Think about the three people who affected you the most growing up. For a lot of us, I’d bet at least one is a teacher or coach. It speaks to the influence and importance schools can have on our lives and education. Teachers are difference makers who help us, as parents, educate and develop our kids. But just as we don’t need Washington to tell parents how to parent, we don’t need federal bureaucrats telling our schools how to teach. Many classroom decisions are best left up to our leaders at the local level.
Last week, the Trump administration, under the leadership of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, announced it is following through with a campaign promise to rethink the size and scope of the Department of Education. I think it’s beyond time to return those powers and decisions to the states and restore local control, giving families more freedom.
Since the Department of Education was formed as a standalone department in 1980, we’ve seen its budget and workforce bloat — but we haven’t seen improved outcomes for students, parents, or teachers. We clearly aren’t getting what we’re paying for.
For a decade, I served on the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska system, getting into the weeds of education policy and decision making for our state. One of the philosophies I brought with me from that experience into the governor’s office is that we need more accountability in government.
Just like a teen staring at a phone screen, too often the U.S. Department of Education’s bureaucracy has been distracted from its mission, and American education has suffered for it. We can’t predict the future, but we have to change something. Our kids’ education is too important for us to keep pursuing mediocre results that cost us billions.
For starters, American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding controversial culture wars through our schools. We should expect that our investment will be spent on teaching kids the essentials: math, reading, science, and civics.
There is a simpler, better path forward. By sending education back to states, we let those nearest to the student have the biggest influence. This is a pro-kid, pro-parent, pro-teacher, pro-school position. No matter the style of schooling families choose — public, private, homeschool, or hybrid — our lessons should be focused on helping our youth succeed, and you don’t need federal government mandates to do that.
In Nebraska, I know the type of people who serve in our schools. Our teachers devote their lives to our kids. We’re human, and we’re not going to get things right 100 percent of the time, but I’m confident in our ability to lead and ensure we’re addressing the needs of our students, teachers, and schools.
Because technology and research constantly change the way we learn, educators must be able to move fast in the classroom in ways some faraway cubicle worker in Washington can’t. Teachers and administrators are closer to the action and better prepared for this type of work.
In my state, we’re leading by making localized decisions: We’re rethinking how we invest and fund K-12 schools, raising awareness and doubling down on special education opportunities, and working with students and schools to ban the distraction of cell phones bell-to-bell.
Secretary McMahon’s stated goal is to make the state of education in America “freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future.” That’s a mission all of us should be able to get behind because there’s no politics in it.
Let’s focus more on how to help the teacher in the classroom who is giving our kids this week’s spelling test. Let’s figure out ways to better support dynamic, inspiring lessons. Let’s support the guidance counselor who is helping our students navigate adolescence while they make big, life-long decisions.
Let’s let our country’s kids — and education — reach the world-changing potential they have. That should be the American tradition. The Department of Education just needs to get out of the way.
On Tuesday, Wyoming became the 15th state to enact universal school choice into law with Gov. Mark Gordon’s signature on the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act.
The Cowboy State joins a rapidly growing group of states that have passed laws giving all (or nearly all) families statewide choice concerning their children’s kindergarten through twelfth-grade education. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
The act grants families who choose to participate with an education savings account of $7,000 per student per year to allocate toward approved K-12 educational expenses. Education savings accounts with universal eligibility are the gold standard of school choice programs due to the flexibility they provide parents to select the best learning avenues for their children.
It also expands eligibility of the state’s existing pre-kindergarten education savings account program from parents with a maximum income of 150 percent of the federal poverty line to up to 250 percent. The amount provided to qualifying parents is $7,000. According to Gov. Gordon, “early education builds a very strong foundation. It’s important that when kids get to kindergarten, they have the grounding that’s necessary to be able to move forward, thrive and really do well.”
Wyoming Speaker of the House Ocean Andrew is a defender of education freedom and under his leadership the bill promptly passed the House by a 39-21 vote on Jan. 29. It then headed to the Senate.
Mid-February, President Trump applauded the leadership of Senate President Bo Biteman and urged every state senator to vote in favor of the bill. On Feb. 19, the Senate passed the bill with a vote of 20-11. As part of the Wyoming legislative process, a Joint Conference Committee was tasked to successfully negotiate the policy differences between the Senate and House, which was completed on Feb. 27. The following day, the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate both signed the bill, sending it to Gov. Gordon for signature.
Wyoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, who was voted into office in 2022, has been instrumental in providing a strategic plan for the state’s education system. She is a proponent of school choice and understands that it is a rising tide that lifts all boats. Of her six key initiative areas for education reform in Wyoming, “parental empowerment” are the first two words.
“As an economist, I know that greater choices lead to greater outcomes. I am an ardent supporter of universal school choice because even parents in the most rural corners of Wyoming should have the opportunity to determine the best education for their child,” Degenfelder told me.
Hats off to Wyoming leaders for embracing the innovative educational approach of a free market K-12 education landscape by enacting universal school choice. The market forces of competition will drive quality, spur innovation, and decrease costs, which are foundational for achieving the governor’s goal of a world-class education system in Wyoming.
Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Senior Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
Parents across the United States are being restricted from accessing their adolescent children’s online electronic health records. Not only are military parents barred from accessing all but basic information on their 13- to 17-year-olds in the military’s online health care portal, but the adolescent minor also is not allowed to have a user logon until 18. Though elected officials are tackling this issue on the state level, military parents will need to be their own advocates as they appeal to Congress to restore their parental rights.
Military insurance provider Tricare finally issued a press release in March explaining Department of Defense (DOD) policies that restrict parents from adolescent records in the portal, Military Health System (MHS) Genesis, as well as from “sensitive” physical records.
Last year, I wrote about my experience of spending months trying to obtain the official policy that barred parents from these records. Now that the policy is out in the open, it must not be allowed to stand, as it is ultimately harmful to children.
Many military parents object to providers’ having a confidential relationship with their children because they do not trust activist MHS doctors who believe a child can be born in the wrong body to counsel their children on anything in secret — as some are doing.
One sobering example of what can happen when parents are excluded occurred in Louisiana, where two civilian parents were treated as the enemy. After less than an hour behind closed doors with their 13-year-old, the provider tried to manipulate them into affirming their daughter’s new identity as a boy by asking them if they would “rather have a dead daughter or a live son.” One of the doctors involved, Dr. Ryan Pasternak, is a leader in adolescent medicine and has co-written recommendations for the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) on the management of electronic health records. SAHM’s ideal method includes permitting full access only to the adolescent, while actively blocking parents so they receive only nonconfidential information.
Even as state legislatures are moving to restore parental access to unemancipated minor medical records, the MHS seems to be plowing ahead with its efforts to keep parents in the dark. With all I’ve uncovered about adolescent confidentiality and gender activists within the MHS, parents are right to be concerned.
Congress Fails to Act
In 2017, the Defense Health Board, a federal committee that advises the secretary of defense, acknowledged in a report that the emerging field of adolescent medicine had “recently made a profound shift from its traditional role. Instead of providing preemptive guidance to parents, providers now work to reduce risk-taking behaviors with their focus aimed directly at the adolescent.” The board also recommended expanding the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to address gender dysphoria and suggested possibly including surgeries for gender-confused children in the future. The board pointed out that the Tricare Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Treatment final rule on Sept. 2, 2016, “permits ‘coverage of all non-surgical medically necessary and appropriate care in the treatment of gender dysphoria.’” This was a final rule that came from unelected bureaucrats — not Congress.
Nevertheless, recent efforts in Congress to prohibit coverage for transgender procedures for minor military children were removed by the Senate from the House-passed fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. Language to prevent the Exceptional Family Member Program from being used to facilitate child transgender transitions was also removed.
Bases, Schools Push Transgenderism
Today, adolescents can receive confidential care on military bases and in school-based clinics. For example, Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s Madigan Army Medical Center’s adolescent clinic offers subspecialty care for transgender confusion, sexuality issues, and substance use, among other services. Madigan also runs a system of school-based health clinics in 10 area schools; dependents on Tricare Prime insurance can visit the clinic once each week.
If military parents aren’t “affirming” of a transgender identity, activist group PFLAG recommends that children talk with “a school counselor, the on-base youth Military Family Life Counselor (MFLC), a chaplain (if from an affirming denomination), or an online friend or peer.” PFLAG also reveals that MHS Genesis “now allows patients to mark their gender identity in addition to their sex assigned at birth.” This will “allow transgender youth to receive appropriate care without as many obstacles.” And “military LGBTQ+ organizations are currently working with DoDEA [schools for children of military families] to incorporate the same procedures in school documents.”
In the school-to-scalpel age, confidential care being provided to adolescents should cause alarm bells to go off. Ian Prior, founder of Fight for Schools, in his article, “Queer Whistleblower Exposes Evils of the School to Scalpel Pipeline,” shows how indoctrination into transgenderism can begin at school as young as kindergarten. In many cases, children are encouraged to socially transition at school. By the time parents find out, children can be convinced they were born in the wrong body, and doctors who favor the “gender affirmation” approach steer parents and their dysphoric children down that path of care.
Thanks to an official Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA) teacher training in May 2021, we know that secret transgender transitions are happening in overseas schools for military children. Former Rep. Vicky Hartzler wrote a letter to DOD in 2021 asking why teachers were being trained at a DODEA teachers summit to transition children at school without parents’ knowledge. She never received a response — and DODEA has avoided accountability even to this day.
I spoke with a military mom whose daughter, Cami (not her real name), was enrolled in a public school in Fairfax County, Virginia, that concealed from her parents that she had transitioned to a boy at school. Though the mother only wanted Cami to see a therapist to address her depression, military medicine additionally referred her to a so-called gender clinic in the Washington, D.C., area. When the mother didn’t take her daughter to the clinic, she received a call from a military doctor who suggested Cami might need puberty blockers to give her time to decide about her sex. At the time of our conversation, the family was still reeling from the harm that “trusted” adults at school had caused.
MHS Treats Thousands of Confused Dependents
Armed with this information about a gender clinic on base, I found research conducted by active-duty medical doctors and a medical school professor that mentioned a regional referral-based adolescent medicine clinic that opened in 2014 and serves dependents between the ages of 9 and 24. It provides “services including diagnosis, puberty suppression, affirming-hormone treatment, reproductive health services … and affirming counseling, and refers for surgical, ancillary (e.g., voice therapy) and complex mental health services.”
Ft. Belvoir in Virginia fit the clinic’s description, and transgender-confused children do, indeed, seek care there. Dr. David Klein was chief of adolescent medicine at Ft. Belvoir in 2016. He and his associates have diligently documented their research on transgender-identifying military dependents. They reveal that from 2009 until 2017, more than 2,500 military dependents, ages 4 to 25, sought treatment for gender confusion from the MHS. When Tricare began to pay for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for dependents in 2016, they observed a marked increase in the number of patients seeking such care. One can only imagine how high the figures are today when taking into account estimates that the number of transgender-identifying youth in the United States nearly doubled between 2016 and 2022.
Another Klein study looked at 53 gender-confused adolescents and measured parental support for their care. Researchers looked at MHS data from 2014 to 2017 and rated strong support of parents for initiation or continuation of “gender transition” at 55.8 percent, non to moderately supportive at 25 percent, and conflicted support at 19.2 percent.
Though numerous studies show that military kids suffer from a higher rate of anxiety and depression than their civilian peers, key recommendations from Klein and his co-authors provide advice to doctors as if wrongly named “gender affirmation” is the only approach for treating gender dysphoria. They claim a transgender diagnosis is not necessarily related to other mental health concerns and that attempts “to convert a person’s gender identity to align with their sex assigned at birth are unethical and incompatible with current guidelines and evidence.”
Klein and colleagues made the news last year and caught congressional attention when they stated in their latest research, in a discussion about understanding the risks and benefits of “gender-affirming” care, that 7-year-olds can begin participating in medical decision-making. Fortunately, as former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard pointed out to Tucker Carlson, 53 percent of MHS physicians in that study said they would refuse to prescribe hormones even if trained to do so. Sadly, others would be willing to, and Klein is now the Family Adolescent Medicine Program director at Travis Air Force Base in California — training the next generation of military physicians.
Falling out of Favor Around the World
Even as MHS leaders continue to promote this harmful medicating of children, it is rapidly falling out of favor among doctors around the world, who are opting for psychotherapy as a first line treatment for gender dysphoria, after studies have shown “no demonstrable, long-term benefit” on “psychosocial well-being of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”
Additionally, the leading organization for transgender care, WPATH, was recently exposed for its lack of evidence and safeguards that led to members performing pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on minors. And, similarly, the Cass Review, released this month, detailed how England’s leading specialist youth transgender “clinic,” now permanently closed, was untethered from evidence-based medicine.
As the rationale for transgender drugs and surgeries unravels, a legal reckoning is being led in the United States by detransitioners such as Chloe Cole, who began transitioning at 12 and had a double mastectomy by 15. DOD and affirming doctors in the MHS must be included in this reckoning and held accountable for any harm suffered by military dependents under their care.
Laws and policies that allow medical records and medical treatment of adolescents to be hidden from parents are potentially harmful to children and destructive to families, and this is why military parents must urge Congress to strike DOD’s policies that drive a wedge between them and their children and to pass legislation that clarifies their right to guide the medical care of their children.
Amy Haywood is a former senior legislative assistant for a U.S. House representative. She writes The Primary Educator newsletter, which can be found at theprimaryeducator.com.
Does your children’s school take tips on hate from the Southern Poverty Law Center? The SPLC frames all responses to the border crisis as rooted in hate. (Photo: Getty Images)
When concerned mom Nicole Solas requested all emails from her Rhode Island school district to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the request turned up more than 8,000 pages of communications, and the district told her it would cost $6,629.25 for it to process the SPLC documents.
A brief refresher: The SPLC began as a civil rights nonprofit but has morphed into a far-left fundraising machine and smear factory. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” it weaponized its history of suing KKK groups into bankruptcy to smear its political and ideological opponents, placing mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.
Solas, a Rhode Island mother, had briefly enrolled her daughter in kindergarten in the South Kingstown School District. She withdrew her daughter after the school district sued her on account of Solas’ multiple public records requests to reveal whether the district taught kids the principles of critical race theory, a lens that teaches kids to view white people as oppressors and black people as oppressed.
Solas told The Daily Signal that she requested “emails sent by [South Kingstown School District] employees” to “weed out spam emails automatically sent by SPLC to schools.”
There are 8,859 pages of emails sent by my school district to Southern Poverty Law Center, who thinks moms are "hate groups."
— Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union (@Nicoletta0602) March 1, 2024
The SPLC runs an education program long known as “Teaching Tolerance.” In 2021, after the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, the SPLC apparently decided that “tolerance” wasn’t woke enough, so it rebranded the program to “Learning for Justice.” The program has advocated for lessons that inculcate critical race theory, transgender identity, and pornographic books in schools. Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, to its “hate map,” in part demonizing those groups for opposing sexually explicit books in school libraries.
The SPLC has bragged that it sent “over 400,000 educators” the “Teaching Tolerance” magazine, “reaching nearly every school in the country.” This language disappeared from the website, however, as more Americans look critically at the SPLC.
The SPLC hides its radical agenda behind benign-sounding initiatives such as celebrating diversity and inclusion. Many on the Left have adopted its rhetoric.
The SPLC’s “hate map” has caused real-world harm. In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council for a mass shooting using the “hate map.” He told the FBI he aimed to kill everyone in the building, but the building manager prevented the slaughter, in the process sustaining bullet wounds. The shooter pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Early in the 2000s, the SPLC began branding some activist groups that opposed illegal immigration “anti-immigrant hate groups” and putting them on the “hate map.” The SPLC maintains that hatred drives the movement calling for the enforcement of immigration laws, even as the Biden administration sets new records for the number of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border.
In the past two weeks, the SPLC has demonized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for attempting to close the border when the Biden administration refuses to do so. Abbott is attempting to enforce federal laws that Biden will not enforce, yet the SPLC claims Abbott is seeking to establish “state supremacy over the border.” The SPLC noted Abbott’s attempts to install razor wire between Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, and the southern border, the Biden administration’s decision to cut the wire, and the Supreme Court ruling allowing the Biden administration access.
“This is part of Abbott’s broader anti-immigrant agenda, which includes an attempt to stop a supposed ‘invasion’ of Texas by migrants,” SPLC’s Caleb Kieffer and Rachel Goldwasser wrote. “Claims of ‘invasion’ have become a trope among right-wing lawmakers and the hard right despite dangerous similarities to the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
The SPLC did not acknowledge that border agents encountered a record 3.2 million illegal aliens in fiscal year 2023 (a number larger than the combined populations of Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont), nor that Democratic mayors are requesting help to deal with the large numbers of aliens in the country. This isn’t a “great replacement conspiracy theory”; it is a blatantly obvious fact that millions of illegals are taking root in the U.S., and the SPLC’s move to dismiss critics as racist in the face of that fact should set off alarm bells across America. PLEASE SEE https://wordpress.com/post/whatdidyousay.org/88628
The SPLC also demonized the effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for failing to enforce immigration law and prevent mass hordes of aliens from entering the country. In an article focused on a militia group’s efforts to take border enforcement into its own hands, Goldwasser claims the militia’s action represents “a product of the anti-immigrant environment produced by the xenophobic posturing of hate groups and politicians, and the controversial impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latinx and immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.”
Goldwasser suggested that Mayorkas faces an impeachment effort not because he has failed to enforce immigration law and prevent the border crisis, but because he is the first Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security. She used “Latinx,” a transgender neologism, in order to avoid the clear masculine ending in Spanish for “Latino.”
The SPLC did not reserve all its vitriol for Republicans, however. Kieffer and Goldwasser noted that President Joe Biden has supported a Senate bill that included minor border security measures and changes to the asylum process in exchange for funding to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion.
“The bill worried immigration advocates, who viewed it as being extremely harsh and out of step for the needs of border communities,” they wrote. “The Senate relief package debacle shows the same anti-immigrant animus undergirding impeachment of Mayorkas and the standoff in Eagle Pass.”
It seems the SPLC’s partisan attacks against pro-enforcement groups have so unmoored the organization from reality that it is unwilling to accept the blatantly obvious truth. Recent polls have showed former President Donald Trump, who currently leads in the Republican presidential nominating proces, ahead of Biden in key swing states. Americans give Biden poor marks on the border, which helps explain the president’s belated support for some immigration restrictions. Biden knows he has to make up ground on this issue, and he’s furiously working to make it seem like the border crisis is Republicans’ fault.
Yet the SPLC hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s so focused on branding as “hateful” anyone who dares to speak the plain truth about the border crisis that it turns against Biden, the very president the SPLC brags about influencing and with whom SPLC leaders have met at least six times personally.
The SPLC’s radical agenda of critical race theory, transgender lessons, and apparent hatred for the very idea of national borders has no place in America’s classrooms. Solas is right to demand answers from her Rhode Island school district, and parents across the country should be on the lookout for the SPLC’s influence in schools.
The harms social media poses to children are well documented. People agree that kids shouldn’t be exposed to certain content. Here’s an age verification system that wouldn’t infringe on the First Amendment. (Photo: Flashpop/Getty Images)
A bipartisan group of senators is about to take Big Tech CEOs to task on Jan. 31, 2024, by having them publicly address their failures to protect kids online. And the CEOs need to! The harms social media poses to children are well documented and, at this point, indisputable—even by the companies themselves.
In it, he writes that YouTube “can’t do it alone … [and] support[s] policymakers, families, researchers, companies, and experts coming together to define a set of consistent standards for companies serving young people online.” He then advocates for policies that provide more parental rights, age-appropriate content for minors, and “appropriate safeguards.”
Even with this call for legislation, policymakers are finding it hard to impose basic measures, such as age restriction requirements to protect kids using these services.
Age restrictions on a deliberately addictive product that targets children should be a no-brainer. Various levels of government impose age restrictions on these types of offerings all the time. For example, kids can’t get tattoos or piercings without parental consent. Or attend movies that are rated R or PG-13. Or purchase video games rated “M.” But somehow, social media services are distinct, even though they trigger a similar addictive response as nicotine withdrawaland gambling.
So, why haven’t we done it?
State legislatures are making unforced errors by not considering the full internet stack—e.g., the operating system, the app store, or the app—when imposing such measures. Arkansas’ social media law is a prime example of an unforced error. Its law would have required some, but not all, social media companies to verify the age of their users. The law didn’t apply to YouTube, for example.
Failing to take a holistic approach when crafting legislation for the social media market unnecessarily opened the state up to a First Amendment challenge. This is because for the state to require such a measure, it would have to show that the requirement is both “narrowly tailored” to not impact adult users’ speech and also necessary to address the harms alleged.
According to federal District Court Judge Timothy Brooks, the state failed because excluding some social media companies made little sense if the law’s stated goal is to protect kids from the harms social media imparts. Brooks pointed out that even though “YouTube is not regulated by [Arkansas social media law],” the state oddly cited YouTube as being particularly harmful to children and “[a]mong all types of online platforms, YouTube was the most widely used by children.”
So, if Arkansas’ law doesn’t apply to YouTube, how can the state justify an imposition on adult speech on services that aren’t even favored by most children?
But it’s not all bad news. Brooks may have provided legislatures a path forward to get age verification without implicating the First Amendment—by going through the app stores.
