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Two States Now Have Universal School Choice — And Yours Could Be Next


BY: KERI INGRAHAM | JANUARY 27, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/two-states-now-have-universal-school-choice-and-yours-could-be-next-2659317975.html/

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signing a document
On Tuesday, Iowa became the second state in the country to pass universal school choice. Several red states are looking to follow suit.

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On Tuesday, Iowa became the second state in the country to pass universal school choice, directly providing families with funds to support their children’s education. Arizona was the trendsetter for this new wave of educational freedom after Gov. Doug Ducey signed universal school choice into law on July 7, 2022. 

Now the race is on to advance educational freedom, with several red states looking to follow suit. The significance of these developments can hardly be overstated. What was once a pipe dream for many education reformers — the enabling of school choice at scale during their lifetimes — is now becoming a reality.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, true to her word, wasted no time in the 2023 legislative session by introducing the Students First Act in her Condition of the State address on Jan. 10. Within two weeks, the bill was signed into law. It took less than 24 hours for debate in the House and Senate, followed by Reynolds’ signing. The education savings account (ESA) program will provide parents with approximately $7,600 annually to allocate toward approved educational avenues. Most families are eligible in years one and two, and the benefit will be extended to all families statewide in year three.

Of course, powers beholden to leftist teachers unions should not be expected to go down without a fight. Even in pioneering state Arizona, new Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs seeks to undo its universal school voucher expansion law in her 2023 budget proposal. With Republicans controlling both state legislative bodies, her proposal will likely go down with the same fate as her massively failed veto referendum that sought to stop the law from taking effect while she was secretary of state last fall. For a politician, Hobbs is remarkably insensitive to the views of Arizona voters, 67 percent of whom support the state’s ESA program (the number jumps to 77 percent of Arizona parents of school-aged children).

States with a Republican governor and GOP majorities in both their House and Senate, on the other hand, are leading the charge across the United States to empower parents with options. The goal is universal school choice — through ESAs — to provide flexibility for families to select their desired educational avenue. Funds can be spent on school tuition, homeschool expenses, online learning, tutoring, special needs therapy, learning materials, and other education-related expenses.

ESA programs not only afford parents options outside of government-run, union-controlled public schools, but they save the state money because typically only a portion of the student state funding is provided. For example, in Arizona, instead of upwards of $12,000 spent per student within the public system, the ESA provided to families is only $7,000.

As the race to pass universal school choice picks up speed, several states could be heading to the home stretch in the coming weeks and months.

  • Utah is positioned extremely well to join the universal school choice ranks as the House and
    Senate have both passed the “Utah Fits All Act” as of January 26. If signed into law by Gov.
    Spencer Cox, families would have access to roughly $8,000 each year for educational expenses.
  • Florida is historically a national leader in school choice, with almost half its students learning in an option outside of their assigned traditional public school. Current legislation is calling for
    universal school choice. With Republican lawmakers holding supermajorities in both the House
    and Senate, and Gov. Ron DeSantis at the helm, it’s only a matter of time.
  • Oklahoma is a contender in the educational freedom race. The Education Freedom Act is currently in the Senate, which has a 40-8 Republican supermajority. The House has an 81-20 supermajority. Once the bill hits educational freedom champion Gov. Kevin Stitt’s desk, it will be signed into law. It will grant all families statewide access to an ESA based on the state’s per-pupil education expense. State Superintendent Ryan Walters is a fierce supporter of empowering Oklahoma families with educational freedom to select the schools that will best serve their children.
  • Texas, traditionally lagging behind other red states on school choice, is not to be counted out this session in advancing ESAs. In May 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott urged lawmakers to empower parents through state funding following students. As the months passed, the groundwork was laid, including debunking the notion that school choice does not benefit rural areas or that it hurts rural school districts.
  • West Virginia was the national leader prior to Arizona passing universal school choice in 2022. In West Virginia, roughly 93 percent of students have access to the Hope Scholarship to date. There is the possibility to expand it to 100 percent of the state’s children within the next three years. Despite the state’s families having negligible educational freedom options until 2019, West Virginia is now among the leaders.
  • Indiana has efforts underway to expand the state’s existing ESA program to all students statewide while also increasing the grant amount from 90 percent of the per-student state funding to 100 percent. That would translate to an average of $7,500 allocated per student for educational expenses of the parents’ choosing.
  • Arkansas shouldn’t be overlooked this session. Newly elected Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has stated her support for plans to “empower parents with more choices … so no child is ever trapped in a failing school.”

