identity from their parents.
“The law in the United States has long recognized the importance of parental rights. A parent’s right to oversee the care education of their child is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment,” the bill said. “Parents have a fundamental, constitutionally guaranteed right to raise and educate their children in the way they choose.”
“Public schools across the country are violating these fundamental parental and familial rights by deliberately hiding information about gender transitioning from their parents,” it continued. “These schools are sabotaging the parent-child relationship and encouraging children to keep secrets from the adults who are charged with protecting and defending them – their parents.”
A speaker at a recent virtual library conference instructed school and public librarians to take steps to prevent parents and community members from finding books with LGBT+ themes, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
The June seminar, hosted by Library 2.0 and called “Banned Books and Censorship: Current Intellectual Freedom Issues in the Library,” featured Valerie Byrd Fort, an instructor at the University of South Carolina. Byrd Fort presented a session titled “Get Ready, Stay Ready: Community Action Toolkit” that instructed librarians on how to best ensure that parents and other concerned community members would not find LGBT+ books.
The presentation covered “some things you could do proactively to get ready when censors come knocking at your door.”
Byrd Fort’s “Pro-Active Steps to Take” advised librarians to create rotating displays of recommended books. She stated that the displays should “let the community know that you’re there for all students and not just certain groups.”
Byrd Fort recommended having student volunteers create some of the displays.
“If somebody maybe has something to say about one of those displays, you could say, ‘well, we had one of our teen volunteers create it, so it just goes to show that they want to see it and they need to see these resources,'” she said.
Byrd Fort then instructed school librarians to avoid labeling the books with “identity-based subject headings” such as “LGBTQIA+” or “Gays Fiction.”
“Aside from being bad practice, it makes it too easy for parents or community members to find those kinds of books,” she explained. “Don’t make it necessarily easy for those groups to find, but make it easy for those who want the books.”
For students to easily find the titles, the seminar suggested providing children with a physical list of LGBT-themed literature or creating a digital list that could only be accessed with a username and password.
“We have plenty of examples of book challenges, book banning … things being put out on social media by people that aren’t even a part of a certain library community,” Fort stated. “So that will help make it very hard for that to happen.”
If students express concerns about a particular title, librarians are encouraged to “explain how just because something isn’t for them, that doesn’t mean we’re going to keep it from everyone else.”
Byrd Fort advised providing students with “privacy covers” when they want to read books with LGBT+ themes “or something else with potential to offend.”
A Library 2.0 spokesperson told the DCNF, “For these events, none of the speakers are compensated, and the opening keynote panel host chooses his or her own panel members.”
“So those particular remarks, or any remarks in that context, do not represent the position of the conference organizers, as we’ve never taken a position on any issue. And while we might personally agree or disagree with specific sentiments that are expressed in forum discussions or conference sessions, we’ve never censored or deleted any content–although we obviously would if it were slanderous or illegal,” the spokesperson added.
Byrd Fort did not respond to a request for comment, the DCNF reported.
Get Ready, Stay Ready: A Community Action Toolkit youtu.be
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A 12-year-old girl alleged that she was raped in a middle school bathroom in October 2021, but the incident was not brought to light until the girl’s mother discovered her diary entry about the attack, according to the Post Millennial.
In Rio Rancho, New Mexico, the young girl was washing her hands in what was described as a girls’ restroom at the ASK Academy middle school. At that point a male came into the bathroom and allegedly walked over to the girl, pinned her against the counter, and wrestled her onto the floor. After allegedly hitting her head, he also reportedly held the girl down and raped her.
“I was raped. I was raped. I was raped. F***ing kill me,” the girl, who is being referred to as Ray, reportedly wrote in her diary. The discovery of the passage by her mother, being referred to as Maggie, explained the shift in mood and mental health that her daughter had inexplicably been going through.
The daughter had been exhibiting signs of grief, anxiety, and depression. She was also put in therapy, as the mother insisted that the girl must have been bullied at school.
Months after the alleged incident, parents pressed the girl about the diary entry, and the young girl admitted that the attack took place. The family took the girl in for a physical exam and began questioning the school. The mother reportedly concluded that the alleged horrific act was only made possible because the school embraced gender ideology.
“We learned that kids were pledging allegiance to the Pride flag instead of the American flag,” Maggie said. “We learned that some teachers were discussing daily the normalcy of transgender people and gender dysphoria and that this school had a higher population than anyone would expect for such a small school of kids saying they were trans and parents not knowing.”
The young girl also reportedly said the school pushed a far-left culture that pressured her to accept men in women’s spaces. The students were allegedly taught to avoid improperly “judging” transgender people.
The Independent Women’s Forum asked ASK Academy CEO Edward Garcia for comment and clarity on the bathroom policies. Garcia reportedly responded that the school is an “inclusive learning environment for all students” and added the school does “not discriminate against any student.”
Garcia denied claims that sexual harassment and assault were commonly trending at ASK Academy. Garcia allegedly did not respond when asked if girls’ facilities are open to biological boys.
The now 13-year-old girl doesn’t hold sympathy for similar transgender-inclusive situations and said, “By them saying the only thing that matters is how they feel and not how I feel is very selfish of them.”
“If they want their own bathroom, then gladly get your own bathroom. If you want your own sports, get your own sports. If you want to be included, be included in your own way that doesn’t cause danger to everyone else,” she added.
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A school in southeastern England is under fire from parents and critics alike after one of its teachers chastised a student over her refusal to accept a classmate as a cat.
Grade eight students at Rye College in East Sussex were subjected to a class on “life education” on Friday, during which they were told they can “be who you want to be, and how you identify is up to you,” reported the Telegraph.