Brooks seemed to be more upset that Arkansas’ law imposed duties on social media companies rather than on Google and Apple, the companies that run two of the biggest app stores on the internet. Throughout his opinion, he noted that Apple and Google provide parents several tools to shield kids from certain apps and wondered why the state needed to go through social media platforms to do what the app stores ought to.
He’s got a point. Social media apps rely on users to self-certify their age when they create an account, but they can’t fully confirm that the user is being truthful—whereas Apple and Google know the precise age of the owner of the device. How? Well, their software is integrated at every level of the mobile device. They own the two dominant mobile operating systems (i.e., iOS and Android, respectively), app stores (i.e., the App Store and Play Store), and browsers (i.e., Safari and Chrome).
Candidly, not including Apple and Google in age verification legislation makes little sense, because doing so would almost certainly resolve the First Amendment concern.
Why? Because all the law would have to require is for Apple and Google to give the app a thumbs up or thumbs down when a social media app asks to verify the device is owned by an adult or a child. The social media company would no longer have to guess how old the user is, which limits, or even eliminates, the risk of denying an adult the ability to engage on American social media platforms.
What’s more, going through the app stores makes parental consent more doable, because, as the court noted, parents have more control over the device than the apps themselves and the app stores are already required to obtain express parental consent for in-app purchases to comply with consent decrees from the Federal Trade Commission.
If the child’s device’s app store prohibits the child from downloading apps without a parent’s credentials (e.g., entering a password, providing a fingerprint, or using facial recognition), then parents immediately get more agency over the apps their children can access.
Better yet, it wouldn’t require the consumer to provide more information about the user to social media companies. If social media companies could simply send a request to the device (leveraging the data already available from the device’s operating system) to confirm (almost instantaneously) that a person is above the age of 18, then two things occur: 1) The user doesn’t provide more data other than what he has already provided to Apple or Google; and 2) the social media company only gets a thumbs up or a thumbs down in response to its inquiry, which limits the amount of new information the company receives.
State legislators should learn from these mistakes in order to effectively protect kids online. The biggest lesson so far is to look to both the apps and the app stores when it comes to age restrictions.
Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting.
Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.
On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars
Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.
Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.
Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”
Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.
Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.
Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers
Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie.
And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.
The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing
that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes.
The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.
Times up, WPATH.
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl
“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.”
Critics warn of an attempt to “chill parents from speaking out” as the California State Assembly considers a bill that would criminalize causing a “substantial disruption” at a school board meeting. Pictured: A man hoists his message at a July 20 meeting of the Chino Valley school board in Chino, California. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)
California already has undermined the rights of parents from out of state when it comes to experimental transgender “health care,” but the Legislature also is considering a bill that would criminalize causing “substantial disorder” at school board meetings—an attempt to “chill parents from speaking out,” critics warn.
SB 596, which the California State Senate passed in May, 30-8, would expand state law that bars adults from subjecting “a school employee to harassment.”
The bill, now making its way to the floor of the lower chamber, the California State Assembly, would expand the definition of “school employee” to cover any employee or official of a school district, charter school, and county or state education board or office.
The bill also would outlaw, as a misdemeanor, actions that cause “substantial disorder” at a school board meeting.
The law proposed in the Golden State doesn’t define “substantial disorder,” and its definition of “harassment” leaves broad room for interpretation. Under the proposal, Californians who violate the provision face a fine of $500 to $1,000, a year in county jail, or both. A second offense would mean mandatory jail time and could involve another fine; a third offense would mean more jail time and perhaps a third fine.
“It’s clear they’re trying to chill parents from speaking out,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
“I find it curious that there’s no definition of ‘substantial’ or ‘disruption’ within the proposed text,” Perry said. “Considering that these are essential terms for the bill, it’s likely that if passed, the law would fall under a vagueness challenge.”
Parents “have a right to express themselves under the protections of the First Amendment,” she noted. “Ordinary limitations on certain speech—making a true threat of violence, for example—already apply within the context of the First Amendment, making the criminal penalty here unnecessary, legally suspect, and ideologically driven.”
“California Democrats want to increase the presence of minors’ activism while working to chill the free speech of rightfully concerned parents and taxpayers,” Kelly Schenkoske, a California mother who homeschools her two children in conjunction with a public charter school program, told The Daily Signal.
“Instead of focusing on solutions for a state riddled with low academic achievement, a drug crisis, homelessness, rising taxes, human trafficking, water storage issues, and fire prevention, this Democrat-controlled Legislature continues to propose their aggressive, anti-family, legislative pet projects,” Schenkoske added. “Their work over the years to erode parental involvement and rights has been noticed by parents who will stand courageously to speak for the protection of their children and for a better education.”
Jim Manley, state legal policy deputy director at the Pacific Legal Institute, told The Daily Signal that the state government has the prerogative to make laws regarding school board meetings, but the vagueness of the text might encourage school employees and prosecutors to chill parents’ rights to speak freely.
“The idea that the government is trying to regulate conduct at school board meetings is pretty normal,” Manley said. “What sends up potential red flags is some of the language in this bill.”
SB 596defines “harassment” as “a knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that seriously alarms, torments, or terrorizes the person, and that serves no legitimate person.” The bill defines “course of conduct” as “a pattern of conduct composed of two or more acts occurring over a period of time, however short, evidencing a continuity of purpose.”
A parent or other critic “saying two things that the school official finds harassing could be enough to qualify there,” Manley said. “An email that simply torments would count as harassment under this standard.”
The lawyer noted that “to torment” merely means “to cause mental suffering.”
“If you send two emails that cause a school board official to mentally suffer, technically you fall under this definition,” Manley said.
The bill “could be interpreted in a way that chills people’s ability to communicate with elected officials,” he said.
Manley also noted that the bill includes an exemption for “any otherwise lawful employee concerted activity, including, but not limited to, picketing and the distribution of handbills.”
“Parents showing up to hand out literature would not be exempt” under the proposed law, the lawyer said. “Given how broadly this expands the coverage of the crime, I’d like to see the exemption be similarly broad. As written now, it only applies to employees who are picketing.”
Matt McReynolds, deputy chief counsel at the Pacific Justice Institute, echoed these concerns.
“I would certainly agreethat SB 596 targets conservative parents who have been energized and re-engaging at the school board level,” McReynolds told The Daily Signal.
“It’s not just speaking at school board meetings; this would criminalize sending emails that seriously annoy or alarm school employees,” he said. “Note, too, the double standards, beginning with the exception in the legislation for labor union activity such as picketing.”
McReynolds also said the “larger context” of the bill is “revealing.”
“In nearly all other areas, our state leaders are stressing decriminalization and have released thousands of dangerous offenders back into our communities,” he said. “The rhetoric about mass incarceration and overcriminalization goes out the window when they’re going after their political enemies. And in the school setting itself, our legislators are moving to reduce the ability of teachers and administrators to punish kids for defiance, disruption, and disorder. The hypocrisy is unmistakable.”
McReynolds also mentioned AB 1078, which passed the California State Assembly in May. That bill, which aims to boost instructional materials regarding diversity by circumventing parents, threatens “to reduce parents’ influence at the school board level,” McReynolds argued,
State Sen. Anthony J. Portantino, the Democrat who sponsored SB 596, didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the bill.
The bill comes amid new California laws prioritizing children’s stated gender identity over parental rights. Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law SB 107, a bill to turn California into a “sanctuary state” for “gender-affirming care.” The measure, which took effect in January, gives California courts the ability to award custody of a child if someone removes that child from his or her parents in another state to obtain such “care” over the parents’ disagreement.
In June, a California state senator told parents to flee the state as the Senate debated a bill that would subject parents who refuse to “affirm” their children’s “gender transitions” to child abuse charges.
“In the past when we’ve had these discussions and I’ve seen parental rights atrophied, I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting,” state Sen. Scott Wilk, a Republican, said. “I’ve changed my mind on that.”
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.
A radical bill being hotly debated in the Golden State threatens to label parents as child abusers if they decline to “affirm” their son or daughter’s sexual confusion.
AB 957, which has already passed California’s State Assembly, would require judges who are overseeing custody disputes with transgender children involved to favor the mother or father who supports the child’s so-called new gender identity. Parents who choose to affirm their son or daughter’s biological sex are considered out of bounds and out of luck.
At the root of this dangerous legislation is a foundational belief that the constructive and compassionate thing to do when it comes to gender confusion is to go along with whatever the child is feeling at the moment. This premise is not only destructive but also shortsighted and foolish, and on several levels. Cases of gender dysphoria or gender identity disorders have skyrocketed in recent years. Why is this happening? Sociologists report that much like teen suicide, gender-confused children run in clusters. In essence, if one child begins to question or act out, others soon follow. In some cases it’s become trendy and exotic to experiment with drugs and surgeries.
In reality, it’s terribly sad, and also a direct affront to God’s beautiful design for humanity. My heart breaks for children struggling and for those parents struggling alongside them. The organization I lead, Focus on the Family, exists to help moms and dads guide and provide the critical help needed when children are in this type of crisis.
Culture, though, is leading and encouraging children down a dangerous pathway by affirming their sexual confusion. In fact, some medical practitioners and activists have even coined the deceptive term “gender-affirming care” to describe the dark deed of irreversibly mutilating and altering children’s bodies.
What makes this even more tragic is that sociologists tell us that a significant majority (upwards of 80 percent) of children who experience this confusion will eventually psychologically revert back to their biological gender. In other words, they grow out of it.
Mark Yarhouse, professor psychology at Wheaton College, suggests, “Most children who meet criteria for gender dysphoria do not continue to meet criteria as they grow up and enter adolescence.” Yet, for some who take drugs and have surgery, the act of fully “de-transitioning” is impossible.
Despite the explosion of this confusion and abuse here in the United States, traditionally more progressive countries in Europe appear to be waking up to reality. The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board recently recommended that so-called sex-change operations and puberty blockers be used in research settings but not on children. They’re finally acknowledging that there’s no science to justify these abusive acts.
“The knowledge base, especially research-based knowledge for gender-affirming treatment (hormonal and surgical), is deficient and the long-term effects are little known,” the UKOM, an independent government watchdog over Norway’s healthcare system, stated. “This is particularly true for the teenage population where the stability of their gender incongruence is also not known.”
Norway’s not alone. Officials in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and France have made similar decisions. The controversial Tavistock Gender Clinic in the U.K. was shut down last year and just this past Friday, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service announced they were banning puberty blockers for children.
Whether in business or family life, leadership is knowing reality and suggesting solutions to problems. Affirming confusion and out right falsehoods does children no favors and, in fact, enslaves them to a lifetime of regret. We owe our children both truth and compassion, as well as situational clarity. California legislators are serving up only lies and confusion.
Jim Daly is president of Focus on the Family and author of “The Good Dad: Becoming the Father You Were Meant to Be.”
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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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
Conservatives who ran on culture war issues won dozens of school board elections in battleground and Democrat-controlled states last week, but you wouldn’t know that from Politico’s coverage of the races. The outlet claimed pro-parent candidates who ran against racist curricula in classrooms, lockdowns, and radical gender ideology “flamed out.”
Politico not-so-subtly concluded, based on recent school board election results in Illinois and Wisconsin, that “leaning on school-based wedge issues to court primary voters in a crowded White House campaign” won’t bode well for 2024 front-runner Republicans including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not yet announced his candidacy.
Not long after publication on Monday, the article gained traction with leftist talking heads and organizations such as Rachel Maddow, the Lincoln Project, the nation’s largest teachers union, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who were thrilled to share about the potential demise of the issues that made them a target of public scrutiny for the last three years.
“Parents, educators, and community members are all looking for candidates who are committed to strengthening public schools, not abandoning them,” the National Education Association’s elections arm tweeted.
The public school activists were specifically thrilled that the publication’s education reporter, Juan Perez Jr., pointed to Democrat wins in recent school board elections as evidence that the right’s culture war issues were a brief and unsustainable phenomenon.
“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” Perez Jr. asserted.
“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” For your information Mr. Perez Jr., in 2023, The Federal Government is funding $45 BILLION for public schools. With approximately 49.7 million students enrolled in public schools in 2023, that’s a whopping $9,375.00 per child. How many PRIVATE SCHOOLS COST LESS, WITH SUPERIOR SCHOLASTIC RESULTS AND SUPERIOR SECURITY?
He evidenced this claim by noting that Democrats and teachers’ unions in both Wisconsin and Illinois celebrated the wins of many of their preferred candidates in the more than 100 races they endorsed. Many of those wins came in districts in or near Democrat stronghold cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, but that didn’t stop the author from concluding that Republicans “lost big.”
Perez Jr. included data from political action committees that clearly showed candidates on the right claimed several victories but discounted those results by claiming that at least “two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record.”
Just seven paragraphs into the article, Perez Jr. included a half-sentence quote from 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky — “We lost more than we won” — that seemingly backed up his belief that these results “offer lessons to both parties as they eye even more board elections this year.”
“We had an hour-long conversation. [Perez Jr.] left it to one edited half sentence,” Girdusky told The Federalist.
Poorly framing quotes from Girdusky wasn’t Perez Jr.’s only mistake.
Leaning in
Leftist school board wins may have dominated corporate media coverage, but there’s no denying they were rivaled by dozens of triumphs by conservative-backed school board candidates who ran on fighting the radical racial and LGBT indoctrination infecting the nation’s government schools.
Overall, school board candidates endorsed by Girdusky’s 1776 Project PAC won 30 out of their 63 races.
Our endorsed candidates also won 6 races in Illinois last night.
“The seats that we did lose in Illinois were because of a third-party conservative candidate. So it wasn’t that conservatives lost, we split the vote,” Girdusky explained. “It wasn’t a rejection.”
Politico’s article fails to mention this nuance — likely because it would undermine the article’s purpose.
Winning nearly half of the elections it participated in is not “losing big,” especially when readers consider that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Democrats, and their teachers’ union allies in both Wisconsin and Illinois outspent conservative challengers by hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also got a helping hand from corporate media, which gave supporters of left-wing school board members plenty of TV time to help protect eligible seats from pro-parent candidates.
Handpicking the results from one off-year election and selling it as gospel truth about the future of culture war issues in local and national politics isn’t just incredibly ignorant. It’s deliberately deceitful and helps teachers’ unions keep their monopoly on making decisions about children’s lives that should fall under parents’ jurisdiction.
Whether corporate media like it or not, conservative messaging on education resonates with voters and has done so for years now. In 2021, dozens of parents concerned about the rise of racist curricula in government schools curried enough support to secure landslide victories against left-wing incumbents in states such as Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and many more. The same momentum was found in 2022 in states like Wisconsin.
Perez Jr. can repeat the prevalent lie that conservatives simply “seized on transgender students to rejuvenate a social agenda,” but the truth is even he couldn’t deny that parents’ frustration with the education bureaucracy is responsible for changing the course of countless elections including Virginia’s gubernatorial race in 2021.
Contrary to what Perez Jr. and his sullen quotes from “GOP activists” would have you believe, the organizations propping up pro-parent candidates aren’t backing down from the culture war. As Girdusky said: “I think that there’s clearly a message there that education is an important issue that Republicans can overperform in substantially.”
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.
From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences.
Homeschooling rose to 1 in 10 American kids in 2021 due to lockdowns, and the number has remained high even as lockdowns abated. Most families who began homeschooling due to lockdowns say they don’t plan to go back.
Despite the steady increase in homeschooling since its revival in the 1980s, families who choose this way of raising their children often face fearful responses from family and friends. Chief among the concerns is what people often call “socialization.” Sometimes, they mean, “Will your kids have any friends?” Other times, they mean, “Will your kids understand social cues and how to get along with normies?”
Yes, you can find homeschooling kids who dress oddly and don’t know how to carry on a basic conversation. But you can find people like that anywhere. As anyone who attended a public school can confirm, people who can’t make eye contact and are otherwise antisocial persist in that environment, too.
From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences. On balance, these differences tend to favor homeschoolers. Here are just seven I’ve observed that are also often obtainable in small schools.
1. Independent Thinking
It’s common for the “good” kids in public school to work hard to learn what the teacher wants and give it to her. They have a tendency to become compliers. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”
Now, homeschooled kids often also want to please Mom and Dad, but the ability to negotiate with a parent in ways one can’t with a teacher often encourages mental independence. They have freedom to read widely and extra free time in which to develop and personalize their sense of self. They also tend to get more long conversations with their parents because of homeschooling’s extremely small class sizes.
All these cultivate independent habits of thought. They teach people to develop their interests and personalities, and to follow arguments all the way to their conclusions. These things also teach students to spend time comparing and contrasting ideas for real, in a way that shapes one’s soul for life, not as a human version of ChatGPT.
Homeschoolers are also used to being unusual. They’re used to being asked questions like, “Do you have any friends?” and given the cold shoulder by public-school kids at events like sports and family gatherings.
Sometimes this turns a homeschooled kid desperate and makes him more peer-dependent, especially if he’s a sociable child and doesn’t spend enough time with friends. So he’s desperate for friends and therefore works overly hard to conform to negative peer pressure. I’ve seen this also with conservative kids. They accept peers’ or culture’s shaming and rejection of their social differences and therefore can more easily turn into antagonists against their own group.
Thus we have entities like Homeschoolers Anonymous, which argues that because some homeschooling families are abusive, homeschooling rather than the family is the problem. (You don’t hear that same argument about public schooling, which has a far higher rate of child abuse than homeschooling does. But I digress.)
If parents observe and address these social dynamics, mostly by helping their children find friends who build them up instead of savage their family’s choices, homeschoolers do tend to emerge into adulthood as independent thinkers. They tend to be quite comfortable with nonconformity, bringing new perspectives into their communities. This strengthens our society, especially now, as political correctness is metastasizing into a totalitarian social credit system.
2. More Practice with Multi-Age Relationships
Since they are so strongly family-oriented, homeschoolers break out of our society’s artificial, factory-school model of corralling people with those who happen to be born in the same calendar year. Homeschooled kids are far more comfortable making friends with anyone, not just those their exact same age.
They drop by for tea at the old lady’s down the block (true story). Bigger kids play comfortably with babies and toddlers. They know how because they have little siblings and cousins they are around more often because they’re not in school all day. This makes many homeschoolers even more socially capable than peers who falsely believe that one can only be friends with a person who looks and acts just like them. It expands their horizons and their relationship skills.
Freedom from same-age exclusivity has academic benefits as well as social benefits. Everyone understands that no person is exactly mentally on track with every other person his age. An 8-year-old may be strong in math but weak in spelling, compared to those of his age. Homeschooling allows the flexibility to meet children academically outside of the “average” peer.
Being too far ahead of one’s class makes bright kids bored, and being too far behind his class makes struggling students despair. Teaching right at a person’s actual level instead of his artificially imposed level is the most effective instruction possible.
3. More Prosocial Habits and Expectations
For decades, parents have moved to the suburbs to raise their kids because they didn’t want their children in environments shaped by poverty. As Thomas Sowell and others have chronicled, America’s urban and rural poor share many antisocial behaviors that keep them down and drag others with them. These include higher rates of violence and nonmarital sex and other coarse and life-damaging behavior such as openly disrespecting authority.
Homeschooling takes the protection of moving to the suburbs a step further. That’s an increasingly prudent step as our entire culture seems hell-bent on downward mobility.
Simply the widespread adoption of smartphones for children immediately degrades entire social ecosystems such as schools, because children are too immature to handle attention-destroying notifications and open internet access. Ten-year-old girls don’t need to see pornographic drawings and get propositioned to join a threesome because their badly parented peers watch YouTube videos of lesbian sex (true stories — from the suburbs).
In an environment like this, sometimes the only possible way to ensure your child actually has a childhood is to homeschool. It would be better if our society decided to protect children from living in social cesspools like this, but most of our parents and institutions have so far refused. That leaves it up to sane parents and churches. Homeschooling is one way to allow children an innocent childhood so they encounter this world’s violence and sex when they are ready.
4. Better Ability to Choose Friends
It’s always been prudent to select one’s companions carefully. Friends strongly affect who you are. Families who pay $50,000 a year for so-called “elite” private schools and then send their children to morally bankrupt Ivies know this. Their values are degraded, but the underlying impetus is correct: One’s companions can determine the course of one’s entire life. This is true for adults and even more so for children.
The thing about public school is that anyone can and does go there. We don’t live in the 1950s, when one could more reliably count on both the average parent and most institutions to be sane and responsible.
Today’s average parent is checked out and lets his kids be mentored by creepy strangers on the internet and other kids who are mentored by creepy strangers on the internet. Today’s average institution is run by apathetic box-checkers whose lack of moral fiber tends to let antisocial people and woke inmates turn everything into an asylum.
This means parents today can’t count on most other people to encourage their families toward the good. Sending children to public school (and allowing them unsupervised internet access) not only prevents parents from carefully selecting their children’s major influences but also ensures their impressionable children will repeatedly encounter sick perversions they are too immature to handle.
Homeschooling (and private schooling) families have far greater control over their companions than do those who allow our degraded public square to mess with their kids’ minds, and therefore can more intentionally manage this key determinant of a family’s character.
5. Better Family Relationships
A complaint I often hear about homeschooling that unintentionally reveals its speaker’s lack of character is: “I just couldn’t be with my kids all day long!” Parents shouldn’t avoid helping their kids mature by farming out their parenting to others. Others don’t do as good a job of it as parents will. It’s also an abdication of their responsibility that has bad consequences for them, their children, their community, and all of society.
Yes, children are annoying. Every person is annoying sometimes. Mature adults realize we’re also annoying sometimes and that a currently annoying person will usually get over it. This isn’t a children problem, it’s a people problem.