The tide is turning, and the implications are tremendous. No longer will families be at the mercy of government-run, union-controlled traditional public schools. Parents in an increasing number of states will be empowered as decision-makers in their children’s education.

The question is: Which state will be next to achieve universal educational freedom?

Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Visiting Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.

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If Your Child’s School Can’t Tell Boys from Girls, How Can You Trust them on Anything?


BY: CASEY CHALK | DECEMBER 08, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/08/if-your-childs-school-cant-tell-boys-from-girls-how-can-you-trust-them-on-anything/

close up of a school bus window with children inside
Public schools’ embrace of radical gender ideology provokes the question: If they can’t differentiate boys from girls, what wisdom can they impart?

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Last Thursday afternoon, time expired for parents to provide comments on proposed changes to sex education in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), one of the largest school districts in the country, with a population of about 180,000 students. As The Federalist reported last week, the proposal includes labeling boys and girls, respectively, as “assigned” males and females “at birth.” It also includes curricula on “sexual orientation and gender identity” that involves watching a pro-transgender PBS video telling kids they can have “intermediate” private parts.

If you think FCPS officials will carefully consider comments and complaints from parents worried about exposing their prepubescent children to transgender ideology, and perhaps even rethink their plans, I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to sell you. As we have seen from earlier examples of Fairfax County “welcoming comments” on proposed changes to road names, this public survey is nothing more than an empty, perfunctory bureaucratic procedure aimed at pretending that parents have a say regarding what happens during the school day.

Yet even more saliently, FCPS’s willingness to embrace this radical gender ideology and foist it upon thousands of Northern Virginia youth provokes a more important question: If our public schools can’t differentiate boys from girls, what wisdom and knowledge can they impart?

Ignoring Basic Biology in Favor of Gender Studies

I confess a certain embarrassment to be the one writing on this. When I worked in FCPS, I taught high-school history, not science. Years before that, I earned a respectable but certainly not impressive “B” in my ninth-grade FCPS honors biology class. But I’d like to think the lessons my teacher offered on the rudimentary realities of male and female biology — which of course apply not only to humans but the entirety of the natural order — are still in effect, even if it’s been 24 years since the last time I took a test on stamens, pistils, and gametes. I can still remember us boys immaturely chuckling when our teacher discussed ova and sperm.

But this is no laughing matter. School administrators and educators across the country have dispensed with these basic truths of biology in favor of the latest “findings” from politicized university sociology and “gender studies” departments. Schools take their directives not from biology — or, God forbid, classical philosophy and its articulation of the teleological nature of the human body, oriented, as ova and sperm are, toward the creation of new life — but from politically motivated journalists who attack the few teachers courageous enough to take a stand.

The new FCPS directive — which other school districts will undoubtedly follow —  rejects stable and universal distinctions between large and small gametes and the fact that sexes can now also be determined at conception through the SRY gene (resulting in male gametes), or its absence (female gametes). They expound endlessly on “intersex” persons who supposedly undermine “binary norms,” neglecting to note that such persons are incredibly rare: Sex is readily recognizable at birth for 99.98 percent of humans. Of the 3.6 million babies born in America in 2021, there was some manner of sex-related deformity or irregularity in about 750 of them, according to Abigail Favale’s book “The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory.” But to the ideologues, a trait found in .02 percent of people isn’t a biological deformity, but a new “gender.”

The Casualties of the Curriculum

The FCPS directive can only further intensify the casualties from confused gender ideology, well documented in Abigail Shrier’s recent popular book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Little girls have been exhorted to go on puberty blockers, causing all kinds of permanent harm, from sterility to arrested brain and bone development. As I noted in a Federalist article earlier this year, a recent Heritage study observed that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.” And a 2016 report found that “a large percentage of adolescents referred for gender dysphoria have a substantial co-occurring history of psychosocial and psychological vulnerability.” A growing body of research indicates that promoting transgenderism in youth increases mental illness.