Seizing upon the invitation to become who she wants to be, one student turned zoologist asked a classmate, “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”
For questioning a classmate’s attempt to self-dehumanize, the 13-year-old was subjected to a verbal thrashing by her teacher. The teacher ultimately told the student she was “despicable” and informed her that if she didn’t agree with the gender ideology being foisted upon her, she needs “to go to a different school.”
Audio of the exchange has since surfaced, wherein the teacher can be heard confronting the student: “How dare you? You just really upset someone, saying things like [you] should be in an asylum.”
“I didn’t say that,” responded the student. “I just said if they want to identify as a cat or something, then they are genuinely unwell. … They’re crazy.”
“You were questioning their identity,” said the teacher. “Where did you get this idea from? That there’s only two genders?”
The student noted, “There’s only a boy and a girl. There’s no other private parts,” adding, “I just said my opinion. If I respect their opinion, can’t they respect mine?”
The teacher suggested that the recognition of two genders is “not an opinion”; that gender is “not linked to the parts that you were born with. Gender is about how you identify. … There are lots of genders. There is transgender. There is agender.”
Before the teacher could rattle off the various other “genders” she had committed to memory, the 13-year-old interjected, saying, “Yeah, but you can’t have that. … It’s not a law but it’s our opinion — we just don’t agree with it.”
In the audio, the student and her friend appear to reinforce one another, with one stating, “If you have a vagina, you’re a girl. If you have a penis, you’re a boy.”
“But cisgender is not necessarily the way to be,” said the audibly vexed teacher. “You are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with or you’re weird, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.”
The teacher suggested that the girl’s thinking and that allegedly shared by her mother helped to account for why there is so much “homophobia” in the world. The 13-year-old corrected her teacher, noting that “that’s not homophobia, that’s transgender. I’m fine with lesbians and gay people. I’ve got nothing against them,” underscoring there is no meaningful link between gender ideology and homosexuality.
Unable to dominate the debate, the teacher signaled a desire to oust the debater, telling the student that she is in need of a “proper educational conversation about equality, diversity, and inclusion” and no longer belongs at the school.
A parent of one of the 13-year-old’s classmates told the Telegraph, “I understand the point the teacher was attempting to make; what bothers me is the shutting down of debate in such a threatening and aggressive manner, which I don’t believe is appropriate in an educational setting.”
“Regardless of the subject, education should serve to build awareness of differing points of view to widen the understanding of a subject. It shouldn’t be a case of indoctrination,” added the parent.
Andrew Williams, leader of Christian Concern, told the Daily Mail, “These lesson plans targeting the innocence of children, and even babies, have no place in U.K. schools. The fact that they are being kept secret from parents tells us everything we need to know. Since RSE [relationships and sex education] was introduced, schools have become places of confusion rather than clarity. Lesson plans are becoming more and more extreme, and increasingly parents are being cut off and marginalized from what is being taught to their children.”
A spokesman for the the school said, “We are committed to offering our pupils an inclusive education. Teachers endeavour to ensure that pupils’ views are listened to, and encourage them to ask questions and engage in discussion. Teachers also aim to answer questions sensitively and honestly,” adding, “We will be reviewing our processes and working with the relevant individuals to ensure such events do not take place in the future.”
The girls will reportedly face no punishment, as the school considers the matter closed.
The Daily Mail reported earlier this year that the Church of England’s Aquinas trust, which manages nine primary and two secondary schools including Rye College, instructed teachers earlier this year to “re-educate” students who use politically incorrect language, such as “stop acting like a girl.”
Staff were allegedly urged to “challenge negative language and actions, re-educating and using sanctions where appropriate.”
The so-called “Equality Lead” for the Aquinas trust, Barry Blakelock, also happens to be be executive head teacher at Rye College and Rye Community Primary School. Blakelock has been responsible for leading the trust’s “Equalities Strategy,” which advances an Orwellian “Inclusive Language Guide” that seeks to eliminate language that does not advantage gender ideology, including the terms “mother and father.”
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Image source: Instagram video screenshot via @the_typical_liberal
A Huntington Beach, California, city council member and some parents took time during a local school board meeting earlier this week to blast a Pride video recently shown to students. A clip that’s been circulating on social media shows students purportedly in an Edison High School math class watching the Pride video and reacting with jeers and boos.
The teacher gives an initial warning for unruly students to “stop!” But when the negative reactions continue, the teacher adds, “Hey, I’m warning you guys now, if you’re gonna be inappropriate, I will have supervision down and give all of you a Saturday school for next year. So knock it off.”
“At no time was the teacher concerned with the student’s visceral reactions as they watched the video clips of couples in intimate positions and poses,” Councilwoman Gracey Van Der Mark said during Tuesday’s Huntington Beach Union High School District board meeting, according to Voice of OC. “In my opinion, it was not the students who were being inappropriate in that video.”
Van Der Mark added that she’s received emails demanding that she apologize for calling on parents to speak out against the teacher and the video shown in the class, the outlet noted.
“I will never apologize for encouraging parents to express their concerns any time they are worried about their child’s safety or well-being. Never,” she said, according to Voice of OC.
The outlet said some parents spoke out, too.
The Daily Pilot reported that one parent described the Pride video as “indoctrination,” which drew cheers from some in the crowd. The parent also accused “activist teachers” of trying to push their values on his children, the Pilot added.