Yes, children can be more directly annoying than adults because they are more actively driven by their passions. That’s one top characteristic of immaturity. Yet kids’ natural immaturity isn’t worse because it’s more obvious than most adults’.
When an adult seeks arousal, he might use internet porn, blast loud music in public spaces, or zone out on a video game. A child seeking arousal might wander around whistling or run in circles around the kitchen. He might bang the same song on the piano 20 times a day or tease his sister 30 times just to get a reaction (guess how I came up with these examples).
But Jordan Peterson is right that kids are mostly as annoying as their parents allow them to be. Some parents allow their children to maintain habits of complaining, whining, arguing with parents when they say no, teasing siblings, or fighting. Other parents build and enforce appropriate behavior boundaries in their family life.
By putting family members in more constant direct contact with each other, homeschooling gives parents increased opportunities for character building and habit formation. If parents do this work, it definitely pays off. It also tends to pay off both short- and long-term.
Children who are required by active parents to daily practice self-discipline tend to become better adults — better fellow citizens, better parents, better neighbors, mothers, and fathers. Unlike unparented children, they are also mostly a pleasure to be around — just like adults.
6. More Creative Hobbies and Entrepreneurial Instincts
Because they don’t have to waste so much time being controlled as part of a herd in large classes and schools, homeschoolers tend to have a lot more free time that they don’t spend watching TV. This makes homeschoolers extremely creative and active people, on average, which lends itself to entrepreneurial instincts.
With all the free time they gain from not having to move at a pace constrained by 22 other people, homeschoolers tend to develop strong hobbies and skills. The average homeschooler is involved in more than five community activities such as piano lessons, scouts, and karate, and is more likely to volunteer than public-schooled kids, according to studies.
Cultivating personal interests is not only good in itself, but it also leads to other goods, such as a penchant for social and economic entrepreneurship. Homeschooled students are used to being self-directed and managing their own time and interests. That makes them more likely to develop their own creative pursuits and I think explains why there are so many homeschooling families running high-traffic channels on YouTube.
7. A More Individual Personality
Some combination of the high personalization and high control of one’s time in homeschooling, as well as the lack of personality flattening that comes from harsh peer pressure, seems to make homeschoolers often very much more developed individuals. This reality is a bit ineffable, partly because it’s so varied in its expression.
While most people seem to come out of public schools slotted into some mass marketing consumer profile — punk, valedictorian, LGBT, SJW, jock, geek, nerd, or some other role defined and assigned by corporate conglomerates — homeschoolers tend not to fit into these kinds of boxes very easily.
Partly I think it’s because they have less awareness that these boxes even exist, because of their lower exposure to mass media through both screens and peers. Partly I think it arises out of their years of freedom to deeply explore nooks and crannies of human existence that aren’t part of mass culture, like Victorian clothing, historical re-enactment replicas, or Scottish literature.
Sometimes this reality manifests in slight oddities, like wearing nonstandard clothing, taking longer pauses in a conversation (or being more likely to monologue at people), knowing swing and folk dance steps, and not getting pop culture references. But I prefer these kinds of oddities to encountering a bearded man in a dress or to hearing some crappy song blare out of someone’s speakers that sounds essentially like every other crappy song that has blared out of speakers since the 1960s.
This also makes homeschoolers really interesting people to talk to. They have actual interests in their lives and unusual ways of seeing the world because more of their ideas haven’t come to them via the dreary mass marketing that in our society badly substitutes for legitimate culture. So no, often homeschoolers don’t act like zombies who download their brains from the corporate cloud, but that’s a good thing.
Parents — not the government — are responsible for teaching morals and fundamental values to their children. School administrators seem to have forgotten this. Throughout our commonwealth and country, local school districts are attempting to supplant parents with government officials, who they believe know what is best for our children.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
Parents are responsible for instilling moral, religious, personal, cultural and other values that they deem appropriate in order to prepare their children for success and happiness in life. Some parents, like us, believe this should be rooted in our Christian faith. No matter the source, we believe that parents are foremost responsible for establishing a moral foundation in their children.
With a strong moral foundation being built at home, parents then entrust their local school districts with educating their child in reading, writing and arithmetic. Parents do not, however, expect government bureaucrats to infiltrate their child’s classroom and teach them their own concept of morality.
In our own community, the West Shore School district has engaged with “CharacterStrong” to teach “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) to our children. This curriculum is aligned with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) whose chief priority is to implement SEL with “equity and excellence” in mind. This may sound relatively harmless to the untrained listener, until you find out more about these organizations and their disturbing goals.
CharacterStrong states that their goal is to “partner” with parents in teaching moral and fundamental values to their children. The organization’s overt goal is to co-parent children by helping them to identify their own “values and virtues” and to reflect on those values to “help guide their decisions.”
We, like the majority of parents across the country, are not interested in coparenting with a government contractor. The government is not the parent of my child. We raise our children consistent with the values of our Christian faith and expect those values not to be meddled with.
The West Shore School District should be focused on teaching rigorous academics and training our children to think critically. It should be focused on preparing our children for the academic rigors of high school, college, and the real world. Instead, it is focused on promoting the CharacterStrong curriculum which, through CASEL, has made “equity” essential to the SEL curriculum.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
My child’s school should not be focused on gender ideology, race, or undermining the core values I teach my children. Unfortunately, the school district has decided to continue to push this dangerous ideology and indoctrination scheme.
Thankfully, parents have strong parental rights here in Pennsylvania. Chapter four of the Pennsylvania School Code authorizes parents or guardians to “have their children excused from specific instruction that conflicts with their religious beliefs.”
My fellow district parents recently exercised their rights under this provision but were met with denials. Worse, West Shore School District repeatedly demanded that our friends justify their religious objections to the chosen religion of the West Shore School District.
The school district has no discretion. It must grant the parents’ request and properly accommodate their children. Notably, the district did in fact permit some exemptions to the curriculum but denied others.
Parents who have decided to exercise their rights under both our state and federal constitutions should not be vilified. These parents should be praised for paying close attention to their children’s curriculum and ensuring that no one — especially the government — gets between parents and their children, before it’s too late.
Allison Shipp is the leader of the Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Chapter of Moms for Liberty.
Friday, in Sacramento, Calif., a group of detransitioners, parents, and allies gathered at the state capitol building in honor of Detrans Awareness Day. They came together to raise awareness about the growing group of individuals who say they’ve been irreparably harmed by the gender industry.
Among them is Prisha Mosley, a female detransitioner who was prescribed male hormones as a minor and underwent a double mastectomy shortly after turning 18. Today at 25, Mosley describes feeling like a “medical monster,” suffering from a long list of prolonged side effects, including such severe vaginal atrophy that she can no longer use tampons.
The effects of the “mutilation” that Mosley describes falling victim to as a child is not unlike the horrific procedure of female genital mutilation, which involves partial or total removal of the external female genitalia.
As a result of her medical transition, Mosley is unable to have a normal sex life, says she feels as though she’s “robbing” her boyfriend of her breasts, and doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to bear her own children.
According to data from the World Health Organization, more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to FGM and, annually, more than 3 million girls are still at risk of being subjected to the procedure. FGM is nearly universally recognized as a violation of the human rights of girls and women, and a violation of the rights of children. And yet, in the U.S., under the guise of “gender-affirming care,” a modern-day version of the practice is being widely accepted and promoted to young girls.
Join me for Detrans Awareness at the California Capitol on March 10th! Dress warm it might be raining! pic.twitter.com/XOE9YbRvkK
Instead of calling it FGM, activists have bubble wrapped their modern-day mutilation in pleasant-sounding terms such “top surgery,” “bottom surgery,” and “reversible” hormonal treatments for children and adults who identify as transgender.
Yet, like FGM, procedures offered to those who suffer from body image issues and/or gender confusion incorporate medical interventions that can mutilate their sex organs. These effects aren’t limited to vulvoplasties and hysterectomies, which are two of the more extreme surgical procedures offered under “gender-affirming care.”
As Jamie Reed, a whistleblower who oversaw the treatment of thousands of minors at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, recently described:
“[G]irls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, ‘Wow, we hurt this kid.’
“There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.”
This is an atrocity. And disproportionately, it’s an atrocity that’s affecting the bodies of women, as girls account for a significant majority of minors receiving “gender-affirming care.”
While critics are quick to dismiss evidence of “social contagion” among teenage girls, even the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and its activist president, Dr. Marci Bowers, have recognized that social influences may be driving some transgender identification in youth.
This perhaps explains why detransitioners are a rapidly-growing group gaining more visibility and attention, despite claims by some transgender activists that detransitioning is rare or not a “real thing.” Yet the harrowing stories of former trans-identified individuals serve as a cautionary tale against medical transitioning, as professionals appear either unable or unwilling to treat the often-severe medical complications caused by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
At its root, gender ideology teaches vulnerable and impressionable girls to medicalize the natural insecurities that they face. In pursuit of “acceptance,” professionals then send them down a devastating path that includes drugs used to castrate male sex offenders and, in some cases, irreversible surgeries.
European countries such as the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and most recently Norway have moved to sharply limit these practices for minors after a systematic review of evidence found that the risks to “gender-affirming care” outweigh any benefits.
Here in the U.S., aside from a few brave states such as Florida pushing back on “gender-affirming care,” we’re moving in the opposite direction. Activists, medical professionals, and politicians are doubling down on their support for the mutilation of healthy bodies by smearing attempts to ban these procedures as bigoted and dangerous—attacks not unlike those once used to legalize and normalize FGM.
For his part, President Joe Biden has made his position clear: “Affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy,” he said in a 2022 video message speaking directly to parents.
To transgender Americans of all ages, I want you to know that you are so brave. You belong. I have your back. pic.twitter.com/mD4F0m3rU1
But sadly for the Biden administration, it’s not enough to irreversibly destroy the future sex lives and reproductive abilities of youth by encouraging experimental drugs and treatments in the U.S. According to a leaked internal memo from Secretary Antony Blinken, the Biden administration may begin pressuring other countries to push vulnerable youth into hormones and surgeries.
As Manhattan Institute scholar Leor Sapir put it, “Under President Biden, it would appear that cultural arrogance and ‘colonialism’ (as defined in the contemporary academy) are once again staples of American foreign policy.”
With Detrans Awareness Day following on the heels of International Women’s Day this week, it’s time to stop mincing words. We must treat gender ideology as a human rights issue. And we must be clear, the Biden administration is on the wrong side.
On Sunday night, as I was doing laundry, I got a text message from a fellow Virginia mother with an interesting invitation: Ben Litchfield, a Democratic Party Virginia Senate candidate from Fredericksburg, was convening a statewide Zoom call of “parents, educations and pro-public school activists” to discuss education issues.
A “mama bear” activist from northern Virginia since June 2020, I thought it was a unique opportunity to brainstorm. A Democrat all my life, I moved to Virginia in December 2008 with my young son, then in kindergarten, only because the state elected Barack Obama to be U.S. president.
Born in India, I am an American Muslim immigrant and single mother, and I thought the state was finally progressive enough for me. With English as my second language when I arrived in the U.S. at the age of 4, I believe in the power of America’s public school system to empower a girl like me to become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the age of 23.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin gestures after signing a House bill at the Capitol, March 2, 2022, in Richmond, Virginia. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
That’s why I fight every day to support a public system where teachers are able to spend their time educating my younger self, not indoctrinating kids with divisive, distracting activist agendas.
This time, these activists were hosting a strategy session to develop “a coordinated opposition” to the Youngkin administration’s alleged “attack on public schools, educators, and students.”
The designated “Topic” for the call: “VA Dept of Education and Youngkin Town Hall.” Thursday night, CNN host Jake Tapper is hosting a town hall meeting with Gov. Glenn Youngkin. I know because I’ve encouraged many parents and students to join the town hall.
Suparna Dutta was smeared when nominated to the Virginia Board of Education in July 2022. (Fox News Digital)
When I joined the call, I recognized some names. Cheryl Binkley, a former northern Virginia teachers’ union leader, was guiding introductions. Mariane Burke, the local leader of the national activist group, Indivisible, was online.
I knew them well. They had led a successful hit, organized by the Virginia chapter of a national teachers’ union campaign – #RedForEd – to assassinate the character of a friend, Suparna Dutta, an American Hindu immigrant, with the “White supremacist” smear when Youngkin nominated her to be on the Virginia Board of Education. They won a 22-18 vote, with Democrats casting their ballots unanimously against Dutta.
On the call, another woman introduced herself, and then Binkley, a former Virginia Education Association union official, turned to me. I introduced myself fully: I’m Asra Nomani, and I’m a mother in northern Virginia, and I looked forward to learning from others.
While we may have a difference of opinion on a few – OK, many – issues, I thought we could benefit from a much-needed conversation, hearing each other out, at least virtually face-to-face. Binkley had another point of view.
She kicked me out of the meeting, and my only participation was left to my introduction and this note that popped up on my phone: “The host has removed you from this meeting.”
“…I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” declared Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat’s gubernatorial candidate in Virginia in 2021. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Virginia Democrats’ removal of me – a Muslim immigrant single mother from India and “woman of color,” as U.S. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez once described Rep. Ilhan Omar – symbolizes much more than the ejection of one person. It captures the utter failure of the Democratic National Committee to actually be inclusive to the millions of parents – many of them immigrant minority parents – who refuse its lockstep agenda with the country’s two teachers’ unions – the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.
Even though President Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race in 2021, over Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, who famously sealed his loss with the assertion in a debate that “…I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
The arrogance, political corruption and myopia of Democratic Party officials to parents portends bad news for the Democratic Party in 2024 and good news for Republican candidates. On cue, every Republican presidential candidate, former Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former President Donald Trump – and those still unannounced, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Youngkin – have made education a key issue on their platform.
Take a bow. That’s the mama bear movement driving issues, not the other way around.
On Twitter the next day, the Democrat loyalists didn’t apologize and acknowledge the error of their ways. One user responded: “Good. You have no business in Virginia education.”
But I actually do have business in Virginia education. So does every parent.
Democrats will turn off more parents with their closed-door mentality, and that will drive a wedge issue between traditionally Democratic parents, like Black, Hispanic and Asian parents, and the Democratic Party.
Republicans have embraced a winning agenda item, and they will win the White House if they continue to translate their platforms with policy and legislative answers restoring parents’ rights in America.
A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Q. Nomani is the author of a new book, Woke Army. She is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Network. She is reachable on Twitter as @AsraNomani.
Pro-life activist Abby Johnson addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2, 2023, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington, D.C. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A women-centered panel at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference focused on defending human dignity and how the panelists believe the culture has lost sight of God’s intended vision for humankind.
The panel, “Some Tuff Mutha,” featured pro-life advocate Abby Johnson, founder of And Then There Were None; Penny Nance, CEO and president of the conservative group Concerned Women for America; and Kimberly Fletcher of Moms for America. Radio host Sandy Rios served as the moderator for the panel.
One of the ways the panelists believe human dignity has been lost is through the practice of abortion, which has killed 63.5 million Americans since it was legalized in 1973.
Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director (read more about her here and here), drew attention to the Food and Drug Administration modifying restrictions on abortion pills and enabling women to obtain prescriptions for the drugs at major retail pharmacies. Under the Biden administration, the FDA “greenlit abortion into the home of every woman across the country,” she said.
“We have created abortion facilities in every woman’s home across the country,” Johnson added, lamenting the risk this imposes on women.
The former abortion clinic director noted that the full extent of the ramifications of the FDA’s decision is still unknown, highlighting the lack of medical supervision surrounding at-home chemical abortions. According to a 2009 study, the complication rate for chemical abortions is four times higher than for surgical abortions.
Johnson cited several concerns she has with the modified regulations, such as women potentially hemorrhaging to death in their bathroom. She also emphasized that women will be looking into the toilet to see the remains of their “fully-formed baby.”
“And then they’re going to have to make a decision,” she said. “‘What do I do with this fully-formed baby? What do I do with this child? Do I scoop the child out of the toilet? Do I take the child to be buried? Do I flush my child down the toilet?’”
The pro-life advocate raised further concerns about the psychological impact of seeing their child’s remains.
Nance added that abortion is the “ultimate disrespect of human dignity,” but stressed that God still loves and can redeem women who have had abortions.
The conservative leader pointed to another loss of human dignity, criticizing the Biden administration’s treatment of women. She asserted that the Administration seemingly believes “men can do everything better than women, including being women,” highlighting the appointment of Rachel (Richard) Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, to the position of U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health. In 2022, USA Today listed Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, as its Woman of the Year.
Nance said CWA intends to “stand up for the unique dignity of American women” and encourages other Americans to do the same.
“We are fearfully and wonderfully made as male and female,” she said. “That is the ultimate disrespect, to deny who we are and how God created us in that unique, dignified position as American women.”
Speaking about public education, Fletcher shared how, when she talks to mothers, she tells them how “parental rights are fundamental and supreme.”
“We as parents have got to stand up,” she said. “First of all, we have to know what’s coming our way.”
Fletcher noted that mothers are attending school board meetings, reading the sexual content in books made accessible to their children, and being lectured for sharing such things out loud. She also pointed to incidents involving comprehensive sex education being taught to early elementary school students or schools instructing young children about changing their sex.
The parental advocate asserted that conservative Christian women haven’t been voting or paying enough attention to what’s happening at their school boards. This demographic of women, she added, can “repair” what’s wrong in the education system.
In terms of fixing what they see as negatively impacting the culture, Johnson said God wants His people to participate in “daily victories,” imploring those gathered to use their “voice” and “speak boldly” on these issues.
Nance seconded Johnson’s challenge, adding that the “Holy Spirit is alive and well,” and whether it be at school board meetings or outside abortion facilities, she called on everyone to speak the “truth” and fulfill God’s command to “care for the least of these.”
A Loudoun County father, whose arrest at a June 2021 school board meeting was used by the Biden administration to justify a politicized attack on concerned parents, was found not guilty of trespassing on Wednesday.
Law enforcement arrested Jon Tigges at a Loudoun school board meeting on June 22, 2021, after he tried expressing concerns about the school district’s “moral decay.” A Virginia district judge found Tigges guilty in October of 2021. Loudoun Circuit Judge Douglas Fleming Jr., however, cleared Tigges of any wrongdoing. Fleming determined that Tigges not only had a First Amendment right to attend the heated meeting but also that the superintendent who shut down the official gathering last summer had no right to declare it an “unlawful assembly.”
“My thanks to God for justice,” Tigges wrote on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon.
Tigges was one of the more than 250 people who had signed up to speak during the public comment section of the Loudoun County School Board meeting that summer night. He intended to voice opposition to the board’s new transgender policy proposal, which mandated that employees use students’ so-called “preferred pronouns” and preferred restrooms regardless of their sex. Before Tigges could speak, School Board Chairwoman Brenda Sheridan called off the meeting, and the now-recently fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared the gathering an “unlawful assembly.” Ziegler ordered the hundreds of people waiting to express their outrage at the government school district to vacate the premises or risk arrest.
Tigges refused to leave.
“I just felt led to realize that we could still speak,” Tigges told The Federalist last year. “It’s a public forum, a public room. It had been scheduled until seven o’clock for people to speak. I stood up to encourage folks to stay and if they had something to say whether they were on the left or the right, didn’t matter. They’d be heard and we’d respect one another and do so and so people started doing that without any amplification at all and you could hear them fine because it was a peaceful assembly.”
Despite Tigges’ claim on the First Amendment, police officers handcuffed, arrested, and charged him with trespassing.
Two arrests made at the Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting after it was declared an unlawful assembly and some parents here to protest against critical race theory and a transgender policy refused to leave right away #CriticalRaceTheorypic.twitter.com/dsZDrqJ0Gp
Tigges’ arrest in June of 2021 was used by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), in collusion with the Biden White House, to justify the smearing of concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” who required punishment from federal law enforcement. In September of 2021, the NSBA sent its infamous complaint letter, secretly solicited by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, to the Department of Justice, which sparked a politicized attack on parents who wanted to speak out against corrupt school boards.
“Despite this victory, I have serious concerns about where we are as a country. We’ve been subverted by a darkness that is spilling out in rot at all levels and in both political parties,” Tigges tweeted after the decision. “Nothing will change until We the People value conviction over comfort.”
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 and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my son — let’s call him Andy — was putting rainbow stickers on his phone. And a friend alerted me that Andy rebuked her daughter in a group chat for being “so cisgender.” I did some delicate digging, and it became clear: My child, then 13, was flirting with going “trans.”
He’s not alone. The number of transgender-identifying kids is up 20 to 40 times since a decade ago, to 1.5 percent of all teens. And the gender facilities that say they are the experts have been unmasked. Videos and statements have revealed that doctors in these so-called clinics are willing to give 15-year-old girls double mastectomies and call it treatment.
I wasn’t about to send my son off for experimental medical interventions that didn’t treat any underlying psychological issues. In this, I think I’m representative of the silent (and bullied) majority. Still, what could I do?
The first thing I had to do was to realize that the gender cult is powerful, and I can’t control the choices and feelings of my kid. I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.
Finding a New School
I was lucky: My son was at a private school that did not push kids, behind their parents’ backs, into exploring alternate sexualities and getting “treated” by lifetime medicalization. If my son had been at a trans-affirming school — which means just about any public school — I would have been undermined at every turn.
At this school, however, he did have a cohort of “rebel” friends who all seemed to identify themselves as gender-questioning. And the school itself was not academically challenging enough for Andy. So I focused on academics, and we looked for a new school that would be a better fit on that score — and still supportive of my values. Finding one gave him a fresh start and a new peer group.