Professor John S. Grabowski’s in his recent book “Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference,” notes that “significant evidence reveals that aggressive hormonal and surgical transitioning procedures do not improve mental health outcomes for people who undergo them — even in ostensibly LGBTQ+ friendly cultures.” Moreover, postoperative transsexuals experience higher rates for psychiatric hospitalization, criminal conviction, and suicide, not to mention higher risk of mortality. In other words, confusing prepubescent fourth-graders or hormonal eighth-graders about their gender and sexuality may very well have lifelong detrimental effects on their emotional, psychological, and physical well-being.

It’s Not Just Biology, but English, Social Studies, Libraries…

If only it were in science classes that children are catechized in errant ideologies. An FCPS English teacher earlier this year read 10th-grade students a poem about masturbation (my 10th-grade FCPS English class, by comparison, read “Brave New World,” “1984,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “Antigone”). School libraries promote trans content for elementary schoolers, including in picture books. FCPS prides itself on its libraries’ queer book selection.

And, of course, we cannot forget social studies, whose curricula have become beholden to racial ideologies pushed by the 1619 Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Many Virginia schools have embraced the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History” curriculum, while school districts across the country are using the 1619 Project’s social studies curriculum. That New York Times-originating project believes that America was “founded … on an ideal and a lie” as a “slavocracy,” and that “anti-blackness” is “at the core of so many of our institutions and really our society itself.”

It depresses me to see what has happened in FCPS, and so many other school districts across the country. I am a product of FCPS, as are many of my extended family members. My mother and I worked in FCPS. It was once an impressive school system, one my parents trusted to offer me a solid, if secular, education. Now its leadership can’t even tell boys from girls. On what grounds should we trust them regarding anything else?

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

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The Left Unmasks Its Desire To Destroy Families — And The Nation — With Sexual Chaos


REPORTED BY: CARINA BENTON | APRIL 04, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/04/the-left-unmasks-its-desire-to-destroy-families-and-the-nation-with-sexual-chaos/

Hollywood

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once again led the way in protecting parental rights in education last week when he signed into law a bill that prohibits age-inappropriate “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also requires parental consent for any health care services offered at school, and school districts “may not prohibit or discourage parental notification of or involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.”

Contrary to the fear-mongering, there is nothing “controversial” about this law. Yet it certainly does throw a spanner in the works for the radicals, neurotics, and degenerates in control of corporate America, the establishment media, and Hollywood, who are evidently on board with schools serving as platforms for perverts, predators, and groomers. The obscene obsession with hypersexualizing children that exploded about two years ago needs to be understood in the context of the left’s wider agenda to promote moral relativism and sexual deviance, a campaign they have been gaslighting Americans into accepting as “progressive.” Decades ago, Marxists ditched class warfare and economics in favor of sexual politics and culture as a vehicle for executing revolution. Ever since, they have been shrewdly redefining marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, to the point where “tolerance” and “diversity” now means foisting porn, perversion, and predators on our families. Those who won’t stand for it are cunningly condemned as bigots.

Although the tactics have changed, the underlying objective is no different from the philosophy of their ideological forebears in Communist hellholes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the fundamental transformation of society by co-opting and perverting the nuclear family, the most influential societal unit, and the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.

A Nationwide Trend

Brainwashing school-aged children as young as five into becoming transgender-affirming disruptors of the nuclear family is not just a thing happening out west in crazy California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington State. In Virginia, Michigan, and Texas, parents have expressed disgust and outrage over sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In Connecticut, eighth graders were given a foul school assignment asking them to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. A couple in Florida accused their 12-year-old daughter’s elementary school of covertly coaching her in gender confusion, which they believe led to her suicide attempt.

After last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe learned the hard way that parents don’t want this trash for their kids. It turns out white suburban women don’t take kindly to school boards covering up the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “gender-fluid” student. Then there’s the Wisconsin teacher who apparently used a link in her email signature block to redirect students to an LGBT resource site and sex toy shop, and the Missouri teacher charged with sending dozens of nude photos and videos of himself to students, including a girl under 15.

Against this stunning backdrop, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm the catastrophic Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, a radical judge with a 25-year career history of leniency toward individuals convicted of possessing or distributing child pornography. The left-wing media was quick to normalize and defend this disturbing trend, while endeavoring to humanize the depraved pedophiles in question.