While many have reacted harshly toward the teacher in question as if airing the clip was her idea, conservative commentator Robby Starbuck — who posted the clip on Twitter — noted in a subsequent tweet that “some 10th grade students came forward to tell me that this video was played in ALL classes that day, not just math class. They’re upset about it and want the school to refrain from playing videos like this.”
Another Twitter user — @inminivanhell — made a similar claim on Twitter, saying the clip was shown in all classes and actually is from the student news channel. The Daily Pilot added that it was from an episode of a student-produced show called “Bolt TV.”
That Twitter user added, “In an effort to control the class, the teacher can be heard warning the students if they can’t behave they will receive Saturday school. This teacher is now dealing with her picture & name being posted all over the Internet — because she asked them to behave in class.”
That same Twitter user also noted the following: “Further context: the student news video was 10 mins long, it shared graduation information, interviews with students, sports recap, and videos reflecting on their school year. This video clip about Pride was a 1-min segment during the episode.”
Another Twitter account posted what it claimed is the Pride clip shown at Edison High School:
Here is the video that was shown at Edison High. It’s a simple explanation of #Pride month and does not show two women kissing, just their heads together. The message of this video is to love and accept everyone on campus. That is all. #BoltTV@EdisonChargerspic.twitter.com/EcWN5YofM9
— Exposing_Huntington_Beach (@exposing_hb) June 12, 2023
The Huntington Beach Union High School District on Monday didn’t immediately respond to TheBlaze’s request for comment on the initial story.
The Daily Pilot also reported that residents about a mile away from Edison High School found anti-LGBTQ, anti-Jewish flyers the morning after the school board meeting.
Councilwoman Natalie Moser told Voice of OC that a resident sent her a photo of the flyer.
The flyers feature a pentagram, star of David, and the words “The LGBTQ+ movement is Jewish” in a rainbow-colored font, the Daily Pilot said, adding that Mayor Tony Strickland said their distribution was limited to a small, “isolated” area.
Van Der Mark told the Voice of OC that the flyers don’t have anything to do with the Pride video, and she also issued a statement against the flyers.
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Oh, look, it’s another one of those books that Democrats absolutely demand be made available to children. All it does is push little kids to “defy” the “ridiculous rules” of gender norms— because they cause “depression”!
A friend of mine took her two young children — a boy, 6, and a girl, 4 — to the Indianapolis Public Library, Glendale branch, this week and let them pick out some books from the kids’ section. It wasn’t until she got home that among the ones chosen by her daughter, who hasn’t yet learned to read, was Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too, a colorful picture book by Michelle Tea, the creator of “drag queen story hour.”
Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too promotes transgenderism to children. IMAGE CREDITUSED WITH PERMISSION
The story involves two young kids who like to play dress up, but when they’re told to take the costumes off before leaving the house, a garish drag queen named Morgana arrives and tells them all about the splendor of being a transvestite.
“Like Mama Ru said, we all are born nude,” the book says. “All our clothing is drag—every dress, tie, and snood. Now, I know that some people make ridiculous rules, but you’ll learn to defy them, and I’ll give you some tools!”
‘I know that some people make ridiculous rules, but you’ll learn to defy them,’ the book says. IMAGE CREDITUSED WITH PERMISSION
Mama Ru is a nickname for RuPaul, the famous drag queen. He and depictions of several other drag performers are featured on another page. This is a book listed on Amazon for children ages 4 to 8. Isn’t your 6-year-old a “Drag Race” fan?! The pages are filled with illustrations of little boys wearing dresses, girls wearing male sports attire, other boys in wigs, wearing heels and make-up and on and on. Also jarring are drawings of swords, snakes, and one creature with the head of a cat but the body of a cow. (All that’s missing are seven heads, 10 horns, and 10 crowns.)
My friend noted the passage on one page in particular that she said concerned her the most: “You see, my dear children, when gender expression / is hampered with rules, it just leads to depression!”
The book continues: ‘when gender expression is hampered with rules, it just leads to depression!’ IMAGE CREDITUSED WITH PERMISSION
“You see, my dear children, when gender expression / is hampered with rules, it just leads to depression!”
Just what every parent wants — to explain the concept of depression to their 4-year-old daughter.
“I’m a moderate who previously thought the book bans were outrageous,” my friend told me, referring to the attempt by some local governments to restrict sex-themed kids’ books in public libraries and schools. “I support the gays and the queens but not the idea of teaching a child they should be depressed over the gender they were born into.”
It’s worth repeating that she had no idea her child had chosen this book until after she and her family had gotten home. She had assumed that when her daughter came back to her with a vibrant picture book plucked from the kids’ section that it was harmless literature for children. But as we’ve seen, the kids are no longer off limits. The militant transgender activist lobby is out to get them and this is how they’re doing it.
This article includes graphic quotes from books that are being marketed to children.
On Thursday, Joe Biden will host a pride month event for families with LGBT kids on the White House South Lawn. It’s during this event that he’ll appoint a “banned-book” czar, whose job it will be to try to compel local communities to stock their libraries with race-obsessed pseudo-histories and books depicting oral sex, rape, violence, and gender dysphoria.
Now, if that sounds like an unfair description, there’s an easy way for the president to debunk his critics: He can read selected outtakes from some of these innocuous books to the prepubescent kids who show up to the event. Even better, he can do it on TV. After all, “[b]ook banning erodes our democracy,” says White House Domestic Policy Adviser Neera Tanden, and “removes vital resources for student learning, and can contribute to stigma and isolation.”
Hey! That’s a GREAT idea. Have President Biden, with Jill beside him, gather all his children, and grandchildren, all the children of the people who work in his cabinet and White House, along with all the children, and grandchildren of every democrat Congress Person, and Senators. Make sure the Mainstream Media cameras are broadcasting LIVE. Then have President Biden and his wife Jill, alternate books as they read them out loud to their guests, and the nation. EVERY WORD!