Building Real Identity
Next, I decided I would not provoke Andy by debating gender and trans issues. Maria Keffler in her book “Desist, Detrans, and Detox” reminds parents that transgenderism in adolescents is less about sex and more about identity, identity, and identity. A few decades ago, Andy probably would have worked through his teenage crises by going goth or arguing with me about religion. These days, becoming one of the letters in LGTB is the shortcut to being interesting, not “basic.”
Well, I didn’t want to make gender-bending the way he was going to differentiate himself from his parents. If he had been openly claiming a different so-called gender identity, maybe I would have been more confrontational about it. But since he was just flirting with being trans, not yet eloping, I decided not to make the topic of the sexes even more important than it already was. Instead, I focused on helping him build an identity in a healthy way.
I made it a priority to compliment him, every day, praising him for all the good things he is. Every time I “caught him” being funny, smart, helpful, generous, thoughtful, or kind, I noted it out loud. Every day, multiple times a day. I tried to help him see that these things are more important to his identity than some exotic “gender.” I also tried to help him feel more at home in his skin. He was given lessons in a sport he enjoys, so he could experience his body being strong and agile. Whatever reduced his alienation from his body, I encouraged.
Open-Ended Questioning
Next, I focused on building our relationship. I asked a lot of open-ended questions, and I made goofy jokes. We laughed a lot. I learned about him and signaled that I was interested in learning more. De-escalating tension and increasing the joy between us was key.
If Andy wanted to wear a vintage shirt that looked like it belonged on a French aristocrat from a few centuries ago, I just shrugged and let it pass. As long as what he chose was somewhere within the boundaries of socially acceptable male clothing, I didn’t make a fuss. After all, being a man (or a woman) is large enough to encompass differences in style, personality, and interest. It’s the trans movement that stereotypes the sexes, telling us that a sensitive, artistic boy must actually be a girl. Nonsense! My son could be a man and wear pastels.
When opportunities arose in everyday life, I pointed out the differences between men and women. In talking about school athletics, I would casually observe, “Oh, in high school, the athletic teams are divided by sex, because by puberty, boys develop more muscles and have more lung capacity than girls.” I never made these into arguments, just objective remarks.
In fact, we didn’t talk about so-called gender much, although I was prepared to. I coached myself on how to respond with neutrality and interest. I was determined only to ask questions. “I’m not clear how, if gender is socially constructed, that it is also an infallible identity deep inside the person?” “Help me understand. If gender is fluid and changeable, why should people get surgeries to alter their bodies permanently?” Books and essays pointing out transgenderism’s inconsistencies helped me clarify my thoughts. Still, I vowed I would only provide my own answers when Andy asked me a question — only, that is, when he was truly curious about my thinking.
I did take Andy to one talk on gender by a speaker who was calm and sympathetic but still supportive of my values. When he asked why he had to go, I simply said, “It’s an important topic, and this point of view is not well-represented in the culture.” Afterward, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was fine,” in a tone of voice that indicated the opposite. I dropped it; the talk still gave him a lot to chew on, even if he didn’t want to admit it.
Limiting Technology
One other piece was key: technology. Much trans proselytizing happens online, with anonymous adults love-bombing vulnerable kids. These adults sell the idea that acceptance can be found only in their new trans family and not in their real home. Some parents need to take drastic steps regarding their kids’ online presence. Fortunately, the screen problem was one I had been addressing for a long time, so I could be more moderate.
Andy did not have a smartphone, although even flip phones these days have internet browsers. I gave him a new phone designed for kids, one that had some carefully curated apps but no internet browser. For computer time, he was limited to an hour a day, and I trusted the internet filters I managed on his computer to keep him off the porn sites and the sexually explicit forums that cater to trans-questioning kids. All that limited (but didn’t eliminate) his exposure to pro-trans pressure. As a bonus, I got a much more cheerful kid at home who wasn’t always in front of a screen.
The point of all of this was threefold: to be the good guy, to distract him from all gender talk all the time, and to provide other identity options than the trans one.
Upping My Parenting
Lastly, I played the long game. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating to myself that the universe wouldn’t give me a kid that I couldn’t care for. That I had his best interests at heart — and online trans gurus didn’t — and I could wait this out with patience. I prioritized him when we had downtime in the evenings, not my phone. And I did the things I needed to, like sleeping enough and getting my own support system, so I could be available to him. Should I have been doing all of this all along as a parent? Well, of course, and in fact, it’s not like I had to do a total 180 when this emergency happened. Some of these things I was already doing, sort of. But I still needed to level up my parenting.
This summer, when he decorated a new phone, there were no rainbow stickers on it.
I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods, but he seems uninterested in the whole gender question. His wardrobe choices are less outrageous, and he’s not anxious, angry, and approval-seeking. Instead, he’s engaged and happy at school and at home, and he doesn’t need to be “different” according to the trans script. He’s happier being different just as himself. That makes me one happy parent.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
Michigan voters will decide Tuesday whether children in that state can obtain puberty blockers at Planned Parenthood facilities without parental consent. Proposal 3 would also give Michigan children a constitutional right to be castrated or surgically sterilized — again, without the consent of a parent.
Parental rights have become a fiercely contested battleground. Historically, your right to determine what’s in the best interest of your child has gone without question. It’s the oldest, most fundamental liberty we know, enshrined in legal doctrine since 1690.
But too often today, ideology determines whether your parental rights will actually stand in court. If a parent opposes her child’s desire to pretend to be the opposite sex, courts increasingly treat that parent’s rights as expendable.The sexual confusion of children overshadows parents’ rights to remain in their children’s lives as a potent force.
In a courtroom down the hall, however, the rights of neglectful or drug-abusing parents are treated with kid gloves, under the theme of family preservation. Activist courts stand ready to protect your parental rights, but only when your narrative matches their own.
‘I’m God in this Case’
Less than a year ago, Abigail Shrier shocked readers with her story of a California judge who stripped a father of his parental rights because he showed insufficient support for performing irreversible medical procedures on his sex-confused son. These cases are popping up all around the country. Sexual ideology is becoming the governing factor in a child’s placement, trumping the will and the voice of a parent.In a state whose governor was elected on a parental rights platform, Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman brazenly introduced a bill that would charge a parent who fails to affirm a child’s “sexual orientation or gender identity” with a felony. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation that makes his state a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical procedures. Just make it to the Golden State … and there is nothing your objecting parents can do.
One case in the sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, provides some insight into how a parent can suddenly get framed as “the bad parent” in a custody battle, merely for questioning a child’s sexual confusion.
Sarah Schultz told me she spent more than a half-million dollars trying to retain joint custody of her 15-year-old daughter who first claimed she was bisexual and then began to question her sex. Schultz pled for a “wait and see” approach and for the right to have an influence in her daughter’s maturing adolescence. Despite Sarah’s ex-husband’s earlier fentanyl overdose, she says, a judge gave primary custody of the daughter to her dad, who permitted both bisexual and heterosexual sleepovers. In the past four years, Schultz has seen her daughter fewer than five times.
Schultz said the appointed guardian ad litem viewed her faith as a threat to her daughter’s emerging sexuality.“I’m God in this case,” Schultz recalled her daughter’s guardian ad litem saying. The court saw her daughter as a girl in an “authentic process to discover her identity,” Schultz explained, while the father was commendable because he was “allowing her sexuality to blossom.”
Courts often use the “safety of the child” as a guise to award custody to a parent who mirrors the left’s narrative. Note the irony here. How can you be a good parent unless you are willing to oppose something harmful your child thinks she wants at the time? A teenager sees hormones and irreversible surgeries as a mirage of liberation. A concerned parent sees what a disfigured body and the inability to have children will mean 10 years from now.
A Pernicious Double Standard
Treatment of parental rights in the world of foster care and adoption, meanwhile, is a vastly different story.
A mother can give birth to a baby who spends two months in the NICU, crying for endless hours as he detoxes from the heroin his mother ingested during pregnancy, and she or her mother can still take the baby home. Parental rights are treated as sacrosanct, even though most of the maltreatment of children actually occurs at the hands of parents or their paramours.
“Family preservation” is the holy grail courts and welfare agencies pursue, often at the expense of the actual safety of children. As Naomi Schaefer Riley explains in her book, “No Way To Treat A Child,” “child welfare workers and family-court judges … believe that foster care, to the extent that it should be used at all, is an endless holding pattern for a child while parents get their affairs in order.” Sadly, many never do.
In an effort to preserve parental rights, children languish in care for years. The common complaint in foster care is “the clock.” Though a child is legally eligible for adoption after roughly two years in care, drug-abusing parents can play out the clock, attend a few recovery meetings, fulfill a requirement or two on the reunification plan — and the clock starts over. Many children age out of the possibility of adoption because the court favors parental rights over children’s attachment needs.
The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights
Given the current capricious approach of many courts, the question to ask is: Just how safe are your parental rights? If the issues at hand are related to your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily. But if the court frames those rights as a matter of “family preservation,” they are nearly carved in stone.
The contrast between how parental rights are viewed, depending on the left-wing bias of courts and state agencies, should disturb everyone. The right of conscientious parents to shape their child’s life is among the most cherished of all human freedoms. That right is increasingly threatened, as the militancy of transgender ideology invades the private realm of parent and child.
How safe are your parental rights then? Only as safe as the left wants them to be.
Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Monday morning, I swept through the marbled halls of the Supreme Court of the United States, off First Street NE here in the nation’s capital, to enter the highest room of jurisprudence in the land. The sound of my footsteps muffled atop thick carpeting, the blinds on the massive windows mostly drawn and the room packed with rows upon rows of chairs, slowly filling.
A daughter of India who grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, little could I know that over the next four-and-a-half-hours I would ride an emotional rollercoaster as three so-called “liberal” justices and four attorneys overlooked, erased, and tried to gaslight the truth of Asian Americans who face discrimination — or as the ideologues call it, “systemic racism” — in admissions to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
If not for fierce questioning from the court’s six conservative justices and the arguments of two attorneys for the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, Asian Americans would have been erased in the courtroom that day — much as they have been nationwide by “equity warriors” for whom we are an inconvenient minority. Instead, this is my prediction for the rulings, expected next year: a 6-2 victory by Asian American families and students over Harvard and a 6-3 win over the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Born in India, I was on an emotional roller coaster today in the Supreme Court, listening to 3 justices + 4 lawyers try to gaslight America on the reality of anti-Asian racism. Fortunately, 4 justices argued fiercely. My bet: 6-2, Harvard loses. 6-3 UNC loses. America wins 💯 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/IsQ1yK8Ny1
In 332 pages of court transcripts, “diversity” was referenced 202 times, most of the time by the universities’ lawyers and the three justices that supported them, with “Asian” mentioned only 81 times. The universities’ lawyers, the sympathetic U.S. solicitor general, and the three like-minded justices spoke many times about supporting “students of color,” “minorities” and “diversity” but most often excluded Asian Americans. Ironically, the three liberal justices waxed eloquently about “diversity” without once noting the obvious: There wasn’t an Asian American justice beside them.
In the most defining moment of the day, Harvard’s attorney, Seth Waxman, tried to downplay “race” as a “determinative factor” in admissions to Harvard, noting that it was just like, “you know,” being “an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Ratcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.”
Chief Justice John Roberts shot that comparison down immediately.
“Yeah. We did not fight a civil war about oboe players,” he said firmly.
“I—,” Waxman tried to interrupt.
Roberts continued, undeterred. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of — of considerable concern.”
Across the country, parents listening to the proceedings laughed and cheered. The day before, many of those parents, with names like Jack Ouyang, Wai Wah Chin, Eva Guo, Suparna Dutta, Yuyan Zhou, and Harry Jackson, stood on the steps of the Supreme Court at an “Equal Education Rights for All” rally with signs promoting simple ideas. “Stop Anti-Asian Discrimination.” “Diversity ≠ Skin Color.” Together, over the past years, we had become accidental activists in the war on merit and Asian American students.
Since late August, parents had been meeting at 9 p.m. on Thursday nights over Zoom to ready for the rally, trading messages through the week on WeChat, Telegram, and Signal. CNN and Fox News featured their voices in their coverage of the case. Chinese-language newspapers put news of the rally on their front pages. But inside the Supreme Court, to the lawyers for the universities and the three justices who supported them, it felt as if we were invisible.
‘Gas lighters’
I’d first visited the nation’s capital decades ago as an 18-year-old intern in the summer of 1983, but this was my first time in the Supreme Court hearing room. It is about the size of a soccer field. At 57, I had to be a witness for the approximately 22 million Asian Americans living in the United States, about one of every 15 people, most hailing from 19 countries and the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center.
In response to a K-12 education system that has largely failed black and Hispanic students, officials at Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill have allegedly rigged their admissions processes with “race-conscious” standards that discriminate against Asian American students to boost the number of black, Hispanic, and other “underrepresented minorities,” known today as “URMs.”
I brought two books into the Supreme Court with me: the big red book, “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,” and the yearbook for the class of 2021 from my son’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia, a magnet school known as “TJ,” where about 70 percent of the students are Asian American.
The yearbook theme was simple, “We know exactly how you feel.” Unfortunately, activists for the tenets of critical race theory don’t even pretend to want to know how we feel, and I witnessed this tone-deaf callousness from the three activist justices: Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In my notebook, I penned their three names under “Gas Lighters.”
These three justices infused their questions, comments, and analysis with the politics and worldview of critical race theory, the ideology that teaches that society’s injustices must be corrected through the lens of race. Kagan wondered whether “people who have been kicked in the teeth by our society for centuries” can get a “thumb on the scale” instead of “white men.” She spoke about “our color blindness, whatever that means, because our society is not color blind in its effects.” Sotomayor punctuated many a question with “correct?” For example, she said schools are working to examine the “whole” student as “equals” — “correct?”
Quickly, Kagan found a kindred spirit in the country’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who spoke so sing-song it took a careful ear to recognize the disturbing worldview of critical race theory in her words. To the plaintiff’s argument on the “color-blind interpretation of the Constitution,” she said, “There’s nothing in history to support that.”
Under “Fierce Against Racism,” I wrote four names: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Under “Sympathetic” to the plaintiffs, I penned two names: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Photo/Asra Nomani
Prophets of critical race theory, such as author Ibram X. Kendi, have spread a toxic, unbelievable, and illiberal idea: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Asian American students have been their sacrificial lambs in their racial experiment, with K-12 schools like TJ in the crosshairs of their war on merit.
In December 2020, after the killing of George Floyd turned educrats into activists, the 12-0 Democratic school board in Fairfax County, Virginia, eliminated the merit-based admissions tests to the school and replaced them with a “holistic” process that would increase the number of black, Hispanic, and other “URM” students, assigning “bonus points” to racially engineer the student body. A group we started, Coalition for TJ, filed a lawsuit with attorneys from a public-interest nonprofit, Pacific Legal Foundation.
In early 2022, a federal judge ruled that the new admissions process is “blatantly unconstitutional,” but the “UnFairfax” school board, as we like to call it, is appealing the case, and it will likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court as early as fall 2023.
‘Asian’ Does Not Appear
On Monday, to hear the three “Gas Lighters” and the university’s lawyers, you wouldn’t have even known they were weighing the effect of systemic racism against Asian Americans. In fact, at one point, Alito turned to David Hinojosa, an attorney representing current and former students at UNC-Chapel Hill supporting race in admissions and said: “I was struck by the fact that the word ‘Asian’ does not appear one time in your brief. Yet Asians have been subject to de jure segregation. They have been subjected to many forms of mistreatment and discrimination, including internment.”
Like a magician, Hinojosa said there was no mention of “Asian” in his brief because, voila, a “record” of discrimination against Asian Americans “actually doesn’t exist.” He instructed the court to take it up with Harvard.
When Alito pressed the Harvard attorney, Waxman, on why Asian American students received a lower “personal score” than other students on character traits, including “integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy,” the Harvard lawyer did a tap-dance, saying the “syllogism” of the question was “wrong,” then asserted that the personal score difference is a “slight numerical disparity” that doesn’t reveal any “evidence of discrimination in admissions outcomes against Asian Americans,” because it’s “simply a number” that “fades into the background.”
Simply a number.
“They think we’re that stupid.”
Alito pounced with the obvious question: “If it doesn’t matter, why do you do it?” Waxman dismissed the “personal score” as a “matter of triage” for overwhelmed admissions officers.
What about “affinity groups,” the controversial new tool for separating and segregating students in housing, discussion groups, and elsewhere in schools by race and other identity markers, asked Justice Amy Coney Barrett? Oh, they have “incredible benefits,” gushed Hinojosa.
Photo/Asra Nomani
In the 1920s, Harvard President Lawrence Lowell discriminated in admissions against another group: Jewish students, because he believed there was a “Jew problem” with the overrepresentation of Jewish students at the school. In gaslighting back then, Harvard officials said they weren’t discriminating against Jewish students but just putting in place a “holistic” admissions process.
Now, in his closing remarks, Cameron Norris, an attorney for Students for Fair Admissions, said, “Harvard thankfully does say it is ashamed of its history of Jewish discrimination. I hope someday it says the same about how it’s treating Asians.”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Nomani writes a regular newsletter, Asra InvestigatesAsra Investigates, with breaking news and analysis on the frontlines of culture and politics. She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at the Independent Women’s Network and a cofounder of the Coalition for TJ, a grassroots parent group, and of the Pearl Project, an investigative reporting initiative. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com and @AsraNomani.
From coast to coast, transgender activists are working to push chemical castration and genital mutilation on minors at all costs. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 into law, blocking officials from enforcing other states’ laws that hinder access to transgender medical procedures and drugs for minors.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Pride Liberation Project (PLP) is organizing resources to help confused minors whose parents are not supportive of their gender and/or sexual identity experimentation to run away from their homes to stay with a “queer-friendly” adult. The potential for predatory behavior with this initiative is alarming.
PLP leader, Aaryan Rawal, now a college student, does not seem to be concerned about the risks of sending confused children into strangers’ houses “within 1-2 days” of their separation from their families. He sent messages to PLP members, mostly high school and middle school students, that the organization could offer rides and money promptly.
As reported by Asra Nomani, on July 15, 2022, Rawal wrote on Discord, “We can pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if you need to leave immediately. … In the short term, we can provide a couple of hundred dollars … through Venmo or Zelle.” For the longer term, he offers more money. “We can also set up a dedicated ActBlue fundraising page for you and get allies to donate. In the past, this has led to thousands of dollars in donations. All of this money is yours.”
At best, PLP is helping children run away from home. But it seems there is a sinister drive behind this network. Children are among our society’s most vulnerable, and those confused and separated from their parents are ripe prey. It is suspicious that identity disagreements within families, notably during this era of the social contagion of gender dysphoria and confusion — particularly among middle schoolers, would ever justify removing children from their families and placing them with strangers. Would these same actors argue that we take away a 13-year-old conservative girl from her liberal parents who refuse to affirm her political identity and place her with a random identity-affirming adult male stranger?
This is illegal and absurd. Saying so is common sense, not bigotry, as members of groups like PLP and Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Pride suggest on social media. These groups are manipulating the political landscape to obliterate parental rights and push transgenderism on children — even in elementary schools.
On its website, PLP boasts that it has advocated for the books “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” to remain in public school libraries. Its members have promoted compelled speech (via mandatory pronouns). Multiple PLP members spoke at a July 2022 Fairfax County School Board meeting in favor of proposed changes to the Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum that include lessons on transgender transitioning as early as fourth grade and co-ed FLE instruction to make students who identify as transgender feel more comfortable.
Arguably not by coincidence, the students who spoke at the board meeting all carried the same message: “Queer” students feel frightened and depressed. The PLP speakers repeatedly cited 50 percent as the community’s depression rate and suggested that changes to the FLE curriculum would help them feel supported. Their messages were so consistent, in fact, it would not be surprising if someone else wrote them.
On Sept. 25, 2022, Rawal sent PLP members detailed talking points and provided media training for the student walkout that occurred later that month. The walkout was meant to object to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to preserve parental rights and roll back Ralph Northam’s heavily politicized “Model Transgender Policies.” Rawal encouraged students to say that these efforts would “hurt Queer students,” “erase [their] existence,” and cause depression and potentially suicide.
In Q&A forums with PLP walk-out participants, Rawal further told a student who was not permitted to hang flyers in the school to proceed. “My honest response is do it anyway. Admin won’t penalize over flyers distributed manually…” Rawal also offered reimbursements of up to $25 for walkout expenses. When he realized he needed megaphones for the walkout and nearby stores were sold out of them, he wrote “f—, let me dm rigby.” Notably, Robert Rigby, a retired teacher and co-chair of FCPS Pride appears to be helping to organize and support PLP initiatives as well.
Adults organizing groups such as PLP are providing resources to help children run away from home. These minors, who are not permitted by law to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, could potentially travel to California — now a so-called “gender-affirming” sanctuary state — to obtain permanent and irreversible surgical procedures, and/or medication, without their parents’ consent.
These transgender ideology pushers are not simply accepting, they are aggressive in encouraging medical experimentation among children and keeping parents in the dark. Permanently scarring children behind a parent’s back is a particular kind of evil we will, hopefully, look back on in disbelief.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother, author, and member of the Independent Women’s Network.