A recent op-ed in The Hill spelled out the horrific reality behind the euphemistic phrase “child pornography.” It is the recording of violent acts of torture committed against terrified, defenseless pre-pubescent children and even infants by adult men, and distributed for the sadistic pleasure of the sickos who consume it, perpetuating a fiendish and expanding industry.

The Shift to Cultural Marxism

From the classroom floor to the Senate floor, none of this is a coincidence. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural Marxists realized that the class warfare narrative was never going to lure enough Americans to achieve a fundamental transformation of this nation. Despite the Soviet Union directing and subsidizing communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies, trade and teachers’ unions, and even churches and seminaries beginning in the 1930s, classical Marxism proved a flop. The left’s tactical response was two-fold:

  • Firstly, in reimagining Marxism in terms of sex and culture, they used maneuver warfare to simply attack the hill from a more advantageous position.
  • Secondly, pushing the falsehood that the Red Scare was just a conspiracy of the early 1950s deluded Americans into thinking the communist threat was a hoax when, in truth, it never went away.

Meanwhile, whether the battleground is economics or culture, the greatest threat to the twisted Marxist ideology has always been the Christian family. Christians know, as St. Paul writes, that every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name, not from the state, or a party, or society, or some fanciful “village,” but from God the Father. Hence the repression of religious families, the laicization of schools, and the prohibition of religious education that began with the Bolsheviks. In the 1950s, under the Khrushchev regime, Nikolai Ilyachev, the chief ideologist for a reinvigorated antireligious propaganda blitz, summed it up well when he stated that “in Soviet society, a family is a cell of Communist education or a refuge of backward conceptions.” The left’s contempt for those who remain faithful to God’s commandments and the truth revealed by Christ has never changed.

With Your Eyes Clear, Stand Up and Fight

Resisting the soul-destroying lies being force-fed to innocent children means supporting candidates who fear God more than some punk journalist, and who are bold enough, DeSantis style, to stand up to the Marxist schemers waging this cultural revolution. The politically suicidal Republicans and moderate Democrats flirting with the idea of supporting a historically unpopular Biden administration’s pedo-lenient Supreme Court pick might want to simultaneously start researching their post-political career options. 

Most importantly, we must return to Christ. He is the only remedy for the sickness and squalor rotting this country from within. So read the Bible, pray, catechize your children, go to church, and yank your kids out of the rainbow-parading, gender expansive-promoting indoctrination camps posing as schools.

Every communist who has ever haunted the earth understands that to control society, you must control the family. They ironically possess a deeper, albeit disordered, appreciation of the mustard seed principle than do many Christians. The nuclear family, the smallest societal unit, has the potential for the most profound cultural influence. As Pope Leo XIII explained, family life is “the cornerstone of all society and government.” It’s time to reinvigorate our Judeo-Christian heritage and start using the Marxists’ tactics against them.

Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.

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3 Reasons Parents Are Absolutely Right To Demand Informed Consent To What Schools Do To Their Kids


REPORTED BY: EMILIE KAO | MARCH 10, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/10/3-reasons-parents-are-absolutely-right-to-demand-informed-consent-to-what-schools-do-to-their-kids/

kids

A parent can look at the label on a juice box to decide what ingredients to allow into her child’s body. He should also be able to decide what ingredients a teacher puts into his child’s mind, but that isn’t the case in a growing number of public schools.

When Covid-19 brought the classroom into the kitchen, parents’ eyes were opened to some unsettling revelations, including that their children are being indoctrinated into critical race theory, and that some schools are secretly treating girls as boys and vice-versa.

Food labeling helps parents make informed decisions about what their children eat. In the same way, transparency helps parents make informed decisions about what their children learn. Yet some schools are resisting calls for transparency. Corporate media and teachers’ unions have inaccurately disparaged parents, but these critics are wrong. Here are three reasons why.

1. Children belong to their parents, not to the ‘community’ or the state.

Former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry infamously called on her viewers to “break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents,’. . . and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Her pitch was strikingly similar to that of Terry McAuliffe, former Virginia governor and chair of the Democratic National Committee, who said parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.