You’re right. The networks could not like that content be broadcasted live over the airwaves. So, why is it okay for impressionable children to read such smut?
As Biden says: “There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.” So, perhaps the White House could set up a themed reading circle on the South Lawn where the president can recite selections from Lawn Boy, which describes 10-year-old boys performing oral sex on each other. It is, after all, on PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans.
The School Library Journal praisesLawn Boy as an exploration of “race, sexual identity, and the crushing weight of American capitalism.” (Incidentally, do you know how many books celebrating traditional families or the Second Amendment or Western civilization or the wonders of capitalism are stocked in school libraries? Speaking from experience, I’d say maybe a handful — and that’s probably an exaggeration. They aren’t “banned,” schools just refuse to carry them.)
Or, better yet, First Lady Jill Biden — who, you may not have heard, earned a doctorate in education — should recite these words for the kids: “‘What if I told you I touched another guy’s d-ck?’ I said. … ‘I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s d-ck in my mouth…’” and so on. This is a vital resource for kids, says the administration.
Though it doesn’t have to be Lawn Boy. It could be the graphic “novel” Gender Queer, banned by the Cherry Creek School District in Colorado, according to PEN. Dr. Jill — mom, educator — owes it to democracy to read the words, “I got off once while driving just by rubbing the front of my jeans and imagining getting a blow job.”
Some “banned books,” like It Feels So Good To Be Yourself, are meant to normalize trendy pseudoscientific jargon and ideas among kindergarteners and first graders, filling their heads with words like “non-binary,” “gender fluid,” and “gender expansive.” If reactionary parents won’t teach kids these ideas, someone’s got to. And that’s bad enough. But maybe Biden can explain why middle schoolers need to have access to the vulgar, graphic sexual scenes of incest and child rape featured in Sapphire’s “banned” novel Push.
I’m certainly not arguing that every book removed from libraries is porn or badly written or useless. Perhaps Push tells the story of an abused girl using appropriately realistic and horrifying words. Even so, the topic of brutal sexual violence isn’t morally or educationally tantamount to a math lesson. It’s up to parents, not teachers nor Joe Biden, to decide when, how, or if their kids read about it.
PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans claims there are nearly 1,500 “instances of book banning in schools, affecting 874 different titles in the first half of this school year.” The preponderance of the books on the list feature sexually explicit scenes — and many have minority and gay characters, because regrettably, so-called progressives have decided to teach kids that their immutable physical characteristics or sexuality or “gender expression” define them, rather than their achievements and deeds.
One of the ideas behind public schools was that they would break down ethnic and class barriers and build shared patriotic virtues and civic understanding. Instead, they are often used to trap kids and then indoctrinate them with leftist culture attitudes. That’s what Biden means when he says your kids are also his kids.
And if parents get involved, they’re accused of standing against “democracy.” Because in contemporary left-wing vernacular, “democracy” has been stripped of any useful meaning. Sometimes democracy means majoritarianism denying individuals their rights for the common good, sometimes “democracy” means courts unilaterally dictating policy, and sometimes it means parents having zero say in what their children read or learn.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget that “banned books” are a partisan myth. These days, a “book ban” is a euphemism for curating a library in a way that upsets left-wing activists. Not one book on PEN’s list is even difficult to obtain, much less banned. Parents don’t even need to leave their homes to buy any of these books. They can order any of the titles in mere minutes and have them delivered to their front door in days. There are no “banned books.” There are just cultural imperialists, ideologues, and cowardly politicians trying to force their ideas on all children.
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss is at it again: amplifying far-left partisans in their war on quality education for American kids. On June 8, she wrote about a report claiming schools that use a classics-based curriculum are vanguards of “right-wing Christian nationalism.”
Schools that emphasize personal virtue, English grammar, classic literature, patriotism, original source-based history, traditional and rigorous math and science, and classical artistic training are “designed to attract Christian nationalists with specific imagery and curriculum,” Strauss slanderously claims. I’m not making this up: She and the report claim the American colors of “red, white, and blue” and pictures of the American founders are racist dog whistles.
Such imagery on the schools’ websites is “designed to attract White conservative families,” Strauss says, citing the report. The implicit bigotry is appalling — assuming some people wouldn’t be interested in patriotic ideas simply because of their skin color. Who’s the racist: people who think American patriotism has a skin color or people who don’t?
Strauss and the report she’s citing also attack schools that promote virtuous behavior to their students, because “values” and “virtues” “stand as shorthand for quoted scripture.” We can’t have kids learning about the deep religious beliefs that created their unprecedented equality, liberty, and opportunity, now, could we? That would be horrible! They might, you know, shovel driveways for the elderly, stay faithful to their spouses, and donate their time and money to charity!
According to these anti-American, anti-Christian partisans, who clearly reject the founding American statesmen’s views about the purpose of public education, there’s absolutely no room for teaching children virtue, morality, or religion in public schools. What an interesting message to Christian parents from the people who control public education.
The report makes sure to target highly successful networks of classical schools, including those run by parents trained at and given free curriculum from Hillsdale College (my alma mater), the Great Hearts Academies, and Liberty Common in Fort Collins, Colorado, a model for many other classical schools. Strauss paints it as nefarious that a guy who wrote in The Federalist noticed such schools exist for the “purpose of forming young minds,” as if every single school in existence doesn’t form the minds who enter.