Children in America are in need of protection now more than ever. The leftist tide is coming at them in full force, pushing a radically sexualized agenda on minors both mentally and physically, robbing them of their innocence and their childhood. That’s why legislators like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., are introducing legislation to protect children from dangerous experimental procedures such as puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and ill-named “gender-affirming” surgeries.
Instead of being allowed to enjoy the innocence of childhood, develop imagination, cultivate friendships, develop curiosity, and enjoy the satisfaction of learning facts, figures, and formulas, children are assaulted with sexualized content fueled by a radical agenda. If you think it’s not having an effect, just look at a sampling from Maryland schools. According to school surveys in Montgomery county, over the last two years, the number of students identifying as gender nonconforming has increased by 582 percent. This survey includes children in elementary school.
At the very least, parents should be fully aware of any and all exposure their children have to sexualized content, and they have the primary right to know of any confusion or distress their children may be experiencing in school. Yet somehow it is becoming more to push policies to keep parents in the dark. Most schools cannot even prescribe aspirin to a child without parental consent, yet they see no issue with socially transitioning a minor without parental involvement. The disparity gives every cause for concern.
And when the parents do know about their child’s gender confusion, the agenda becomes even more radical, pushing parents to “affirm” their child’s choices to extreme degrees. Whether you embrace the ideology, no amount of parental concern can justify even the slightest delay in transitioning a child.
Compliance, Not Concern
One lesbian couple had already transitioned their eldest son when their second boy started asking to be called a girl. Unlike their first child, who had preferred playing with girls and had a gentler side, the younger acted like a typical boy, so his mother suspected that he was simply mirroring his older sibling’s behavior. But what happened when she voiced her concerns to a gender therapist?
“She [their gender therapist] expressed that it was transphobic to believe there was anything wrong with our younger son wanting to be like his older transgender sibling. When I pushed back, and asserted that I was not yet convinced our younger son was transgender, she told me that if I did not change his pronouns and honor his identity, he could develop an attachment disorder,” the mom recalls.
Instead of addressing the mother’s fears, the therapist merely preyed on them further.
It’s horrible to emotionally blackmail loving parents while blatantly ignoring their genuine concerns, but this is mild compared to the psychological manipulation that’s been waged on other parents, who have been told “comply or they die,” with doctors insisting that any questioning of their child’s feelings will result in further depression and suicide.
Meanwhile, these “experts” are not basing their methods in science at all.
So Much for Science
According to the recent Heritage report, “Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones, & Youth Suicide” by Dr. Jay Greene, stats show that the exact opposite may be the case. He writes, “Starting in 2010, when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became widely available, elevated suicide rates in states where minors can more easily access those medical interventions became observable.”
That’s right, here it seems that access to these “life-saving drugs” has actually increased suicide rates. The fact is, there is no golden standard study proving the “lifesaving” claims of transition, yet left-wing politicians insist that it is the only path forward.
There isproof that these drugs are dangerous on their own, and there is no certifiable data proving the long-term harmlessness of puberty-blocking drugs and wrong-sex hormones, despite leftist claims to the contrary.
This isn’t health care. This isn’t science. We need to stop using children to wage ideological warfare, and we must stop the progressive tide before every child pays the price.
A Reason for Hope
Rep. Taylor Green is trying to do just that. She recently released the Protect Children’s Innocence Act (H.R.8731), which, if passed, will charge anyone who knowingly performs “gender-affirming care” — including the administering of puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones — with a class C felony.
The bill will prohibit the federal taxpayer funding of so-called gender-affirming care, forbid institutions of higher education from providing instructions on such care, and will prevent aliens who have performed such procedures from receiving a visa. If they already have a visa, they will be eligible for deportation. It is designed to protect children from abusive experimental procedures from every angle.
Victims of surgery who realize their mistake and choose to detransition have recourse to the courts through a private right of action levied against anyone who took an active part in their transition, including administering puberty blockers and performing surgeries. There is no statute of limitations, ensuring that anyone involved in destroying a child’s life will be held accountable in perpetuity.
This bill also looks out for those victims who have already suffered at the hands of misleading therapists, doctors, and propaganda. While it does ban transition attempts on minors, it explicitly states that it in no way prohibits doctors from helping patients handle complications due to those interventions, regardless of whether they were received illegally. In every aspect, this bill holds the health of these patients as its primary object, not monetary benefits and soul-sucking propaganda.
Fighting on defense in the culture isn’t enough. We’re losing — more and more children are being subjected to these horrific “treatments” every single day. We need to fight back legislatively. We need to protect the innocence of children and demand justice for those who have already been deprived of that privilege. If the battleground is in our backyard, this bill gives us the chance to push back enemy lines, to establish a first line of defense that will allow our children the space they need to grow and thrive.
The character of our country will be determined by whether we are willing to defend our innocents. Children being mutilated and castrated openly is the moral issue of our time. Will we stand up and fight? Or will we let these evil monsters continue to wreak havoc on the helpless?
Sandra Kirby is the Government Affairs Manager at American Principles Project. Follow her on Twitter @SandraK1776.
The 2021-2022 school year is coming to a close. As usual, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are looking over the past year to see what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve.
This year, the educational establishment’s report card is even worse than usual. It has failed to address the learning losses due to unnecessary Covid lockdowns and inspired parental uproar over critical race theory and LGBT advocacy in the classroom. It has suffered a surprising electoral defeat in Virginia and a not-so-surprising legislative setback in Florida, as well as an unprecedented number of school board recall elections. Most damaging of all, close to 2 million students have abandoned government schooling for greener (not to mention safer) pastures.
Faced with such massive public losses, one might think a little self-reflection would be in order. Instead, the educrats, with the help of their friends in the legacy media, have decided to address these serious problems by gaslighting the American public.
Avoiding Accountability at All Costs
The most recent example of this deception comes from the continuing saga of the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) effort last fall to smear parents who complain at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” The now infamous letter and even more infamous Department of Justice memo that followed it represent the depths to which the educational establishment was willing to sink to protect itself from accountability to the families it theoretically serves.
A recently completed independent review exonerated the NSBA’s board from culpability in this fiasco, fixing the blame for “both the ‘origin and substance of the letter’” on former Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven. The review also found that while unnamed members of the Biden administration “collaborated” with Slaven, it “did not find direct or indirect evidence suggesting the administration requested the letter.”
In an effort to “clear the record,” Slaven recorded an interview last week with Fox News Digital, where he whined about being “betrayed” and “completely backstabbed” by the organization that he led. He also admitted that he disagreed with the NSBA board’s futile efforts to walk back the language of the letter, claiming that “it drenched an already inflamed and out-of-control narrative with another helping of gasoline.”
Neither Slaven nor the NSBA’s announcement bothered to address the elephant in the room: that the
organization sees engaged parents and community members who attend school board meetings as potential threats that need to be watched and possibly prosecuted by federal authorities. When pressed about this during the interview, Slaven lamely defended the substance of the letter he penned by saying, “The word ‘parents’ is not in the letter anywhere,” despite the examples cited in the letter’s footnotes.
The NSBA has offered vague platitudes about “advocat[ing] for local control” and being “committed to parent engagement” as it pursues its “nonpartisan” goals. These attempts to rewrite history come as 25 state school boards have chosen“to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.”
Meanwhile, an FBI whistleblower has claimed that “counterterrorism tools” were indeed used against parents in accordance with the DOJ’s memo. It remains unclear whether these efforts continue presently despite the NSBA’s repudiation of the letter and its alleged author.
Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire
Of course, the left-wing corporate media have gone all in to support educrats’ efforts to deceive the public into believing they remain the valiant heroes in this ongoing drama. Lately, they’ve decided to focus their attacks on a favorite target of the left: homeschooling families.
This is hardly surprising, as the number of these families at least doubled during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. What’s more, that number has been largely maintained despite schools re-opening in the fall of 2021.
On Mother’s Day, Keith Olbermann fired an opening salvo in this new campaign against educational choice when he tweeted that a homeschooling mom was “ruin[ing] the lives of five innocent children.” Not to be outdone, MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler initiated a preemptive strike against Kirk Cameron’s upcoming documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” by disingenuously linking homeschooling not just with conservative Christianity, but also with the “segregation academies” of the post-Brown v. Board of Education South.
After grudgingly admitting the recent increase in homeschooling “may [in part] be attributed to Black parents and other diverse groups” who might not otherwise dare to disagree with her leftist party line, Butler ended her hatchet job with a dire warning:
Homeschooling may have greater appeal now because of these debates and the desire for parents to play a big part in their children’s educational life. It may also arise out of pandemic concerns, but parents unfamiliar with the existing networks of homeschooling run the danger of being drawn into Christian conservative networks and theocratic teaching. [Cameron] says that people choosing homeschooling are having an awakening, but the public needs to awaken to the reality that public schools may disappear if people with his extreme beliefs have their way.
The left’s message to parents is loud and clear: Exercise your right to homeschool your kids and you are complicit in the cold-blooded murder of public schooling.
Institutional Suicide
In these efforts, Slaven, Olbermann, Butler, and their comrades studiously deflect from the simple truth: If American government-run schools are dying, it is not a case of murder, but of suicide.
The self-inflicted wounds keep coming despite all the warning signs of the past academic year. Last month, the school district in Kiel, Wis., accused three middle schoolers of sexual harassment for failing to refer to another student by her chosen pronouns. What parent wants to go through that as a consequence of sending his kids to public schools?
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools is planning to adopt a policy to suspend or even expel students who “maliciously misgender” classmates. The vote, originally scheduled for May 26, has been suspiciously delayed until June 16, perhaps so the happy chaos of the last day of school will allow the board to avoid further public scrutiny and outrage.
As kids across the nation start their summer vacations, the battle for their minds and souls rages on. True to form, the educational establishment fights dirty, using cheap manipulation tactics to distract the public from its pursuit of ideological “business as usual.”
Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.
A sign outside a classroom taken in 2016. | REUTERS/Tami Chappell
A group of parents and teachers have sued a Virginia school district over a policy requiring teachers to use the preferred pronouns of trans-identified students. The plaintiffs, whose names have been redacted, filed a lawsuit last week in the Circuit Court of Rockingham County against the leadership of Harrisonburg City Public Schools.
At issue is the school board’s decision to add “gender identity” to the school district’s nondiscrimination policy. The policy forces teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns and withhold information about students’ gender identity from their parents if the student requests they do so. The lawsuit claims the policy “compels teachers to violate their religious convictions about gender and honesty” and “violates parents’ rights by interfering with their ability to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”
“Plaintiffs … are HCPS teachers and parents who object to HCPS’s policy on free-speech, religious-freedom, and parental-rights grounds,” the complaint reads.
“Plaintiffs deeply care about their students and children. They see the growing number of children struggling with gender dysphoria and want those children to experience love and support. But like many, Plaintiffs recognize that a policy of immediate social transition and unquestioning affirmation without parental involvement for every case of gender dysphoria in minors is harmful, not to mention contrary to science.”
The plaintiffs are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal nonprofit that has filed similar litigation against other school districts.
“Public schools should never hide information from or lie to parents about a child’s mental health,” the complaint reads. “And schools should never compel teachers to perpetrate such a deception.”
ADF Senior Counsel Ryan Bangert said in a statement that he believes parents “have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing, care, and education of their children.”
“Teachers and staff cannot willfully hide kids’ mental health information from their parents, especially as some of the decisions children are making at school have potentially life-altering ramifications,” Bangert stated.
“As the clients we represent believe, a teacher’s role is to support, not supplant, the role of the parent.”
HCPS posted a statement on its website stating that the school board “maintains a strong commitment to its inclusivity statement.”
“In specific student situations, the focus is always to foster a team approach that includes and supports the unique needs of the student and family on a case-by-case basis,” stated HCPS.
“We are dismayed that this complaint is coming to us in the form of a lawsuit in lieu of the collaborative approach we invite and take to address specific needs or concerns, an approach that we believe best serves the interests of our students, staff, and families.”
HCPS adopted the policy after the Virginia Department of Education mandated school divisions adopt similar policies to a model policy that it supported during the 2021-2022 school year. Other school districts adopted similar policies. In addition to the HCPS lawsuit, ADF oversees litigation against Loudon County Public Schools in Virginia over a similar measure known as Policy 8040.
According to the Loudon County policy enacted last year, school faculty and staff must use the chosen name and pronouns of a student who identifies as “gender-expansive or transgender.”
“School staff shall, at the request of a student or parent/legal guardian, when using a name or pronoun to address the student, use the name and pronoun that correspond to their consistently asserted gender identity,” read the policy.
“The use of gender-neutral pronouns is appropriate. Inadvertent slips in the use of names or pronouns may occur; however, staff or students who intentionally and persistently refuse to respect a student’s gender identity by using the wrong name and gender pronoun are in violation of this policy.”
Last year, the Loudoun County Schools suspended teacher Tanner Cross after he voiced objection to what at the time was a proposed Policy 8040 during a school board hearing. He said the policy would “damage children” and “defile the holy image of God.” He argued that affirming students’ preferred pronouns is “lying to a child.”
After a judge ordered the school district to reinstate Cross, the school district argued that it had received complaints from students and parents who “expressed fear, hurt and disappointment about coming to school” in light of Cross’ comments. Loudoun County Schools said addressing those concerns was “paramount to the school division’s goal to provide a safe, welcoming and affirming learning environment for all students.”
The Virginia Supreme Court rejected the school district’s appeal of the court’s order to reinstate Cross.
A drag queen performer defended an unapproved high school event that angered parents, who he told to “broaden your horizons.” The drag show was performed at the Ankeny High School in Iowa as a part of the end-of-the-year meeting of the Gay Straight Alliance Club. Students were invited but their parents were not warned beforehand, and no permission slips were signed for the event.
The school issued an apology after videos of the drag show were highlighted by the popular “Libs of TikTok” account on Twitter.
Despite the outrage from parents, one performer told KCCI-TV that they needed to lighten up and he defended the performance.
“To the parents that are accepting, thank you. To the parents that are not, please broaden your horizons,” said Skyler Barning.
“I just want them to realize that while the idea of drag is very taboo, there are places and shows meant for people under the age of 21,” he claimed. “It is not always a sexual act, it can be positive and uplifting with a message behind it as well.”
A senior student who performed as “Vivian Von D” at the drag show also defended the performance in an interview with the Des Moines Register.
“It was meant to be an uplifting environment for those in the (Gay Straight Alliance) who don’t always have all the support they need to get through the struggles in their lives,” said Carson Doss.
The school apologized for the incident in a message on Facebook and said the matter was under investigation.
The Libs of TikTok account forced a town in Indiana to cancel a drag show at an LGBTQ event that was advertised as “family-friendly” by simply posting the advertisement for the show on Twitter.
Here’s the interview with Skyler Barning:
Drag event at Ankeny High School draws criticism from some parents www.youtube.com
Casey Scott, a middle school art teacher, described the incident as simply a discussion that happened in class in which students volunteered details about their sexuality and gender identity. Initial reporting indicated she decided to take the opportunity to provide details about her own sexuality and then asked her students to draw pictures.
In another state, teachers in San Francisco held a Zoom meeting in which the question came up as to how to handle a parent who asks teachers to use her child’s given name and biologically correct pronouns. One teacher answered by conveying an experience in which a parent stated to them, “I know you were using a different name than my child’s given name at birth and the pronouns we gave them, and I’m respectfully asking that you use the name and the pronouns that we gave them.”
The teacher proudly described their defiance saying in return, “So, in my classroom, I will refer to your child by whatever name and pronouns that they’ve told me they feel most comfortable with.”
When I was outed in high school in 1998, I attempted to talk to a sympathetic teacher, who firmly explained this was simply not something she could discuss with me. I even decided to force the issue by bringing it up in class and she, again, firmly instructed me to stop, recognizing that the classroom was not an open forum for me to express my personal issues.
Yet another example, shared by Libs of Tiktok, displays a teacher excitedly announcing the teacher came out to peers, supervisors, and students, showing the teacher dressed up as a woman with a full beard.
Keeping Parents in the Dark
Many teachers now seem to feel an obligation and certainly a sense of entitlement to use their classroom as a group therapy session, viewing students as peers they can share secrets with. Unfortunately, this has grown into its own culture in which teachers position themselves as the sole source of safety for vulnerable students, who are assumed to have no one else to turn to. Many in this generation of teachers see themselves as an underground railroad of sorts to ensure students can freely express their “true selves” without the judgment or restrictions of their parents.
This has been demonstrated by the growing discovery of “Transition Closets,” where schools offer students the opportunity to change into opposite-sex clothing once out of the watchful eye of their parents. The entire system seems to be designed to hide children from their parents and teach them to rely on teachers or other administrators for protection and validation.
The motivation behind all of this can be seen in my own generation’s experience with coming out in the late ’90s and how we felt isolated, abandoned, and stigmatized, often by the adults who were supposed to be teaching us about life. We grew up to become teachers ourselves or professors educating a new generation of teachers, and we wanted to make sure students never experienced that again.
The problem that manifests is the teachers behave as activists rather than educators, seeing their defiance of school policy, parental requests, and even the law as a righteous battle for the greater good. Either arrogantly entitled or defiant, activist teachers seem to believe they have free reign in the classroom.
Casey Scott, for example, argued she was not made aware of any restrictions on topics of discussion with the students, saying, “Not once did anyone from my administration ever explain to me any topic that I was not to allow or discuss … as a first-year art teacher in a reinstated class with zero art teaching experience it is reasonable to expect … a mentor to help oversee and give me guidance but, none was offered?”
But why would she think it would possibly be appropriate to discuss complex ideas of sexuality and gender identity with students aged 13 and under? The pictures drawn by the students were of pride flags, which Scott took a picture of for the news. These photos show a lesbian pride flag, an asexual pride flag, a genderfluid flag, and a rainbow flag, among upwards of 10 crumpled pieces of paper. She herself boasted of going into details of what being pansexual meant for her as an educational exercise.
In the San Francisco school Zoom discussion, a teacher argued, “in my school district, LGBTQ+ students have a bill of rights — and the fourth one is that they have the right to be referred to by their gender pronouns and a name that fits their gender identity.” She went on to brag that when a parent complained about the policy, the school responded saying, “No, sorry. Like, our district-wide rule is that the student determines that, not you.”
When Activism Overruns Curriculum
Teachers and many school administrators have lost sight of their fundamental purpose and their obligation to parents. There was no reason for a teacher to explain that she is pansexual and what that means for her. There is no reason for a teacher to “come out” as though he is a teenager, in order to gain approval and validation from students.
Students are being taught to explicitly lie to their parents, with full school administrative support. Non-LGBT students also feel the impact of this, as they are made to feel excluded from these special activities.
Think for a moment of the situation in which the teacher allegedly encouraged her students to draw pride flags. There are hundreds of flag variations representing the full extent of gender and sexuality, except for 95 percent of the population who are heterosexual and accept their physical sex as fact. Imagine being a middle school student with a teacher who announces she is queer and begins encouraging queer classmates to draw pictures of how special and celebrated they are. Imagine the pressure they must feel to find something, anything, to fit in and be a part of the activity.
Sadly, LGBT organizations support the efforts of these teacher activists and the overwhelming message that all students should explore their potential sexuality and gender identity. GLAAD, for example, explicitly encourages teachers to change their language, ask their students for pronouns, provide LGBT resource materials and openly defend student identities.
The answer to all of this is more transparency for parents and for those parents to be active in their children’s schools. There is no justification for keeping school projects, discussions, or curricula from parents. Parental rights, especially in education, must continue to be a top priority for Republican leaders. The more examples like this that are discovered, the more active we all must become in ensuring children are learning appropriately in school rather than being indoctrinated by left-wing ideologies.
Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of the “Reasonably Gay: Essays and Arguments” series and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently claimed to be “truly shocked” by a poll showing President Biden with a 33 percent approval rating. I was shocked, too — how could his approval rating be that high?
Blow, of course, is surprised at Biden’s unpopularity, and worried that the Democrats are stumbling into a bloodbath in the November midterms. Blow is paid to understand and explain politics and culture to his readers. That he is surprised reveals a lot about the bubble he is in. And his meandering analysis of Democrats’ problems illustrates how the ideology making Democrats unpopular is also preventing them from understanding why they are unpopular.
Blow initially blames Biden — for being too much of a “decent man … sober and straightforward” rather than a “showman.” This is a ludicrous assessment of a politician, who, until age caught up with his tongue, was one of D.C.’s preeminent bloviators. Nonetheless, Blow’s ordinary partisan delusion is less interesting than the ideological blind spots revealed when he turns to genuine sources of Biden’s unpopularity, such as “the fear of crime and the pinch of inflation” and that “Republicans are playing heavily into culture war issues.”
Class and Culture Wars Merge
Although Blow does not seem to realize it, these issues combine to reinforce voters’ disapproval of Biden. Democratic failures on bread and butter issues such as crime and inflation are related to the culture-war radicalism that has captured their party. Twitter, not the blue-collar union hall, is now the heart of the Democratic Party, which is controlled by the educated, urban professional-managerial class, epitomized by woke, union-busting CEOs. This faction has merged the class and culture wars — championing cultural radicalism, entrenching its own economic interests, and neglecting the common good.
The Democrats are the party of wealthy diversity consultants lecturing hourly workers about white privilege and cis-heteropatriarchy while inflation eats away at wages and investment firms buy up homes in the hope of making America a nation of permanent renters. The governing priorities of those running the Democratic Party are sending government money to their clients (from teachers unions to Planned Parenthood) and waging culture war.