This view of parental rights is at odds with parents’ fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their children. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, stating, “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

As Professor Melissa Moschella writes, parental rights stem from the uniquely intimate relationship between parents and children. Children belong to their families, which are headed by their parents. Therefore, parents have the most direct obligation and authority to care for children until they are mature enough to direct their own lives. Until then, parents mediate a child’s relationship to the larger political community.

The failure to recognize that the family is distinct and relatively independent from the political community, and that parental rights are pre-political and natural rights, is not just wrong, but dangerous. Moschella notes Hannah Arendt’s observation that eliminating the intermediary structures between the individual and the state — namely the family and the church — is the essence of totalitarianism.

2. More schools are crossing the boundary line between education and indoctrination.

If schools just taught the “three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic), parents would not suspect schools were undermining their values, beliefs, and authority. But, as parents in Albemarle County, Virginia, recently learned, some schools are indoctrinating students with so-called “anti-racism” ideology.

Instead of condemning all racism, “anti-racism” replaces one form of racism with another. Following “anti-racist” logic, Albemarle County schools used race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity to label students as “dominate” or “subordinate.”

Parents from five families of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds challenged the policy. The school undermined what these parents believe and teach their children — that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. The school even threatened to punish students for not supporting the policy.

Yet, as Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit wrote in Oliver v. Arnold, “Schools should educate—not indoctrinate. Teachers can teach. And teachers can test. But teachers cannot require students to endorse a particular political viewpoint.”

Parental rights don’t end at the schoolhouse gate. Parents must be able to protect their children from policies that place burdens and privileges on them according to their immutable characteristics.

3. Backed by the Biden administration, schools are even engaging in unauthorized treatment of students’ mental health.

The U.S. Department of Education has promoted “gender support plans.” An official fact sheet instructs schools to maintain “confidentiality” for students who identify as transgender at school by not using the student’s birth name or “sex assigned at birth if the student wishes to keep this information private.” But there is no mention of notifying, much less involving, parents in such a consequential decision to adopt a new name and pronouns that correspond to the opposite sex.

The agency tells schools to support a student’s gender transition by using “a checklist of issues to discuss with the student or their family” (emphasis added). Without an explicit requirement that schools inform and obtain parental consent to treat the child as a member of the opposite sex, it is reasonable to assume that notification to parents is optional. The schools may also perceive parental notification as a matter that depends on whether the child views their parents as “affirming” of gender transition.

Schools’ use of “gender support plans,” like those recommended by the Biden administration, have shocked parents around the country. After learning that schools sought to hide their children’s emotional distress from them, they challenged these policies in Wisconsin, Florida, and California courts.

Alliance Defending Freedom recently informed Virginia’s Harrisonburg City School District that its policy of using different names and pronouns amounts to “a psychosocial treatment that will increase the odds of long-term persistence,” according to Dr. Kenneth Zucker, an expert in treating gender dysphoria in children. Up to 90 percent of children with gender dysphoria eventually become comfortable with their bodies if they aren’t encouraged to live as the opposite sex. Schools should not endanger students by hiding information from parents about their mental health or engage in unauthorized treatment of gender dysphoria.

Lockdowns allowed many parents to see the ingredients inside their children’s education. That prompted them to support laws that provide more transparency into curriculum and policies. Parents should be able to decide on the education that best suits their child and their family’s beliefs.

Too many schools are hiding crucial information. They must be held accountable through policies that require transparency, so parents won’t receive more nasty surprises.

Emilie Kao is senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy with Alliance Defending Freedom.

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California School District Tells Kids: ‘Attacking Whiteness Is Not Enough’


REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | FEBRUARY 02, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/02/california-school-district-tells-kids-attacking-whiteness-is-not-enough/

A now-deleted portion of the Riverside, Califonia school district’s website obtained by The Federalist displays that the district promoted an essay that attacks people based on their inborn skin color. The essay, titled “Decentering Whiteness” by Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint, claimed that “attacking whiteness is not enough.” It sought to divide people on the basis of their race and argued that “whiteness” should be pushed to “the margin,”

Riverside Unified School District promoted the essay at least three separate times, under the “Professional Learning,” “Community Engagement,” and “Culture and Climate” sections of their Equity, Access, and Community Engagement resources page, according to screenshots.