What she really means is that only the left should be allowed to shape people’s minds. That’s what this report and article are really about: boxing out of public education anyone who doesn’t think exactly like politically extremist teachers union leaders do.
This is another illustration of the reality that today’s left doesn’t believe in sharing the public square, public funds, or anything else with people who don’t parrot their views. This is why leftist-run schools don’t educate, they indoctrinate: You can’t educate without conversation.
Monologues are not conversation. Conversation is not shouting down ideas, banning them, or slandering them. That’s why suddenly conservatives are the only ones who believe in free speech, honoring our country’s fathers and mothers, and educating without indoctrinating: The left has abandoned these common goods in the pursuit of political power.
This report is the work product of the Network for Public Education (NPE), founded by Diane Ravitch, who used to believe in educating kids about their American heritage with original source documents. I’d bet you her U.S. history book is on the shelf in many of the schools this report targets because it is in my kids’ Christian classical school.
But Ravitch has subjugated herself to leftist ideology as she’s become more professionally dependent on corrupt teachers unions. She now seeks to foist a similar intellectual degradation on innocent kids. It’s a shame.
Given this connection, it’s no surprise NPE is financially, ideologically, and professionally connected to the nation’s largest teachers unions, which are gigantic, far-left political operations. The Chicago Teachers Union gave NPE and its political action fund, Network for Public Education Action, a series of grants that look like a startup endowment, according to CTU’s own website and its tax forms. From 2014 to 2016, the union’s foundation gave NPE $265,000, according to its tax forms.
CTU is a large affiliate of the massive national American Federation of Teachers union. It is notorious for extremist behavior, including shutting down Chicago schools in 2022 in defiance of elected officials’ decision to restart school post-Covid.
CTU takes in $32 million a year, and the AFT takes in more than $200 million a year, according to their public tax forms. CTU has something like $60 million in assets, and AFT has $140 million. Each has multiple other arms that also rake in millions each, as well as functioning as distributing houses for all the public money they collect.
The NEA, by the way, takes in $600 million a year, and has more than $450 million in assets, according to its tax records. Teachers unions are essentially giant political money laundering operations and among the top donors to the Democrat Party.
NPE says it has also received money more recently from the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which Peter Cook says received more than $1.3 million from unions between 2011 and 2019, according to their disclosures to the U.S. Department of Labor. Schott itself discloses AFT and National Education Association union funding on its website.
Like teacher’s unions, which strongly support political extremism such as teaching small children about gay sex and hiding kids’ gender struggles from their parents, NPE is an ideologically far-left organization. A conference attendee noted the organization considered canceling or moving its 2016 conference in North Carolina after the state passed a law requiring men to stay out of women’s bathrooms. The report’s retired journalist coauthor is a longtime school choice opponent and teachers union mouthpiece.
So, it’s quite rich for an organization connected to some of the biggest leftist political organizing operations in the United States to complain about politics in public education. What they’re really complaining about is competition, which is gaining steam because of how badly these far-left union activists are mangling public schools.
Union money goes all across the country to target any education innovations that threaten their control of the system. Classical schools are one of those threats.
Lots of parents aren’t happy with the current results of unions’ giant political influence operations masquerading as public education. Instead of responding to parents’ concerns about the lack of quality in their kids’ schools and the proliferation of extremist politics, the interest groups making billions off public education belittle concerned parents as Nazis. (Obviously, “white Christian nationalism” is to them a synonym for “Nazi,” a deeply offensive slander that is somehow OK for the left to throw at anyone who disagrees with their politics.)
“[T]he classical/right-wing sector is rapidly growing. Forty-seven percent of the schools we identified opened since the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017,” the report says. It includes zero reflection about how the rise in leftist extremism since Trump’s tenure may have contributed to this rapid exodus of parents from conventional public schools.
If more parents get better schools that don’t happen to force teachers to launder billions of dollars to the Democrat Party through mandatory union dues, this entire multibillion-dollar power-mongering racket is in danger. This is not at all about the best education for kids; it’s about money and power.
This story may contain details that are disturbing.If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
A 10-year-old New York school student was reportedly so scared of his bully that he pleaded with his family to let him stay home before he killed himself.
Gianlukas “Lukas” Illescas, a student at the Hillcrest Elementary School in Peekskill, New York, was allegedly bullied for months while district officials “didn’t have time” to address the issue, his dad, Christian Illescas, claimed during an emotional school boarding meeting on Tuesday.
Illescas said he asked district administrators and social workers for help multiple times because his son was scared to go to school for the last six months, according to a report by News12 Westchester.
“Look! Look!” Illescas yelled at the board members while holding a picture of his son on his phone. “You didn’t have time? Five minutes. I don’t know how you can sleep. I don’t know how.”
Gianlukas “Lukas” Illescas, a 10-year-old boy, killed himself after allegedly being “relentlessly bullied,” his father said. (GoFundMe)
Illescas said in a GoFundMe post that his son was “robbed of his future” because of the district’s neglect.
“Bullying is responsible for the death of a 10-year-old child!” Illescas wrote. “He will never get to graduate with his friends, make memories alongside his family, and have a life full of choices and adventure! His family and friends are heartbroken and beyond devastated.”
Lukas was “relentlessly bullied by one child,” his dad told ABC News. Before that, he said his son loved to swim and was a “happy, engaging, energetic boy” who loved his family and life at home.
Tragically, Lukas reportedly took his life about two weeks ago.
A 10-year-old boy reportedly died by suicide after being bullied in Hillcrest Elementary School in Peekskill, New York, a suburb of New York City. (Google Street View)
“I have nothing to lose,” Illescas told ABC News. “My son is gone, so all I want right now is justice for other kids.”