Dems Are Fanatical Culture Warriors
And they are fanatical culture warriors. Consider Blow’s complaint that the GOP is “challenging the teaching of Black history and the history of white supremacy in schools, as well as restricting discussions of L.G.B.T. issues and campaigning against trans women and girls competing in sports with other women and girls.” He adds that “Republicans are using white parental fear, particularly the fears of white moms.”
This litany of whines highlights the bubble Blow and his audience at The New York Times are in. Ordinary Americans know the difference between teaching history and teaching poisonous ideology derived from critical race theory. Americans understand that it is unjust for males to compete in women’s sports, and that it is perverse to teach young children about sex and gender ideology. They are angry when educators encourage children to transition, and outraged when they hide it from parents.
Voters have also noticed that the cultural left never stops where it says it will. We were assured that the LGBT movement was about tolerance for consenting adult relationships; now it is about transgender toddlers, child drag queens, and men in girls’ locker rooms. We are also now told that being anti-racist somehow means judging people based on the color of their skin. Blow and other bubbled liberals may be okay with mastectomies for confusedteenage girls, but most Americans are not.
This cultural radicalism erodes Democrats’ ability to govern competently. Sometimes this is the result of neglecting the basic tasks of government in order to prioritize boutique cultural issues, other times it is a direct consequence of ideology, as exemplified in the crime wave resulting from woke prosecutors and defunding the police.
Cushioned from Consequences
In either case, wokeness is an ideology for those who are cushioned from its consequences. Indeed, wokeness is primarily a phenomenon of the college-educated, and especially the well-off; it is a niche, luxury political philosophy that thrives among the privileged and in the shelter of academia.
But though it is often a political liability, there are ways it serves the interests of its adherents. In particular, woke ideology legitimates the rule of the woke over the non-woke, and justifies economic exploitation and socio-political repression. Wokeness claims to reveal the systems of unjust oppression that permeate society; it focuses on race, sex, and gender, and relegates economic class to a second-tier concern. This allows many of the privileged and powerful to claim to be righteous allies of the oppressed without having to sacrifice economic or social power or position. Indeed, many can claim to be oppressed themselves. This is why wokeness tends to focus on BIPoC and LGBT representation in boardrooms and Ivy League campuses, rather than helping the working class.
The Wicked Working Class
Thus, it is to be expected that woke discourse often suggests that the working class (especially working-class whites) have it coming for their sins of racism, sexism, transphobia, and so on — the wicked deserve punishment, not sympathy. This is why pundits such as Blow are so quick to accuse dissenters of racism and bigotry. And it is why the woke left supports oligarchic power in pursuit of its aims, and eagerly uses economic, technological, and cultural power to suppress dissent.
This is why professors are having to submit woke loyalty oaths in the form of diversity statements, and why mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training has become the norm in the corporate world. This is why the left is eager to use social media censorship to suppress “misinformation” — which in many cases is truth that is inconvenient to the regime (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop story).
It is also why the left cannot understand its own failures. They have isolated themselves in a bubble that has drifted so far from reality and the concerns of normal voters that even electoral disaster may not bring them back to Earth. Cocooned in privilege and ideology, they think Biden is doing just fine. But most Americans have had enough of a government that is more committed to transitioning children than to controlling crime and inflation.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The Cultural Research Center (CRC) is out with a new study comparing the number of American parents of children under age 13 who hold a biblical Christian worldview with those who adhere to competing secular alternatives. The results are a damning indictment of Americans’ rejection of or simple indifference to a biblical worldview.
Across all parents of pre-teens, only 2 percent hold a biblical worldview, which is defined as “consistently interpreting and responding to life situations based on biblical principles and teachings.” Those with a biblical worldview believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God containing all moral truths.
Among all respondents, other measured worldviews (such as secular humanism, nihilism, postmodernism, etc.) garnered even fewer adherents. Fully 94 percent subscribed to “a blending of multiple worldviews in which no single life philosophy is dominant.”
The needle scarcely moves for all self-identified Christians (not just pre-teen parents). Only 6 percent of them look at and interpret the world through a biblical lens; that number rises to 21 percent among those attending evangelical Protestant churches.
The fact that the biblical Christian worldview has become so insignificant in the culture should be of concern to all Americans because our country, including its governing principles and legal system, was based on our founders’ biblical worldview.
All around, we see the results of our abandonment of the biblical worldview. According to CRC research, more than half of the population accepts that truth is subjective.
Without objective truth, there is no way to determine what’s real and no moral absolutes to distinguish right from wrong. So we hear the popular “my truth” refrain as the justification for any idea or behavior depending upon what feels right at the time.
Why Worldview Matters
Professor Mikael Stenmark defines worldview as “beliefs, values, and attitudes that … constitute [people’s] basic understanding of (a) who they are, what the world is like, and what their place in it is, (b) what they should do to live a good and meaningful life, and (c) what they can say, know and rationally believe about these things.”
A dividing line between a secular and a biblical worldview is the belief in how the world came to exist. Secularists hold that reality consists entirely of physical matter and forces, which can only be explained through science. For the secularist, the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution explain how all things came to be.
Those with a biblical worldview believe in an all-encompassing divine mind — i.e., God — who rules over and maintains physical matter and forces. The theistic worldview is founded on the core belief that God exists and is the creator of all things.
It is easy to see why the biblical worldview is all but extinct in the culture. Every living generation — baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and many of the silent generation (pre-1945) — has been educated predominantly in a secular or naturalistic worldview based on the prevailing science of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution.
Science Declares God Is Dead
The only “official” science approved to be taught in the primary grades through post-graduate education is the anti-faith naturalistic one. It’s virtually illegal to teach anything that hints at creation science or intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education proudly displays ten major court cases, including a Supreme Court ruling, that essentially ban the teaching of intelligent design.
It’s not just the education system. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski calls the scientific establishment’s approach to intelligent design a “zero-concession policy.”
For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a statement claiming “There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.”
Scientists and post-graduate students who dare to challenge naturalistic-science orthodoxy are subject to professional ridicule, or loss of jobs or research funds. Peer-review journals reject their submissions, as do scientific conferences and meetings.
It’s not in support of science that the establishment defends its official position so vehemently, but to protect its secular worldview. And the American Civil Liberties Union backs them up with legal firepower a detailed statement about why students must be protected against intelligent design at all costs.
Truth Will Come Out
Not all scientists are so didactic. But the “vital few” in control have effectively kept any serious discussion of intelligent design from the rest of the scientific community. However, when they are presented with evidence supporting intelligent design, many discover truth there.
That includes scientists like astronomer Allan Sandage, who studied under Edwin Hubble and continued his work after Hubble died. Sandage’s study of astronomy and astrophysics led him to conclude there is “evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event,” or what he called a “creation event.”
Plenty of members in the scientific community see much to challenge in Darwinian doctrine. More than 1,000 academics and scientists have signed the Dissent from Darwinism petition stating, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
The number of acclaimed scientists who challenge the establishment’s orthodoxy is growing thanks to the work of places like the Discovery Institute, the research arm of the Center for Science and Culture.
Rekindling the Discussion
The education and scientific establishments have become co-conspirators in propagating their secular worldview and banishing the biblical one. But there is hope. Belief in God “as described in the Bible” is still held by a 54 percent majority of Americans, according to a 2022 poll reported by The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd.
Noting that 72 percent of Americans agree the nation’s moral compass is “pointed in the wrong direction,” she writes, “As generations age and the push for secularism and the erasure of faith continues in American establishments such as public schools, younger people are losing spiritual influence and instruction, and with it their faith.”
That is the ultimate goal of our society’s ruling institutions, including government, education, science, medicine, and business. They are determined to wipe out faith by indoctrinating all into their secular worldview using the Big Bang and evolution as the cudgel.
So far, the scientific establishment has been successful in shutting down discussion that the Bible might be true from beginning to end. But continuing research in intelligent design and more scientists who question science’s naturalistic orthodoxy will arm the public with information to support the biblical worldview and loosen the stranglehold of the secular one on our youth and culture.
“Let there be light,” God said in Genesis 1:3. “And there was light.” Jesus said in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” That day isn’t here yet, but we pray it comes quickly.
Pamela Danziger is a market researcher specializing in the study of consumer behavior and motivation. Author of ten books, she shares insights as a senior contributor on Forbes.com. And as a Christian, she is co-founder of Faith Underground. She holds an M.L.S. from University of Maryland and B.A. in English Literature from Penn State.
This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.
Coaxing 10-year-old girls away from their parents, promising a fun and safe environment, and then forcing them to sleep in the same room as grown men is the kind of behavior you’d expect from a sexual predator. It’s child endangerment at best and traumatizing abuse at worst. Yet that’s exactly what California’s Los Alamitos Unified School District forced little girls at a school-organized science camp to do for three nights in San Bernardino, according to outraged parents.
“No parent should feel the way I feel after knowing what could have happened to my daughter,” parent Suzy Johnson told local news. “If I was aware of it and I had initialed something saying this was going to be done at this outdoor science camp, I would have kept my children home.”
When confronted about the sleeping arrangements, the camp’s defense was, “Per California law, we place staff in cabins they identify with,” and the two men refer to themselves as “they/them.”
While the science camp incident is enraging, it’s far from the first or only indication that government schools likely harm children more than they benefit them. Before entrusting their kids to a behemoth that has repeatedly subjected children to abuse, parents should demand proof that schools are trustworthy — and assume they aren’t until proven otherwise.
Public schools’ insane obsession with the transgender agenda has physically endangered young girls before. Just look to Loudoun County, where a boy in a skirt raped a young lady in the women’s bathroom and the school board covered it up to keep the incident from sinking their transgender bathroom policy. What else don’t parents know about?
When these far-left pipe dreams about erasing sex don’t subject kids to physical abuse, they often inflict mental abuse. Even in a red state like Idaho, a report earlier this month found that “School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery” behind her parents’ backs. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation reported.
In Virginia, a public school made kindergarteners sit and listen to a “transgender rights advocate” — a man dressed as a woman who goes by “Sarah” — read them a book about a transgender teen.
In Iowa, a school district used the “Black Lives Matter at School Guiding Principles” to teach kids as young as four years old to “free[] ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle cis-gender privilege,” and “disrupt[] the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”
A school in a small Colorado town outside of Boulder showed elementary students a play about a transgender raven, accompanied by videos like “He, She, and They – What is Gender” and “No More Gender Roles.” The videos include conversations with a gender-confused teddy bear that conclude gender roles are “mean, they are not fun and they are big problems.” One parent of a first-grader reported that, after showing one of the videos, his daughter’s teacher paired kids up to talk about their preferred pronouns.
Leaked audio from a conference of California’s largest teachers union revealed teachers being instructed on how to stalk middle schoolers and coax them into LGBT groups behind their parents’ backs. “Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,” Abigail Shrier reported.
School libraries like the one at Baird Middle School in Massachusetts feature sexually explicit books like “Sex Is A Funny Word” by Cory Silverberg. Not only does the book cover “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation,” its author is a sex shop owner who specifically targets kids.
A Rhode Island mom filed a police report over a local high school’s promotion of a gay porn book to minors in its library. The book “features discussion of gay sexual fantasies and is incredibly graphic, including scenes of gay men having sex and a scene of one man performing oral sex on another.”
These examples are only some of the incidents that have been brought to light — and they merely scratch the surface. Exposing vulnerable children to sexually explicit material and indoctrinating them to question their own identities, often against their parents’ wishes, is nothing less than mental abuse and exploitation.
A Harvard study in 2015 found youth who identified as transgender were at more than double risk for depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and self-harm. Last year, Forbes reported that more than half — 52 percent — “of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020.” Even aside from students’ exposure to the trans agenda, the toxic environment of public schools has tragically been linked to child suicides, which have escalated in recent years.
This isn’t to say every student in the public school system will be tempted to suicide, subject to pornography, placed in danger of sexual assault, or mentally abused. There are wonderful, truth-loving teachers out there who remain in the system to do as much good as they can for children they care deeply about. I know several. But the examples from all across the country, from known crazies in California to small-town red state school districts, should be enough to convince parents to be wary. Especially of what schools don’t tell them.
Nothing should be more paramount for parents than protecting their children. If a stranger offers to babysit your child, you don’t accept the offer with the rationale that your child might be fine. You expect anyone to whom you entrust your child to first prove he is worthy of stewarding your most sacred possession. Public schools are no different, and the repeated instances proving their abuses should drive your trust even further away. Maybe, like many Americans, you don’t feel you have what you think are feasible alternatives. Or maybe your local school district is sheltered from some of the most radical exploitation. But it behooves you to verify that first before betting your child on it.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
The response to Covid-19 has accelerated a growing divide between parents and schools, which is mostly to say between parents and teachers’ unions. From denying students the ability to learn in-person to forced masking to teaching divisive, historically inaccurate curriculum based on critical race theory (CRT), the trend has been to sideline parents from their children’s educations.
In response to this, states are taking action to ensure parents remain the primary decision-makers for their kids. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a parents’ bill of rights in June 2021. Missouri is considering a similar proposal and in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued 11 executive orders on his first day in office, two of which were related to education. Indiana is considering a parents’ bill of rights as part of a push to banish despicable materials that kids shouldn’t be taught.
At the national level, Sen. Josh Hawley has also proposed a Parents’ Bill of Rights, although so far it has not gained any traction. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, now president of Young America’s Foundation, declared “2022 is the Year of the Parent.” In other words, there’s a growing appetite among parents to take a more active role in education, whether through supporting legislation to empower them or taking the initiative to join their local school boards.
On Thursday, January 20, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added Texas to the list of states attempting to tackle the divide when he announced his own Parental Bill of Rights, which will be voted on and perhaps enshrined into Texas’ constitution in January 2023. The initiative consists of seven points clarifying the fact that parents, not school boards or unions, are in charge of their kids’ educations.
In announcing the proposal, Abbott said, “The role of parents is being diminished by government itself across the U.S. Parents are losing a voice when it comes to their children’s education and health matters. Many parents feel powerless to do anything about it. That must end … Under the Parental Bill of Rights, we will amend the Texas Constitution to reinforce that parents are the main decision-makers in all matters involving their children.”
A key point in Texas’ proposed amendment, which could serve as a model starting point for other states reads, “Expand parents’ rights to access course curriculum and all material that is available in any education setting for their student through online posting and other methods so parents know what topics will be taught.” While Texas parents can currently get those materials, it requires an information request rather than the click of a mouse.
Submitting an information request is an unnecessary burden, particularly in an age in which schools are teaching children to be racists, encouraging them to be climate change alarmists, and pushing ludicrous and dangerous ideas about changing your sex or being “two-spirit.” Granted, two of those occurrences are from California, a state parents should just move away from rather than attempt to reform.
Even in Texas, though, there are leftist salvos in the culture war. Just last October, a mom in Keller, who with her husband had moved their family from California to avoid such things, discovered their new town’s library was offering a book featuring graphic depictions of oral sex. Parents in Leander, a town north of Austin and part of its greater metropolitan area, also discovered books with depictions and illustrations they don’t want their children to have access to without their permission.
While all these initiatives are worthy ideas, and Abbott’s proposal is the strongest yet, the jury is still out on whether they will resolve the issues parents are seeing with schools.
For starters, parental bills of rights require parents to actually be involved, which doesn’t always happen, even in the age of Zoom schooling. As a result, these various bills, amendments, and executive orders could result in nothing more than “won’t somebody please think of the children” activity. As the great men’s basketball coach, known for also educating his players, John Wooden said, “Never mistake activity for achievement.”
Elected officials such as Abbott, DeSantis, and Youngkin may be leading the nation on this front, but they’re doing so in response to their constituents. Youngkin’s victory was likely sealed, in fact, when his opponent Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Given that Youngkin’s implicit message is “Stop messing with our kids, you freaks!,” the tide on parents shipping their kids off to school and hoping for the best seems to be turning.
Parents’ bills of rights could still turn out to be gimmicks, an activity that doesn’t lead to achievement, but our kids’ educations are not the government’s job. But at least for those of us who do send our kids to government-run or -funded schools, such measures offer us a way to take more charge and ensure that we approve of what’s being taught in the classroom and offer recourse for times when we have legitimate criticisms.
The work is still up to us parents, but governors and legislatures can give us the tools we need to do that work more effectively.
Richard Cromwell is a writer and senior contributor at The Federalist. He lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife, three daughters, and two crazy dogs. Co-host of the podcast Coffee & Cochon, you can find him on Facebook and Twitter, though you should probably avoid using social media.
For almost as long as Covid-19’s been around, parent anger at local school boards over this or that issue has been a reoccurring major news story. We’ve all seen the viral social media videos and Facebook posts of parents skewering their local elected school boards over critical race theory, unscientific and abusive mask mandates, maddening repeat quarantines of healthy children, and other educational corruption that wrecks children’s ability to learn.
We’ve also seen those viral videos have little effect on what the school board or state board of education subsequently decides. So parents have filed lawsuits and are mounting primary and general election challenges, all of which are great and a healthy part of self-government.
What these strategies don’t do is provide immediate relief to children, whom parents claim are being abused, taught racism, and denied their right to an education. They require children to continue to be abused at least until the next election cycle or until three or five or more years when lawsuits finally reach the highest court that will hear them. That’s a third of a child’s education years.
These strategies also are predicated on the assumption that the people who have created these outrageously irrational and abusive school climates should continue to be trusted to run schools. The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity.
If you can’t trust a principal or superintendent to keep teachers from teaching racism and to accurately assess children’s needs and vulnerabilities through Covid even though the data on that is plentiful and clear, how can you trust any other of such persons’ judgment calls?
More than being restrained by a lucky court order merely from putting toddlers in masks, a person whose judgment is so corrupt shouldn’t be making any decisions about children. A person who puts a toddler in a mask, or allows teachers to shame children based on their skin color, cannot be trusted to do just about anything else important and needs to find a new and more productive line of work. Errors this bad are completely disqualifying, and they will not be rectified by merely changing a few surface policies such as the quarantining of healthy kids.
The fact that parents keep their children in schools they charge are teaching racism or delaying crucial development with Covid irrationality gives the schools all they need to keep ignoring the parents. Parents are saying one thing while doing another. They are voting with their feet, and their feet are voting for what they themselves acknowledge is oppression.
So it’s no surprise that school boards, principals, and other entities disregard what the parents say. What the parents say has no, or no immediate, enforcement. And therefore it really isn’t credible. No wonder the school districts don’t take them seriously.
If the parents wanted to be truly effective — as well as truly honest — they would pull their children from schools en masse until problems of such serious magnitude were resolved favorably. Sickouts and mass protests are highly effective forms of warfare on children waged by teachers unions all the time. But parents so far haven’t responded in kind.
Why is that? Why are parents all bark and no bite with their school complaints? Possibly they don’t know how to be effective. And possibly, many aren’t willing to make the big sacrifices required to enforce their beliefs. They can see that something very serious is wrong, but they aren’t willing or able to fix it. They’re still waiting on others to fix things for them.
They, and their children, will wait a very long time for that. They will certainly wait long past Covidtide. And that’s why public schools are as bad as they are — the people who are supposed to hold them accountable refuse to do exactly that even while claiming to.
In the end, schools and parents are basically fighting over something underneath all these disputes that almost nobody mentions: money. Schools get public education money, not parents. It gives them the power to abuse children while parents complain yet keep putting that mask on their kindergartener every single day, even after he throws up in it at school or it prevents him from being able to read or speak properly.
School boards don’t care about complaints. They care about money. As long as they have it, and parents don’t take it, schools will continue to do whatever they want to children. And American children will continue to be unhappy, uneducated, and unprepared for life while everyone pretends it’s someone else’s fault.
It’s clear that American parents have a codependent relationship with the schools they claim to despise. They are in fact enabling the very abuse they complain about. So while it is entirely legitimate to go yell at school boards and vote bad people out of office, it’s also time for parents to engage in some critical thinking about their own choices that enable this situation. As long as public schools continue to get money no matter what they do, this situation will continue, no matter how many uncomfortable meetings and lawsuits parents instigate.
If state legislatures do not yank money from America’s abusive public school systems, parents must yank their kids. Trust, me, it will work. It might already be happening.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Parents in Leon County, Florida, are suing the school district for holding a meeting with their teenage daughter about her chosen gender identity without their knowledge or consent. The parents have warned that the district’s LGBT policies create a “wedge” between students and their parents.
January and Jeffrey Littlejohn filed a lawsuit against the school board, Superintendent of Schools Rocky Hanna and Assistant Superintendent, Equity Officer and Title IX Compliance Coordinator Kathleen Rodgers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida on Oct. 18.
In the lawsuit, the Littlejohns accuse the defendants of violating their substantive due process right to direct the education and upbringing of their children under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and other rights guaranteed to them by state and federal law by excluding them from a meeting with school officials discussing their 13-year-old daughter’s gender identity.
Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, a legal organization created two-and-a-half years ago “specifically to stand with and help parents who are in some way or the other … seeking to protect the well-being … of their child from gender identity ideology,” is one of the attorneys representing the Littlejohns in the litigation.
In an interview with The Christian Post, January Littlejohn and Broyles elaborated on the lawsuit and the events that led up to it.
Littlejohn explained that her daughter, who is now a high school student, began undergoing treatment for gender confusion in the summer before the start of the 2020-’21 school year. She attributed her daughter’s gender confusion to peer pressure from her “friend group because three other children in that same friend group had come out as nonbinary or transgender within the previous six months.”