The Federalist previously revealed that both Riverside Superintendent Renee Hill and Board of Education member Tom Hunt lied about the district teaching critical race theory. One parent from the district, who wished to remain unnamed, told The Federalist that the resources list that contained “Decentering Whiteness” was removed from the website following the exposé of the district’s dishonesty. 

When asked why the resources had been removed, Communication Director Diana Meza stated that the district is “updating the Equity, Access & Community Engagement google site and landing page, the page should be back up soon.”

The school district has charge of nearly 40,000 students, according to federal data, and 35 percent of those students are white. School families’ median income is significantly above the national average, at approximately $73,000 per year.

Decentering Whiteness

The removed 19-page “resources” document, which can be viewed here, not only condemned “whiteness” but served as a guidebook for how institutions can fight it, so that “whiteness itself can be made more marginal.” The paper explained, “Decentering whiteness, as we envision it, is a collective process that can take place in organizations, sectors of society, personal lives, etc., over periods of days, months, years and generations.”

While launching into both anti-white attacks and blatant attempts to divide people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, the paper engaged in race essentialism. It cast race as a defining rather than incidental characteristic when it tells readers to “Assume whiteness, and race, always structures our experience, and thus needs to be consciously considered as part of any social process.”

White people are also openly villainized in the materials. One line reads, “white culture has, on balance, been based on principles of conquest and exploitation” while another says that in the attempt to marginalize whiteness, “simply attacking whiteness is not enough.”

The document did not oppose attacking “whiteness” out of an opposition to racism, nor did it express any concern over the potential fallout of seizing on racial fault lines for socio-political ends. Rather, it simply argued that openly attacking whiteness wouldn’t be strategically effective. It remarked “Simply attacking whiteness is not enough to accomplish this goal. Assaults on whiteness, depending on their nature, may have the effect of confirming and solidifying the central position of whiteness in American society.”

Lighter skin color has been and continues to be one of the prime targets of critical race theory. Noel Ignatiev, a Marxist Harvard professor who is cited in “Decentering Whiteness,” infamously claimed that “treasonous to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

He also remarked, “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”

Perhaps most sinister, “Decentering Whiteness” clearly sought to encourage racial division and even racial conflict, calling on a multiracial coalition to “displace” whiteness. It read “It will take a multiracial effort to displace whiteness, one that includes people from all racial/cultural groups.”

How exactly any of this rhetoric benefits the students or staff at Riverside Unified School District is entirely unclear. The presence of this material in a school climate is in fact both un-American and undeniably harmful, not only to the white people who are maligned by it but also those of all other racial backgrounds whom the article attempts to conscript into a race-based power struggle. 

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com. SPENCER LINDQUISTVISIT ON TWITTER@SPENCERLNDQST

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Washington Democrats Push Mandatory LGBTQ-Focused Sex Ed for Kindergartners


Reported by Dr. Susan Berry | 

URL of the original posting site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/01/washington-democrats-push-mandatory-lgbtq-focused-sex-ed-for-kindergartners/

NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 26: A boy carries a flag during the New York City Pride March, June 26, 2016 in New York City. This year was the 46th Pride march in New York City (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)

Parents in the state of Washington are fighting a Democrat bill that would mandate LGBTQ-focused sex ed for children, including kindergartners.

Democrats in the State House are pushing House Bill 2184, a measure that would mandate “comprehensive sexual health education” by the year 2022.

Informed Parents of Washington, a group that describes itself as “a coalition of parents dedicated to fighting Comprehensive Sexxx [sic] Education in our schools and legislation that imposes upon parental rights,” is warning parents about the dangers of the legislation.

The Democrat narrative behind the legislation is that such a bill would establish “equity,” i.e., equal access to sexual health information, especially with regard to the topics of “affirmative consent” and the needs of LGBTQ students.

A work group composed of 16 women that reviewed K–12 sex ed provisions in the state concluded in its final report that “members agree all students would benefit from K–12 comprehensive sexual health education.”

The conclusion, however, was reached after the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) conducted a survey about the issue and received more than 10,000 responses, nearly three-fourths of which came from females. Ironically, the work group found 58 percent of survey respondents said comprehensive sexual health education (CSHE) should not be required in grades K–12, and 42 percent said that it should be required.