The school district and city of Peekskill, which is a suburb about 45 minutes north of Manhattan, released identical statements Tuesday afternoon that said the police are investigating.
“On behalf of the City of Peekskill, I want to express our condolences on the recent passing of a Hillcrest Elementary School student. Our hearts and prayers are with the family,” the district said. “Let us all unite as a community like we always do and support this family in its time of need.”
However, the reactionary approach is too little, too late for many supporters, who protested and packed Tuesday’s meeting.
WATCH MOM OF BULLIED VIRGINIA STUDENT TALK ABOUT THE ISSUE
“All these parents are here. There are witnesses,” one parent yelled at the board, according to a report by The New York Post. “And we are not taking that anymore. A 10-year-old child had to suffer because of negligence? Because you didn’t take time?”
About one in five high school students reported being bullied on school property, and more than one in six high school students reported being bullied online in the last year, according to the CDC. Nearly 14% of public schools report that bullying is a discipline problem occurring daily or at least once a week, the CDC says.
The federal government provided resources for parents, victims and school districts on stopbullying.gov, which is managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“When adults respond quickly and consistently to bullying behavior they send the message that it is not acceptable,” the website states. “Research shows this can stop bullying behavior over time.
“Parents, school staff, and other adults in the community can help kids prevent bullying by talking about it, building a safe school environment, and creating a community-wide bullying prevention strategy.”
Chris Eberhart is a crime and US news journalist for Fox News Digital. Email tips to chris.eberhart@fox.com or on twitter @ChrisEberhart48
The affirmative action practice that has allegedly sidelined high-achieving Asian Americans now sits before the U.S. Supreme Court, awaiting a decision that, depending on the outcome, could alter the review process for college applications for the foreseeable future.
Its fate could also weigh heavily on the academic futures of people like 18-year-old Jon Wang, a Florida native who scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT, with a perfect score on the math section. Combined with a 4.65 high school GPA, most would see him as a shoo-in for any elite university.
Asian-American student Jon Wang says he is speaking out against affirmative action policies that discriminate against his race. (Fox Nation/The Diversity Verdict)
“The top-tier schools I applied to were MIT, CalTech, Princeton, Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon and U.C. Berkeley,” he said.
Wang was rejected by all of them.
But the rejection letters didn’t come without warning. Wang told Fox Nation he talked to friends and school guidance counselors going into the application process, and they all issued a bizarre warning.
“They all told me that it’s tougher to get in, especially as an Asian American. I just took it as gospel,” he said.
Wang, the child of two first-generation Chinese immigrants, is one of the people behind the plaintiff group taking on Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — two institutions whose race-based admissions practices have emerged at the epicenter of affirmative action practices for public and private institutions.
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham hosts, walking subscribers through the court case that could shape the future of higher education and shift focus to a merit-based system.
Last fall, the high court heard two cases dealing with the issue, deciding to keep them separate since Harvard is a private institution and UNC is public, creating distinct legal concerns.
At stake in the Harvard case is whether the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Asian-American applicants. The UNC case, in contrast, looks at that school’s unwillingness to adopt a “race-neutral alternative.”
Either of the two cases could overturn 2003 precedent case Grutter v. Bollinger, wherein the court ultimately ruled that the use of race as an admissions factor was not unconstitutional as long as it was narrowly tailored to further the compelling interests of obtaining the educational benefits available in a diverse student body.
But, is getting accepted to college more difficult for Asian American applicants? Ingraham said The Princeton Review, a company that provides college prep and test-taking advice for high schoolers hoping to go to college, agrees with Wang’s concern.
A passage from its book “Cracking College Admissions” notes that the high success of many Asian-American students has generated concerns among some schools who allege there are “too many” on their campuses.
The two Supreme Court cases in subject deal with the admissions policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Fox News)
As explored in the Fox Nation special, the book says applying to college as an Asian American could be a “distinct disadvantage” at many elite schools. It also instructs applicants to refrain from including a photo of themselves in their application and withhold optional answers about ethnic background, if possible, as well as to avoid writing admissions essays about the significance of identifying with two cultures.
“I was scared of getting backlash on social media for it [raising awareness about unfair admissions],” Wang said. “For fighting for what I think is a really important issue.”
But he found a space among Students for Fair Admissions.
“I gave them my test scores, and then they must’ve ran the model on that… [they] told me I had a 20% chance of getting accepted to Harvard as an Asian American and a 95% chance as an African American,” he said.
Wang also found a home at the Georgia Institute of Technology — better known as Georgia Tech — a high-profile Atlanta-based university that specializes in engineering and other STEM degrees.
Despite the risk of backlash in his career and elsewhere, he said he’s never going to stop fighting for the right cause and for future generations of Asian Americans.
Decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College could come before July 4.
Fox News’ Ronn Blitzer and Haley Chi-Sing contributed to this report.
Taylor Penley is a production assistant with Fox News.
Bureaucrats in President Joe Biden’s Department of Education just put their thumb on the scale of a book dispute in Georgia by not only smearing parents’ concerns about sexually explicit books in schools but also leveraging their federal power to intimidate districts that have successfully purged porn from campuses. In the Biden administration’s latest attempt to weaponize an arm of the federal government against parents, the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) wrote a letter to Forsyth County Schools Superintendent Jeff Bearden on May 19 outlining everything it deemed wrong with the district’s decision to pull several inappropriate books from school bookshelves.