While Littlejohn told one of her daughter’s teachers at Deer Lake Middle School that she was “seeking mental health counseling and she was experiencing distress that we weren’t affirming her at home because we didn’t feel like it was in her best interest,” she did not expect the school to begin referring to her daughter using they/them pronouns and give her the option to sleep in the same quarters as her male classmates on an overnight school field trip.
Littlejohn only found out that the school had taken such action because her daughter revealed to her that she’d had a meeting about her “nickname,” with the concerned parent telling CP that “that’s kind of what we refer to it as.”
She said her daughter then asked, ‘“isn’t it funny that they asked me what restroom I wanted to use?”’
“My daughter has ADHD … and so to her, this seemed like the silliest thing in the world that they asked her which restroom she preferred to use. That was my first indication that the school had met with her without … notifying my husband or myself,” she said.
“I immediately called her guidance counselor. The guidance counselor said she needed to call me back. She called me back with the assistant principal on the line. So right then and there, I knew something … felt different about the situation because I had spoken to the guidance counselor multiple times in the past because of my daughter’s 504 plan … for her ADHD.”
Littlejohn accused the school of “colluding with my daughter to deceive us so that we would never have known she was going by an alternate name.”
The concerned mother also insisted that she “absolutely should have been at that meeting” and expressed disbelief that the school that she volunteered at did not partner with them. “I was volunteer of the year at that school. It wasn’t like I was an unknown parent.”
Littlejohn recalled the detrimental impact of the school’s decision to hold meetings with her daughter about her gender identity confusion without her knowledge or consent, saying: “It created a huge wedge between our daughter and us, as her parents. We have worked very hard over the past year-and-a-half to stabilize the situation through counseling, and I do feel like she’s on a better path at this time.”
Broyles told CP that the purpose of the lawsuit was to get the school district to “rescind the guidance … that was in place that … basically instructed school officials not to inform parents when a child begins to indicate a transgender or LGBTQ+ identity.” The attorney expressed particular concern that the guidance implied that “outing a student to their parents could be dangerous to a student’s well-being.”
“Every time I think about this lawsuit, it really hits me: The district guidance had the message to parents that you don’t have the best interests of your child in mind. It sends the message that children need to … be protected from parents rather than by parents, and that is an earth-shattering message that cannot stand,” Broyles asserted.
Specifically, the guidance, part of the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide,” warned that “Outing a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the [student’s] health and well-being” because “some students are not able to be out at home because their parents are unaccepting of LGBTQ+ people out.”
The guidance maintains that “as many as 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+, many of whom have been rejected by their families for being LGBTQ+,” suggesting that “outing students to their parents can literally make them homeless.”
“We are seeking that guidance to be permanently removed and replaced with new guidance that complies with the Parents’ Bill of Rights there in Florida as well as the Florida and United States Constitution that honors the parents’ right to make decisions for their children,” Broyles added. “It’s really important to recognize that affirming a child’s discordant gender identity … involves a significant mental health decision that affects the well-being of children … and with potentially lifelong consequences.”
The lawsuit, as summarized by Broyles, is asking the school district to implement new guidance requiring school officials to notify parents whenever their child “expresses gender discordance, gender confusion, a different identity other than their physical, biological sex” and “new policies that provide public notice and a public hearing regarding the new guidance through the school board.” Additionally, the Littlejohns are seeking “some sort of monetary damages for the … pain and suffering and … the impacts this has had on their family.”
Broyles stressed that the situation facing the Littlejohns is not unique: “This violation of parental rights is driving a wedge between parents and their children by school officials. … It affects parents … all throughout the political spectrum on both political parties or independents, whether it’s Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics. … We’ve spoken to almost virtually every stripe of parent.”
The attorney maintained that the Child and Parental Rights Campaign is working on several similar cases: “We hear almost weekly from parents who have … something similar happening to them and their children.”
“This same guidance I described to you is present on the websites of at least 11 other school districts throughout Florida,” Broyles said. She further noted that the “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Student Support Plan” included in the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide” is also on the ACLU’s website.
“A lot of these documents are already out there and school boards, based on what I’ve been told, simply adopt those and put their name on them,” Broyles added.
“That’s why there seems to be the exact same guidance in multiple counties in the state of Florida and all over the country in all 50 states.”
Littlejohn told CP that she’s aware of other parents in Leon County that have found themselves in the same situation as herself.
“A lot of the parents are really scared to speak out or they don’t feel like they can speak out because it would jeopardize the very fragile relationship they have with their child who’s experiencing distress related to their gender.” She added that she speaks to other families “almost weekly to try to help them understand the situation at hand and help them get resources.”
She also pushed back on the claim that the school was conducting a “benign intervention”: “It’s the first step toward medical transitioning, which is why it is so imperative that parents be included [in] any discussion with their child that could impact the short-term and long-term mental and physical well-being of their child, whether it’s this issue or any issue. So fundamentally, this is about parental rights and what the schools can and cannot do … without their permission.”
Littlejohn emphasized that despite the harm this experience has caused to her and her family, “it’s made our faith grow” as Christians. She seconded Broyles’ assertion that “this issue affects all kinds of families” and “people of all faiths including atheists.”
In the time since officials at Deer Lake Middle School first met with Littlejohn’s daughter to discuss her gender identity, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the Parents’ Bill of Rights into law. The measure mandates that “important information relating to a child should not be withheld, either inadvertently or purposely, from his or her parent, including information relating to the minor child’s health, well-being, and education, while the minor child is in the custody of the school district.”
Additionally, the law directs school districts to work with parents, teachers and administrators to “develop and adopt a policy to promote parental involvement in the public school system.”
Superintendent Hanna reacted to the Littlejohns’ lawsuit in a statement to news outlet WCTV: “We certainly want to include parents, and with the Parental Bill of Rights, I understand and respect that, but we also have to respect the rights of the individuals, safety of the children we care for each and every day” because “while the children are under our care we act in loco parentis, on behalf of a parent while they’re under our care.”
The lawsuit follows a year of unsuccessful efforts to convince the school district to change its policy. Littlejohn insisted that “We tried to do this without filing a lawsuit, which was never our intention.”
While the complaint mentions that the district removed the guide from the publicly accessible portion of its website, it alleges that the district did not comply with the Littlejohns’ request to “publish on the Website a written statement that parents would be notified when their child/children express a discordant gender identity and included in meetings or discussions with their child/children regarding their gender identity.”
The complaint contends that “there is no indication on the website or otherwise that the Guide has been rescinded, only a notation that it is being revised.” Additionally, it states that “no revised guidance regarding parental notification has been published or provided to Plaintiffs.” The website of the Leon County Schools’ Equity and Diversity Department has a section devoted to the LCS LGBTQ+ Support Guide, which informs visitors that “[the] Guide is currently being reviewed and is under revision.”
The lawsuit against Leon County Schools comes at a time when parents have expressed an increasing amount of unease with some of the material their children are exposed to in school. In recent weeks, outraged parents and community members in several states have descended on school board meetings to condemn the inclusion of sexually explicit material in books available to students in school libraries and writing prompts in a textbook used in a college-level English class.
Parents of students in the Scottsdale Unified School District were shocked to discover that a school board member had secretly compiled a dossier detailing parents who opposed critical race theory. The dossier was compiled on Google Drive and contained a list of parents who objected to teachings about CRT; it included photographs of both the parents and their children.
Parents who had been calling for the recall of Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg are now demanding he resign
over the secret dossier, to which he had access.
“I am calling for the immediate resignation of our board president Jann-Michael Greenburg,” said Amy Carney, a mother of six, who is now running for a seat on the Scottsdale Governing Board.“We cannot allow anyone in a leadership position to secretly compile personal documents and information on moms and dads who have dared speak out publicly or on social media about their grievances with the district,” she added.
The dossier included a trove of information on 47 parents, including home addresses, phone numbers, mortgage data, traffic tickets, family members, and social security numbers.
One of the videos on the drive showed Greenburg’s father wearing a bodycam before going out to record video of the parents.
The dossier was discovered when Greenburg sent a screenshot of his desktop to a parent that displayed the address of the link to the Google Drive.
Amanda Wray told KTVK-TV that she saw photographs of her children on the dossier and was horrified.
“When I first saw the contents of the Google Drive and I saw my 8- and 10-year-old’s photos, that was terrifying. And like, what’s he doing?” said Wray.
“But he has pictures of my vacation home, property records,” she added. “I’m not a political opponent, I’m an involved parent and that is threatening to me and it makes me wonder why and what he was planning to do with those photos.”
The district said in the letter that Greenburg could only be removed if he was recalled, if he resigned, or if he was voted out in the next election.
Attorney Alexander Kolodin told the Arizona Free News that Greenburg and his father could face criminal charges related to intimidation.
Americans have two political parties, both of which we loathe. We take turns punishing one by rewarding the other. Our political elites depend on this vicious cycle, and it’s why the only thing both parties ever seem to agree on is screwing ordinary Americans like a two-headed weasel in heat.
It’s easy to think it’s merely that vicious cycle at work in Virginia’s recent election upset: Democrats came out hard in favor of enabling bathroom rape, teaching kids that white skin is evil, and alerting the FBI about parents who expressed concern over such things.
So they got punished for it, and now Republicans have a new opportunity to squander. After that, Americans would normally punish the GOP for failing their mandate by reelecting Democrats who finally rediscovered how to shut up about their true intentions for five minutes.
But the opportunity presented to Virginia Republicans goes beyond another chance for the GOP to suckle on a fresh serving of voters’ goodwill. The massive rightward shift in Virginia wasn’t just business as usual. It was driven by a growing number of parents choosing to reclaim their authority over their households.
Parents Awaken to Their Responsibilities
Providence has given parents the awesome responsibility to raise and provide for the well-being of their children. Like any true responsibility, it comes with the authority to carry it out. When parents are unable to fulfill those responsibilities alone, they delegate.
For example, if parents cannot reliably protect their household from murderers, rapists, and robbers, they collaborate with institutions that can. If they cannot adequately educate their children alone, they enlist the help of teachers. This delegation is ultimately why any and every government institution exists: to assist families in some way or another.
It is precisely this authority Democrat Terry McAuliffe openly tried to usurp. As a result, the election became a referendum on whether children belong to the state. Enough parents were willing to say “no” that a blue state turned red overnight.
Parents can be tricked into delegating their authority to the unfit if they can plausibly tell themselves their children will be fine. The public school system is proof enough of that.
But the past couple of years have rapidly eroded that plausibility. We’ve seen schools forcibly cover children’s faces and isolate them from friends over an illness that poses virtually no threat to them. Remote learning also exposed their curriculum to an extent most parents had never witnessed before. The promotion of sexual degeneracy by schools is likewise coming home to roost more and more often.
Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
It’s also not just Virginia and not just the schools. Our state and federal governments have spent two years devastating our economy, stripping our stores bare, and inflating our currency, making it harder than ever to care for our children. Our media has spent even longer lying to us about all this and more, and it is only doubling down on censorship for the sake of our elites. Worst of all, the Biden-Harris administration has tried to threaten our families with destitution unless we submit to vaccines whose risks often far outstrip any potential benefit.
These are not things parents will forget—especially when committed by those to whom we delegated our authority for the sake of our children. There are also limits to how long any parent is willing to simply wait and hope for improvement before taking action for our children’s sake.
This reclamation of authority by parents is still a work in progress, certainly—McAuliffe only lost by two points, after all. But it is in progress, and it’s not easily reversible.
Once a parent realizes someone has threatened his child, he will never trust that person again. If parents cannot disassociate the people threatening them from the institutions these people run, then they will not trust the institutions either.
Nobody who’s gotten a good look at the true face of progressivism is going to forget it anytime soon. This new dynamic is not stopping. It is accelerating.
If Republicans Don’t Use Their Power, They’re Toast
That brings us to the opportunity for Republicans. I’ve seen a lot of people are calling this a seismic shift in government. But the only reason parents voted for Republicans is that they still hold out hope that the GOP might willingly serve on their behalf.
Should that hope prove false, parents won’t stop trying to reclaim their authority; they will just start doing so in even more earth-shaking ways. One way or another, America’s vicious two-party cycle is not going to persist for much longer. This is the bare minimum Republican office-holders need to do to keep that hope alive.
First, education needs to be addressed, and a few token policy changes aren’t going to cut it. Those faculty and administrators who betrayed parents’ trust need to be removed.
The person who was distributing pornography to your children in school, for example, won’t suddenly become trustworthy because someone makes a rule. The same is true of teachers and administrators who hate your child because of her skin tone. Those people need to go—some fired, some even prosecuted.
Public universities that train teachers to act this way likewise need to be addressed. No program peddling degeneracy and critical race theory to aspiring educators should receive any state funding.
To the timid who complain, “But that’s cancel culture!” I simply respond, “Yes.” If someone starts shooting at your children, you aren’t “sinking to their level” by returning fire. It is parents’ moral obligation to fight back. Leftist institutions chose to escalate to this level of aggression, and they can choke on the consequences.
Yes, this will certainly be a long and difficult battle, which is why parents should immediately be given school choice until it’s resolved. Let parents take their tax dollars away from these errant institutions so they can enlist the help of real schools instead.
Faith In Election Integrity Must Be Restored
Republicans’ second job should be to decisively end voter fraud in their municipalities so parents are guaranteed a voice in their government. There is no point in winning votes if we lose on counting votes.
Do a full forensic investigation of elections you won whether you think there was fraud or not. Prosecute every violation you find whether it made a difference in the outcome or not. And after the investigation, enact common-sense fraud control to address everything you found.
Americans deserve to have confidence in their elections, and parents need to know they still have a say. Republicans need to teach by example that any state or municipality that refuses to transparently ensure the fairness of its elections is doing so because they have something to hide.
Third, Republicans need to use their state and local offices to protect people against the corporations and the federal government that are actively attacking families. Ban corporate mask and vaccine mandates. Provide compensation and other assistance for people being fired for their consciences. Enact laws explicitly holding corporations responsible for the side-effects of any medical treatment they mandate. And, of course, prevent schools from forcing vaccines and other procedures on students—or encouraging such things behind their backs.
Sanctuary States for Right Voters
Now that federal officials are trying to classify outspoken parents as domestic terrorists, states and municipalities will also need to protect their people from those agencies. Republicans should be as diligent about creating sanctuary cities for their own people as the Democrats are about creating sanctuaries for illegal aliens.
Republicans and other conservatives have been great at making careers out of complaining about the left, but that isn’t going to cut it anymore. Parents are finally acting like parents again and taking back their God-given authority. They are offering Republicans a chance to assist them. They aren’t going to stop taking action just because Republicans fail yet again.
The left can complain about white women voting for white kids all they want, but mothers and fathers are almost always going to vote for their children—not because they’re white, but because they’re their children. No adequate parent really cares about someone’s motive for viciously attacking his family; parents are still going to defend their kids no matter what it takes.
Matthew’s writing may be found at The 96th Thesis. You can also follow him on Twitter @matt_e_cochran or subscribe to his YouTube Channel, Lutheran in a Strange Land. He holds an MA from Concordia Theological Seminary.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Students listen to a teacher in a classroom. | Unsplash/NeONBRAND
As the debate about critical race theory continues to engulf the political discourse in the United States, grassroots organizations and activists rely on a variety of methods to combat “woke” ideology’s influence on American education and counter what they characterize as a “destructive message.”
Over the past year, parents have become increasingly aware of content that their children have been exposed to in public, private and religious schools, as the coronavirus pandemic led to the widespread adoption of online learning. The implementation of critical theory and elements of what they call “woke” ideology in the curriculum of American schools has caused some parents and conservative activists particular concern. It’s also led to several conservative politicians voicing their outrage with the promotion of the academic framework, and some states to pass policies banning its teaching in schools.
American schools’ embrace of critical theory, controversial sex education, gender ideology, sexually explicit teaching material and other “woke” curriculums has led many parents and concerned citizens to launch advocacy groups committed to raising awareness about the situation in American education and providing parents with the tools to combat it. It has also led to the launch of political action committees seeking to elect school board candidates who oppose critical race theory.
One group is Parents Defending Education, which describes itself as a “national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.”
“By the time students are 18 years old and they get to college … they have never received a proper civics education, they hate America, they don’t understand the First Amendment,” Nicole Neily, the mother of two who founded Parents Defending Education this past March, told The Christian Post.
“So, if the first time you hear … free speech or First Amendment is this is why [white nationalist] Richard Spencer can come to campus, then yeah, you’re going to hate it.”
Previously having run an organization called Speech First that “defends students’ rights on campus primarily through litigation,” Neily said that she was inspired to launch Parents Defending Education after seeing news articles about how some schools were providing benefits to minority groups and discriminating against white students in the name of diversity.
Parents Defending Education has compiled an “IndoctriNation” map of schools teaching students controversial curriculum based on tips from parents that also includes a directory of parent groups set up to combat “woke” ideology within public schools. She clarified that the map does not include “hearsay.”
“Everything is backed up with a screenshot, a URL … a Freedom of Information Act request,” Neily stated. “We asked the schools for comment. We asked the schools to verify that the information is correct. … We are only putting up information that we stand behind.”
“We have on our map about 100 parent groups across the country that have been created mostly within the past year, specifically to address political indoctrination in schools — not math, not reopening, not school choice, specifically political indoctrination,” Neily explained.
Among the concerns that Neily has with “woke” curriculums is the promotion of critical race theory.
“I honestly don’t think [critical race theory] should be banned,” Neily told CP. “When I did my master’s degree, I had to read Karl Marx.”
“Where I have a problem is when … [critical race theory] is taught to students … as the only way,” she said. “How some of these things are implemented, I think … it encourages discrimination.”
What is critical race theory?
Encyclopedia Britannica defines critical race theory as “an intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour.”
According to the reference source, “critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.”
Proponents of critical race theory, such as those at the New York-based Leadership Academy, argue that the steadfast opposition to the ideology arises from “fear and misunderstanding.” The organization trains educators on how to dismantle “systemic inequities in schools.”
“Critical race theory, at its core, is about acknowledging the existence and impact of race and racism in our communities and society,” wrote the Leadership Academy’s Mary Rice-Boothe and Jill Grossman. “It is about valuing multiple points of view and life experiences, which are essential for helping students learn to think critically about and participate in our global and diverse world.”
The scholars alleged that critical race theory is “central to culturally responsive leadership, which research and our experience supporting thousands of leaders across the country has shown is critical for disrupting inequities in our schools.”
Additionally, they stated that “equity and culturally responsive policies and teaching practices are about making sure students of every race, ethnicity, language, and other characteristics of their identity, feel valued and respected and have what they need to achieve academic, social, and emotional success.” Rice-Boothe and Grossman summarized critical race theory as “simply about humanity.”
The most prominent example of curriculum embracing critical race theory is The 1619 Project, a partnership between The New York Times and the Pulitzer Center that portrays the arrival of enslaved Africans on American soil in 1619 as “the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.”
Launched in 2019, the curriculum framework places the institution of slavery at the center of the national narrative around the country’s founding instead of 1776 and the American Revolution.
Christopher Rufo, a writer, filmmaker and researcher who has studied the issue extensively, defines critical race theory as “an academic discipline that holds that the United States is a nation founded on white supremacy and oppression and that these forces are still at the root of our society.”
Rufo, an outspoken opponent of critical race theory, added that “critical race theorists believe that American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, preach freedom and equality, but are mere ‘camouflages’ for racial discrimination.”
According to Rufo, adherents to critical race theory believe that “racism is a constant, universal condition” that “simply becomes more subtle, sophisticated, and insidious over the course of history.” He characterized the discipline as a reformulation of “the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and black.”
“…….the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and black.”
James Lindsay, who hosts the “New Discourses” podcast, elaborated on critical race theory in a video for the nonprofit media organization Prager University. An opponent of critical race theory, he quoted from two of its proponents, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, in an attempt to portray the philosophy as un-American: “Critical Race Theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
NEA embraces CRT as the public remains lukewarm
Earlier this month, Rufo reported that “the nation’s largest teachers’ union has approved a plan to promote critical race theory in all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts.” He shared screenshots showing that the National Education Association approved New Business Item 39 at its annual meeting and representative assembly two weeks ago.
New Business Item 39 calls on the NEA to make it clear that “we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.” The measure advocates for the publication of an “already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, racism, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”
The item also indicated an intention for the union to double down on its support for an “accurate and honest teaching of social studies topics … including critical race theory.” It also signaled an intent to “join with Black Lives Matter at School” to create a “national day of action to teach lessons about structural racism and oppression” and “conduct a virtual listening tour that will educate members on the tools and resources needed to defend honesty in education including but not limited to tools like CRT.”
While critical race theory has achieved a lot of support in academia, it remains very unpopular with the American public as a whole. A poll released last month found that 38% of Americans had a very or somewhat favorable opinion of the ideology. In comparison, 58% had a very or somewhat unfavorable view of critical race theory. Majorities of Democrats, liberals, African Americans and Americans between the ages of 30 and 44 viewed critical race theory favorably, while majorities of all other groups hold the opposite views.
The teaching of critical race theory at American schools is part of a broader trend of educational institutions embracing what critics refer to as “toxic new curriculums.” Parents across the country have spoken out in opposition to these curriculums, with parent opposition in Loudoun County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., receiving much media attention.
At a school board meeting earlier this year, concerned parents read aloud texts that the county’s children were exposed to in freshman honors English classes that included portrayals of domestic violence and graphic descriptions of sex acts. A video of the parents reading excerpts from the books, published by the grassroots organization Fight for Schools, has received more than 150,000 views [Warning: video contains graphic and sexually explicit language].