Nevertheless, the work group stated:

The Sexual Health Education Workgroup agreed that all students in Washington’s public schools should have access to comprehensive sexual health education (CSHE) in grades K–12. Mandating CSHE is an issue of equity and would help to ensure all students across the state receive quality, evidence-informed instruction, regardless of who they are or where they live. The Workgroup found that several groups are often excluded from relevant, inclusive instruction, including students in out of home care, students with disabilities, students who identify as LGBTQ+, and English learners, among others.

The website of Washington Rep. Michelle Caldier (R) provides a radio report with John Sattgast in Olympia about the bill.

“When I looked at the curriculum, I’d be happy to read some of this stuff, but I will tell you I know that the chair would gavel me because it is completely inappropriate for me to say here,” Caldier said about the proposed mandated sex ed curriculum. “And I think that if it is inappropriate for me to say on the dais, I don’t think that’s something that I would want to teach a kindergartner.”

Sattgast observed that 97 people signed up to testify, yet only 16 were permitted to do so within the time limit.

Though the bill to mandate comprehensive sex ed died in the last legislative session, the current bill is equally as controversial, stated Washington conservative radio host Jason Rantz of The Jason Rantz Show on AM 770 KTTH.

“And it’s fueled less about meeting the sexual needs of young kids (these needs don’t exist), than it is about pushing a very specific social justice agenda on gender identity for all classrooms,” he stated.

According to the Democrats’ proposal, called “Rights, Respect, Responsibility: A K-12 Curriculum” (3Rs), kindergartners would learn about the proper names for body parts, but only after a “note on language” clarifies that biology is subservient to gender identity.

“You will notice that this lesson refers to ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ and ‘male’ and ‘female’ when identifying body parts,” states the note to teachers. “Lessons in higher grades use more precise language and begin to introduce a broader concept of gender.”

With the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, teachers are instructed to tell the young children:

Most girls have a vulva, which is the name for the area between the legs. The vulva describes the whole area including the small hole where urine or pee comes out called the opening to the urethra, the hole below that, which is a little bigger and is called the vagina that is used when a female has a baby, and the hole below that where a bowel movement, or poop, comes out called the anus. So a person with a vulva has three holes between their legs and a very sensitive little area at the top called the clitoris.
…
Most boys have a penis between their legs which they use to urinate or ‘pee.’ Some boys have a foreskin, which is a piece of skin that covers the end of the penis and some boys do not. A boy also has a hole where a bowel movement, or poop, leaves the body called an anus, just like a girl.

In the proposal, first graders would begin to learn about gender roles. Teachers are instructed to read My Princess Boy prior to the lesson and then ask the children:

“Does the job a person has, or what they wear mean the person is a man or woman?” (No) “Do the activities someone likes to do for fun or what they wear mean they are a boy or a girl?” (No)
…
Close the lesson by asking “How could you support others in trying new things and participating in activities that some people may sometimes say are only for boys or only for girls?” Ask for volunteers to offer strategies. (Some responses might include: tell them that you think it’s great; tell them that they shouldn’t listen to what other people think; tell them that you will do it with them; tell them that there is no such thing as girl activities and boy activities, etc.)

In the Democrats’ proposal, sixth graders would learn “language … that seems less familiar – using the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘her’ or him,’ using gender neutral names in scenarios and role-plays and referring to ‘someone with a vulva’ vs. a girl or woman.”

“This is intended to make the curriculum inclusive of all genders and gender identities,” states the proposal.

Informed Parents of Washington noted as well what the “3Rs” curriculum will teach 15-year-olds about “sexting”: “Sexting is here to stay folks. The real issue is consent. If you think about it like that, then sexting is just another aspect of normal sexual behavior.”

“That’s what The 3Rs curriculum wants to tell your 15-year-old, using a video the IT will have to unblock so it can be shown,” the parents’ coalition posted to Facebook.

“Then they’ll discuss scenarios that make sexting seem like the norm,” the parents add. “For homework kids go out and share their newfound knowledge with at least four friends. Though they do tell students that naked photos of kids under 18 is illegal, if they were serious about discouraging kids from sexting they would take a different, more serious approach.”

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