Not only did the federal agency demand that the district offer “supportive measures to students who may have been impacted by the book removal process,” but the OCR also ordered the Georgia school district to administer a “climate survey” to middle and high school students so bureaucrats can “assess whether additional steps need to be taken.”
The OCR predicated its probe into Forsyth schools on allegations from an unnamed complainant that the administration, at the bidding of parents, “created a hostile environment for students”based on race, color, or national origin. Using the Supreme Court’s expanded definition of “sex” as determined in the 5-4 Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, the OCR also claimed it was investigating whether Forsyth County schools “created a hostile environment for students” based on sexual orientation and identity.
The Bostock ruling specifically pertained to sex differences in employment, not education. Still, after reviewing district documents, emails from parents to school staff, and school board meetings as well as interviewing several district staff, the Biden administration attempted to justify its involvement in this local education dispute by claiming it is a top enforcer of the 1972 Title IX and the 1964 Title VI laws.
“In my opinion, this is not about books,” Cindy Martin, an FCS mother, told The Federalist. “This is about the federal government using bully tactics against our school system to indoctrinate our children into their LGBTQ ideology.”
District and Parents Agree: Porn Shouldn’t Be in Schools
Clamor over inappropriate content in Forsyth schools first surfaced in 2021 when parents discovered several titles including sexually explicit material were made available by schools to their children. One parent told The Federalist that despite several attempts to contact the district, she never heard back until January 2022. After months of ignoring parents’ calls for change, the district called a District Media Committee meeting to independently discuss how to address ongoing concerns about unsuitable content in the classroom. By Jan. 21, 2022, FCS Superintendent Dr. Jeff Bearden asked the chief technology and information officer (CTIO) to “pull from school libraries books that were obviously sexually explicit or pornographic.”
“…how to address ongoing concerns about unsuitable content in the classroom”? Simple really. If you are uncomfortable reading the material Sunday Morning in Church Service, then should our children be READING IT?
“For us, it’s not about censorship because, obviously, students and parents have the right to choose to read whatever they want outside of the school,” FCS Chief Communications Officer Jennifer Caracciolo told one local media outlet at the time of the decision. “They can purchase it or they can go to the public library. But we have a responsibility whenever it comes to sexually explicit content in the walls of our buildings.”
Following a review, the CTIO asked Forsyth County Principals to indefinitely pull nine books from “all school libraries” and restrict another six books to high schools only.
“The content in them was what we would consider pervasively vulgar, and it’s not about whether or not a parent or guardian liked or disliked the ideas contained in the book or liked or disliked the author or the author’s identity, we focused on content that was pervasively vulgar,” Caracciolo clarified.
For a while, it seemed like the schools and the parents were beginning to get on the same page. But the fight wasn’t over yet.
“The conservative parents in our community were grateful that the school chose to stop providing children with this harmful, low-quality material. It fantasizes sex and leads to negative consequences such as sexual harassment, teen pregnancy, disease, and poverty,” Martin said. “However, we had done intense research and knew that eight books did not even come close to the amount of sexual explicit books that needed to be removed. This is how and why the Mama Bears of Forsyth County formed. We expected the school to make the libraries a safe place for all children. A school system should never provide sexual reading material to children.”
Twisted Tales
During its investigation, the OCR was quick to overlook the role parents and taxpayers have the right to play in the education of children, instead complaining that “the District did not make an announcement to, or have other communication with, students about the removal of the books.”
The OCR admitted in its findings letter that the school administration made it clear that the books in question “had not been reviewed for LGBTQI+ content or moral dilemma issues, just sexual explicitness.” Yet, OCR accused FCS parents of making what it characterized as “negative comments about diversity and inclusion or critical race theory.”
“Many parents called for the removal of additional books, with most of their comments focused on sexually explicit content; however, some comments focused on removing books for reasons related to gender identity or sexual orientation,” the letter stated.
The OCR additionally accused the district of giving the “impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment.”
Several local media outlets also expressed outrage at the district’s decision and spread the lie that FCS leadership was “banning” books at the bidding of parents. The OCR, in turn, cited the media’s rage as proof that parents and the district somehow overstepped their bounds by protecting minors from sexually explicit content.
One Atlanta Journal-Constitution article lamented that “Juliet Takes a Breath,” a book known for, as Common Sense Media put it, “detailed scenes of kissing and lovemaking between two women, sexual fantasies, masturbation, and periods, as well as extensive discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity,” would no longer be available to students. Another book called “Monday’s Not Coming,” one reviewer noted, is filled with “homosexuality, promiscuity, intercourse, and prostitution” as well as child abuse. That book was sent “to local media center review committees for further analysis” by the school district.
Similar coverage dominated corporate media pages after the OCR’s letter was published in May.
Shortly after the school district pulled the handful of explicit books, parents gathered at a Feb. 15, 2022 Forsyth County Board of Education meeting to express their concern that children were being exposed to even more explicit books via the school system.
One attendee, Alison Hair, only got a few words into reading an excerpt from one of the other explicit library books that still sat on FCS shelves before she was cut off by the board for allegedly violating meeting rules.
“If you continue with your statement just please, we have other people that are younger in this [room],” one board member told Hair.
“If it is inappropriate to read in this building, then it is inappropriate, inappropriate to be in a library,” Hair said. “How dare you say ‘Oh, well, there’s minors in here.’ Wait, what is it? My son’s a minor and this book that you all have copies is in my son’s middle school.”
Hair’s frustrations were echoed by more than a dozen other parents.
“I have an 11-year-old and this is not allowed in our house nor would I allow him to pick this book up at Barnes and Noble or your school library that you provide for my children,” Ann Christopher, a mother to a Forsyth County middle schooler, said. “Also, you say respect the rules. You’re telling Alison to respect the rules. Excuse me. This is in my child’s face if he chose to check it out. What rules are you respecting for my child who can’t speak for [himself]? I’m the one here to protect my child, nobody else is. That’s why we parents are here.”
In a complaint filed in July 2022, Mama Bears of Forsyth members Hair, who was barred from school board meetings after attempting to read from another explicit passage in March, and Martin alleged that the Forsyth County Board of Education violated their First Amendment rights as parents to speak up about what kind of reading materials their children are exposed to.
“This lawsuit does not try to resolve the question of which books should be available in school libraries, but instead addresses unlawful attempts to sanitize how parents speak about those books in the presence of elected officials and other adults,” the lawsuit states.
In February 2023, a judge ruled that the FCS board violated Hair and Martin’s constitutional rights and must pay $100,000 in legal fees.
Despite these particular books’ inappropriate content, parents’ ongoing pleas for the taxpayer-funded district to stop supplying pornographic material to children, and the district’s expensive legal defeat, multiple problematic books were eventually approved to return to school shelves, along with more than half a dozen other titles for high schools, after review by a committee.
The Biden administration’s OCR investigation and demand for a mea culpa from FCS over its decision to pull bad books is likely only going to deter the district from taking any further drastic action when it comes to porn and inappropriate content in schools.
FCS parents, Martin reassured The Federalist, are not deterred.
“Wake up parents,” Martin said.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
One female athlete is suing her home state of Connecticut for its unfair transgender policies, arguing that forcing girls to compete alongside biological men with a “huge” physical advantage is “not fair.”
“All four years of my high school experience, I raced against these two biological males who ended up taking four state championships, two honorary awards, and countless other opportunities for myself to advance. And it’s not fair to force people to participate against biological males, and so that’s why I’m suing,” Chelsea Mitchell argued during an appearance on “Varney & Co.”
Chelsea Mitchell is a college sophomore and track athlete. | Fox News
“It’s not fair that these biological males took these titles from myself and other girls, and so the record should reflect that. But also, we want the policy reversed so that no other female in Connecticut has to go through the same thing that I went through,” she told substitute host Lauren Simonetti on Wednesday.
Selina Soule, a fellow frustrated track and field athlete, is joining the legal battle against the state of Connecticut, and is pleading with other women to take a stand in defense of women’s sports.
“Everybody who has encountered this issue needs to speak up and ask for fairness,” Soule said last week on “America Reports.” “I was one of the very first to start speaking on this issue, and it’s taken a while, but we are finally starting to get somewhere… we need to protect every single girl in this country.”
Soule urged “everybody out there… to start speaking on this issue and ask for fairness to be restored to women’s sports.”
Attorney Christiana Kiefer joined both of her clients, Mitchell and Soule, separately during their TV interviews, detailing the several ways the athletic community can come together and “win” their case.
“It’s so important that our laws and policies, not just in Connecticut but across the United States as well, reflect biological reality. And that’s the whole reason Title IX was passed nearly 50 years ago, was to ensure that girls like Chelsea and like the young woman who are now protected in the state of Alabama, can compete on a fair and level playing field and not be forced to race against males who have inherent physical advantages over them,” Kiefer explained Wednesday.
“It’s been really encouraging to see more than 21 states now protecting women’s sports across our country. And we just want to see that momentum continue.”
As the fight against transgender policy continues to heat up, women nationwide are joining the conversation.
When she initially launched her lawsuit, Mitchell noted that there was “a lot of silence” and “whispered support” for her cause. In the past year, there has been a surge of support for female athletes, making it “much easier” for women to stand up for themselves on a legislative stage. Mitchell continued, spotlighting the ground-breaking impact trans athletes have had, and will continue to have on female sports if changes are not made.
“In competitive sports, we need these sex-separated categories so that women still have the opportunity to win. You know, I mean, I worked for years to get to that state championship, to be on the line, to win that race; and to have that kind of taken from you is really just frustrating and disheartening, especially because you know the person next to you has a huge physical advantage,” she concluded.
A school district in Fargo, North Dakota, will conceal the gender identities of students from parents in spite of a state law prohibiting the policy.
“We will not openly out any student because of one law if we know that that’s going to cause harm to that child,”said Fargo Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Rupak Gandhi, who is backed in the decision by the school board.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, signed the bill earlier in May that banned schools from withholding or concealing “information about a student’s transgender status from the student’s parent or legal guardian.”
Some parents expressed outrage at a school board meeting about the decision.
“The way I see it, the way I heard it is that you want to protect kids from their parents,” said one father. “Instead of encouraging everyone to talk more, you are suppressing talk.”
Another parent accused them of trying to take away authority from parents.
“I really urge you all to pay attention to what we’re setting as a precedent,” said the mother. “Whose kids are these? Do they belong to you as a school board? Do they belong to Fargo Public Schools? Or is each child’s parent ultimately the decision-maker in their family over what is allowed and what is safe for that child?”
Critics of the law said that revealing a student’s gender identity to the parents might lead to dangerous confrontations. Gandhi cited suicide statistics put out by an LGBTQ advocacy group to argue that hiding the gender identities from parents was protecting the students.
“You teach your kids that nobody who asks you to keep a secret is safe,” said another mother at the meeting. “Now, this is going the other way. This is an adult saying that they’ll keep a child’s secret.”
Here’s more about gender laws in North Dakota:
Governor of North Dakota Bans Transgender Pronouns in Government & Schools | EWTN News Nightly www.youtube.com
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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