‘It is in everyone’s backyard’
Neily told CP that in addition to spotlighting groups of concerned parents and schools exposing children to material widely seen as problematic, she sees the mission of Parents Defending Education as seeking to “empower, expose and engage.”
The activist hopes to “empower” American parents by “[telling] people what their rights are” if their children attend a public school, specifically mentioning the First Amendment, Title VII and Title IX. She illustrated that while students have rights at public schools, “they generally do not have the same rights at private schools.”
Neily hopes to get parents engaged in their children’s education and equip them with the tools needed to share their concerns, such as “How do you write a letter to the editor?”“What are questions to ask your school board?” “How do you get involved in a school board race?” “How do you … file a Freedom of Information Act request?” “How do you file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education?”
Expanding on her organization’s goal to “expose,” Neily stressed that she’s “very much a believer in the saying that ‘sunshine is the best disinfectant.’”
She illustrated the need to make American parents aware of what their children are learning at school.
“A lot of this has been happening. People have no idea it’s in their backyard,” she explained. “Many people believe that this problem is like primarily a California and a New York problem. It is not. It is in red states. It is in blue states. It is in private schools. It is in parochial schools. It is in everyone’s backyard.”
Neily said that during the pandemic, American parents “saw what their children were learning on a regular basis because classrooms were then in their living rooms.” She called that the “silver lining” of the coronavirus pandemic.
She recalled how finding out what their children were learning motivated parents to reach out to her and ask, “How do we get the schools to listen to us?” and “What can we do?”
The activist said an action taken by the public school system in Wellesley, Massachusetts, earlier this year is the worst example of “woke” ideology.
Following the shooting at Atlanta-area spas that left several Asian masseuses dead, the school district held a “healing space for Asians and people of color”during school hours, with the invitation for the event specifically highlighting that “white students [were] not allowed.”
Characterizing the event as “modern-day segregation,” Neily’s organization filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights with the U.S. Department of Education, citing the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled school segregation unconstitutional.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. | AFP via Getty Images/Andrew Caballero
‘We’re fighting Marxism’
Parents Defending Education is not the only group dedicated, at least in part, to opposing critical race theory.
Kevin McGary, the co-founder of Every Black Life Matters, is a staunch critic of critical race theory. | Kevin McGary
Kevin McGary, the father of two children, co-founded Every Black Life Matters approximately nine months ago. The group is a response to the “race hatred” and “violence” that resulted from the video of African American George Floyd’s “atrocious” and “heinous” death in police custody.
His organization aims to counter the Black Lives Matter movement, which he referred to as “radical revolutionary Marxists” in an interview with The Christian Post.
“We are founded based on fundamentals that say the nuclear family is important, that protecting black life from conception to the grave is important, that helping encourage black life from early childhood development in education is important,” he asserted. “We believe that having an active father as a part of children’s life is important.”
Acknowledging that “we’re sort of leveraging the momentum of Black Lives Matter,” McGary held up his organization as “the exact opposite of BLM” and the “antithesis” to the left-wing advocacy group.
Every Black Life Matters includes a “template library of … letters that are already pre-written for school boards, city council, other … people that are running for political office or are holding political office.” McGary told CP that all concerned parents have to do is “put their names on it and send it to those people.”
While much of the focus in the effort to push back against critical theory has focused on public schools, the ideology has infiltrated religious schools as well.
As The Christian Post previously reported, Loyola Academy, a Catholic school based in a suburb of Chicago, faced backlash from several parents after employing “diversity consultants” and conducting Zoom meetings where teachers included their gender pronouns.
Noelle Mering, a fellow with the Washington-based think tank Ethics & Public Policy Center, wrote an op-ed arguing that critical theory is incompatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church. She discussed parents’ concerns about Loyola.
“Students were racially segregated for school assignments on privilege,” she wrote. “A working-class student was bewildered to learn that because of his skin color, he is an oppressor to his peers, some of whom live in multi-million dollar homes.”
The Grace Church School, a private Episcopal school in Manhattan, came under fire from both teachers and parents for integrating a “repressive ideology” into its curriculum.
Paul Rossi, a former teacher at the school, wrote an op-ed accusing the Grace Church School of pressuring students to “identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed” and assigning “the morally compromised status of ‘oppressor’” to one group of students “based on their immutable characteristics” as “dependency, resentment, and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered ‘oppressed.’”
McGary attributed the presence of critical theory and “woke” ideology in religious schools to the fact that “they are using critical race theory within our seminaries.”
“And so, we have woke theologians now that are coming out and spreading a false Gospel,” he said.
Echoing Rufo’s analysis, McGary sees the implementation of critical theory and “woke” ideology in both public and religious schools as part of a larger effort to advance Marxist ideology in the U.S.
“Marxism is really what we’re fighting against on all fronts at the moment,” he said. “It’s not necessarily these individual elements — CRT, liberation theology … social justice. Fundamentally, at their core, they’re all based in … Marxism. And so, we’re fighting Marxism.”
“What we need to help people understand is that Marxism has led to more human atrocities, more human deaths, more economic damage and collapse than any other system in world history,” he continued.
“… part of a larger effort to advance Marxist ideology in the U.S.“
Lambasting Marxism for causing over 100 million deaths and “all economic collapse,” McGary emphasized that “there is no actual great, perfect track record with Marxism.”
While he admitted that “capitalism is not perfect either,” he praised the economic system as “better than Marxism” by “any viable metric.”
McGary maintained that schools “should teach the good and bad of history.”
“If indeed we do have … Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, a lot of other founders and/or presidents who were slave owners … that’s fine,” he said.
“We should know the good and bad of … our patriots and heroes and our founders.”
He criticized the move to “expunge history and say that these guys were strictly bad guys,” pointing to some curriculum, “saying that George Washington was a plantation owner … and a slave owner.” He feels “they focus on that and really exclude the fact that he was an American Revolutionary War hero, that he was the first president.”
McGary opined that rather than teaching “accurate history,” critical race theory proponents instead seek to present a “revisionist history.”
‘A more patriotic curriculum’
In May, Ryan Girdusky, a conservative writer and political commentator, founded the 1776 Project PAC, a political action committee supporting school board candidates who explicitly oppose critical race theory.
Speaking to The Christian Post, he emphasized the importance of school boards. He stressed his organization’s mission to “get school board people in there who can actually start reversing it” by changing the superintendents and textbooks as well as pushing “for a more patriotic curriculum.”
He wants school boards to “start negotiating and countering these principals and these teachers who are pushing this policy.”
“There are many institutions working on creating an alternative curriculum in history,” Girdusky said, including Hillsdale College.
“There’s many institutions on the right that are looking to … get involved … with the program of changing curriculum. So hopefully, we can have a meeting of the minds and find the best options that we can put in front of school board members and say, ‘Can you consider this?’”
Girdusky clarified that his organization was not recruiting candidates but rather “supporting candidates who are opposed to critical race theory and the 1619 Project.” He elaborated on the role of school boards, which he characterized as “the only check really for the public school systems that voters have.”
“They can hire superintendents, negotiate with the schools. They can try to hold teachers and principals more accountable within the school system,” he added. “They can pick out which textbooks are … acceptable, and they purchase textbooks in many cases. They can pick out which outside reading material is acceptable.”
Girdusky acknowledged that “conservatives have been trying [for decades] to get children out of the public school into either private school … or charter schools.” However, he maintained that it is still essential to focus on fixing the public schools because “a majority of children will always go to public schools.”
Girdusky, who comes from “a very large family” with “a lot of younger cousins,” was motivated to start the 1776 Project PAC after discovering that as “many of [his cousins] were in school at home … on Google classroom” as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Teachers were incorporating things inside their classrooms that were pretty horrendous and pretty shocking,” the activist claimed. For example, “children as young as 8, 9 years old were being taught things … about racial profiling from police. And one of the teachers basically … said that … police are all racist.”
“What’s happening at the schools and inside classrooms that I find horrendously shocking is … teachers telling … children that there’s implicit bias against them if they’re non-white or that white students have … implicit bias against … non-white people, and that the institutions that really … created this country and … keep our civilization are … inherently created to work against them.”
Consequences for society as a whole
Neily told CP that she worries that “we are encouraging people to hate each other, to doubt each other, to make judgments about each other based on immutable characteristics.”
She slammed critical race theory’s “destructive message.” Girdusky agreed, calling critical theory a “cancer that society is pushing.”
“It’s telling non-white children that they are handicapped in the society that they are raised in on purpose to hurt them. And it says that everyone from our Founding Fathers to entrepreneurs to … the heads of major companies today to their local government and their police force is implicitly working to … keep them down,” he explained. “It’s telling white children, some of which … are extremely young and have no understanding of race or the history of race in our country … that they are racist, that they are born racist … and that’s a terrible lesson to learn.”
Girdusky contends that this ideology will have “detrimental” consequences for the health of American society:
“In a nation that is … multiracial now and increasingly more diverse, it breeds [an] immense amount of social distrust.”
McGary said that the widespread promotion of critical race theory extends far beyond the classroom.
“The net impact is people are viewing … each other with a certain amount of distrust. African Americans have adopted critical race theory to such a degree that a lot of them are viewing white people with complete disdain just because they’re white, and … they’re viewing Asians with disdain,” he stated.
“There’s been a lot of Asian hate, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of coverage as to what is the predominant … ethnicity of the person carrying out those hate crimes and that’s because it’s an inconvenient truth that … blacks are viewing Asians as white-passing and they’ve internalized racist white supremacy. And so, they’re going after Asians with the same vigor that they have towards whites.”
McGary stated that the American public as a whole is “over-sensitized to race.”
“Every conversation, every civic discussion … 10, 12 years ago, we didn’t go around labeling people based on their skin color, whether you’re an oppressed, oppressor, whether you’re privileged or … supremacist … or racist or whatever. Twelve years ago, that didn’t exist.”
He warned that in “every real and every domain,” people are making “snap assessments about people based on the color of their skin and not the content of character.”
McGary connected the adoption of critical theory and “woke” ideology to the rising crime rates across the country. He predicted that “we’re going to see a lot more racial hatred and a lot more crimes based on race as opposed to any other factor.” He believes the “if people don’t get a handle on this stuff, we could actually see a certain amount of mass civil unrest in certain cities between races.”
“we’re going to see a lot more racial hatred and a lot more crimes based on race as opposed to any other factor.” He believes the “if people don’t get a handle on this stuff, we could actually see a certain amount of mass civil unrest in certain cities between races.”
All three agreed that critical theory runs contrary to the teachings of the late civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. Girdusky is concerned that “too many people confuse critical race theory with Martin Luther King Jr.’s conception of having a colorblind America and equality when, in fact, it is using race as the cornerstone of every inequality and inequity in society.”
“What happened to Martin Luther King? What happened to the … content of our character and not the color of our skin?” Neily asked.
McGary lamented that the country is “moving away from … the encouragement and admonition that Dr. Martin Luther King gave us.”
“We’re sort of moving away from that. We’re moving towards strictly analyzing people based upon the color of their skin,” McGary said.
Victories in the battle against CRT
Neily told CP that in the short time since Parents Defending Education was established, there had been “victories that have happened in different places.” She pointed to the town of Southlake, Texas, outside Dallas, where “they just cleared house with their school board” in an “anti-CRT wave that was swept in.”
She also praised the school district in the Chicago suburb of New Trier, Illinois, for adopting a K-12 version of the “Chicago statement” from the University of Chicago expressing support for “free speech and free expression.”
Another example of success against critical race theory is Palm Beach County, Florida. As The Palm Beach Post reported, following backlash from parents, the school board voted to retract a portion of an “equity statement” highlighting its commitment to “dismantling structures rooted in white advantage.”
It’s not just groups like Parents Defending Education, the 1776 Project PAC and Every Black Life Matters working to combat critical race theory and “woke” ideology in education. Several states have already banned the teaching of critical race theory or “divisive concepts” in their public schools, and others are in the process of doing so.
According to Education Week, 26 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict the teaching of critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, while 11 states have enacted those bans as of July 15.
A group of furious parents lined up before Virginia’s Loudoun County School Board this week to read several “pornographic” passages from books assigned to ninth graders in the district, amid a recall effort against several of the board’s members. In a clip from Tuesday night’s meeting provided by Media Research Center, the first mom reads from a book describing a domestic violence scenario where the narrator talks about a female “coming out of some car in these tight-a** little shorts…telling me she’s going to leave me.”
“I grab her by the neck and start punching her,” the mother continues to read. Later, the narrator describes keeping the female “in a closet for a couple of days” where “she kept on screaming, begging to be let out. Begging for water.”
The rest of the excerpts were sexual in nature.
“Jasper wasn’t even my boyfriend, just this dude I did some hacking with once in a while,” the second mother reads. “He was pretty basic…but he had a big d***. And sometimes a girl just needs a big d***.”
A third parent read about sex acts involving a “boy — his pants around his ankles — squeezed between April’s straddled legs as she lay on top of a teacher’s desk.” The narrator describes flipping the “boy” around, “pushing him against the wall” and then dropping to their knees.
The fourth mother reads an excerpt where the narrator declares, “she sucked my d***. I didn’t really want it to happen, it just kinda did.” Another character in the book replies, “Wait a minute, is that what was really going on? She did your homework and you ate her c******!”
A gentleman who said he is representing a group of parents in a harassment suit addressed the board following the readings. After listing off a number of the sexual acts covered, he pointed to the panel and asked, “By show of hands, does anyone up here want to talk about that stuff now? Not a single hand, because it’s very uncomfortable and we’re in a room full of adults.”
He said the reason no one wants to talk about it is “because they’re not acceptable topics,” and added, “my kids don’t go to your crap schools, but theirs do.”
Angry Loudoun County public school parents read heinous passages from county's 9th grade reading material. pic.twitter.com/GYnQFExJ00
When asked for reaction by Fox News, Loudoun County Public Schools pointed to a news release published Wednesday where the district reminded “parents that if they feel a book is not appropriate for their student” they may “submit a formal request for the Reconsideration of Instructional Materials.”
One parent, who did not want to be named, told the outlet, “This is the same district that banned Dr. Seuss and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as being ‘offensive,’ yet they’re having children read pornography that violates every code of conduct in their sexual harassment training.”
A New Mexico Democratic state senator has introduced a bill that could criminalize parents who teach their children how to shoot firearms if the children is not considered an “authorized user,” according to a state pro-gun group.
State Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (D) introduced State Bill 224, which says in part, “It is an offense for a firearm owner or authorized user to store or keep a firearm in any premises unless the firearm is secured in a locked container or secured by a gun lock or other means so as to render the firearm inaccessible or unusable to any person other than the owner or other authorized user.”
The Daily Wire stated that a minor “may be an authorized user only if the minor is at least twelve years of age and has successfully completed a firearm safety training course.”
SB 224 adds, “If a firearm owner or authorized user knows or reasonably should have known that a minor, an at-risk person or a prohibited person could gain access to a firearm belonging to or under the control of that owner or authorized person, and if a minor, an at-risk person or a prohibited person obtained access to that firearm, it is an offense if the firearm owner or authorized user failed to secure the firearm in a locked container or by a lock or other means so as to render such firearm inaccessible or unusable to any person other than the firearm owner or other authorized user.”
In response to the bill, the New Mexico Shooting Sports Association said that the bill’s “storage mandate” would “make it a crime for a child to handle your firearm unless the child was 12 or older and had previously completed a firearms safety class.”
“You would become a criminal for taking your child to go shooting if they had not previously taken some kind of formal class,” NMSSA said in a statement on the proposed legislation. “The bill is an uneducated attempt to demonize firearms. … It is already a crime to place a child in a situation that endangers their life, this law does nothing to add to a child’s safety.”
The association added that the bill as-is is “completely unenforceable” unless the government intends on conducting door-to-door inspections.
“If a prohibited possessor gains access to your firearm you are liable as well,” NMSSA added. “Albuquerque is the property crime capital of America; if your home or vehicle was broken into and a convicted felon stole your firearm, you could be charged with a crime under the bill. Instead of taking on the issue of the crime wave that has engulfed Albuquerque and other parts of the state, Sedillo Lopez wants to blame you, someone just seeking to defend yourself, if your firearm is stolen.”
A couple from Buena Park, California, got a sweet surprise when they boarded a plane to bring their adopted baby home in November.
Dustin and Caren Moore tried to have a child of their own for nine years with no success, but when they met a baby girl in need of a family, they were beyond excited to become her parents, according to ABC 7.
“She had me wrapped around her fingers instantly. … I heard her crying outside the room and I started crying,” Dustin recalled.
Following the adoption, the couple boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Colorado to California but had no idea they were about to receive a ton of support on such a big day.
February 9, Dustin shared the entire story on his Twitter page:
On the plane, the new parents had finally settled into their seats when the baby woke up and needed her diaper changed, so a kind flight attendant named Jenny made room for them in the back, according to Today.
“After a change, Jenny and another passenger complimented my beautiful daughter and politely asked what had prompted a flight with such a young infant,” Dustin wrote, adding “I gave them the shortened adoption story, to which they hastily offered congratulations, and shared a few more kind remarks.”
A few minutes after telling the story to another flight attendant named Bobby, he heard the intercom come on as Bobby announced that the infant was the flight’s special guest.
To the couple’s surprise, all of the passengers began to clap and cheer.
The flight attendants then passed out napkins for everyone to write down any parenting advice they had for the Moore family.
At the end of the trip, Dustin and his wife were presented with 60 napkins with notes that said things like “The hard parts don’t last forever! Congratulations!!”
Dustin shared a few more on his Twitter profile:
Now, the couple keeps the napkins in a scrapbook and said many of the notes have proved helpful since they brought their little girl home.
“All those worries and those fears that we had about, ‘Can we do this? Are people going to be good to our sweet daughter even though we adopted her?’ And everybody who just basically shouted ‘yes’ in unison to each other just made us feel so good, so, so good,” he commented.
“I can’t think of any better way we could have had to bring our daughter home,” Dustin concluded.
A suburban St. Louis police chief on Friday identified the officer whose fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager ignited days of heated protests, and released documents alleging the teen was killed after a robbery in which he was suspected of stealing a $48.99 box of cigars.
Ferguson, Mo., Police Chief Thomas Jackson said the robbery took place just before noon on Saturday at a convenience store roughly 10 minutes before a police officer identified as Darren Wilson fired the bullet that killed Michael Brown. Police say that the shot was fired after a struggle touched off by Wilson’s confronting Brown. Jackson said Wilson is a six-year veteran with no disciplinary action on his record.
At a press conference Friday afternoon, authorities said the police officer who shot Brown did not know he was a robbery suspect at the time.
The news conference came after nearly a week of sometimes-violent protests and calls by many, including President Obama, for local law enforcement to be more transparent about the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Police previously said they withheld Wilson’s identity because of the potential for threats on the officer and his family. The officer has been on administrative leave since the shooting.
Police released still images and were planning to release video from the robbery, at a QuikTrip store in Ferguson. Jackson said Wilson, along with other officers, were called to the area after a 911 call reporting a “strong-arm robbery” at a nearby convenience store. He didn’t immediately release details about the alleged robbery, saying more information would be released later.
Police provided few other details about the police officer at the morning news conference and did not take any questions. Jackson said Swisher Sweets cigars were stolen in the robbery.
According to the police reports, Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were suspected of taking a box of cigars from a store in Ferguson that morning.
“I am incensed,” Laura Keys, 50,told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.“I can’t believe this is the tactic they are using, bringing up a robbery to make the victim look like he was thepersonwho created this whole mess.”
Police have said Brown was shot after an officer encountered him and another man on the street.They say one of the men pushed the officer into his squad car, then physically assaulted him in the vehicle and struggled with the officer over the officer’s weapon. At least one shot was fired inside the car before the struggle spilled onto the street, where Brown was shot multiple times, according to police.
But a much different story has been told by Johnson, who says he was walking down the street with Brown when he was shot. He has said the officer ordered them out of the street, then grabbed his friend’s neck and tried to pull him into the car before brandishing his weapon and firing. He says Brown started to run and the officer pursued him, firing multiple times.
The attorney representing Brown’s family, Benjamin Crump, said Brown’s parents are “incensed” by what he calls “the old game of smoke and mirrors.” He says the family was blind-sided by Friday’s announcement.
Crump says “it’s bad enough they assassinated him, and now they’re trying to assassinate his character.”
Tensions in Ferguson boiled over after a candlelight vigil Sunday night, as looters smashed and burned businesses in the neighborhood, where police have repeatedly fired tear gas and smoke bombs.
But on Thursday, county police in riot gear and armored tanks gave way tostate troopers walking side-by-side with thousands of peaceful protesters.The dramatic shift came after Gov. Jay Nixon assigned oversight of the protests to the state Highway Patrol, stripping that authority from the St. Louis County Police Department.
“All they did was look at us and shoot tear gas,”Pedro Smith, who has participated in the nightly protests, said Thursday. “This is totally different. Now we’re being treated with respect.”
The more tolerant response came asPresident Obama spoke publiclyfor the first time about Saturday’s fatal shooting — and the subsequent violence that shocked the nation and threatened to tear apart Ferguson, a town of 21,000 that is nearly 70 percent black and patrolled by a nearly all-white police force.
Nixon’s promise to ease the deep racial tensions was swiftly put to the test as demonstrators gathered again Thursday evening. But the latest protests had a light, almost jubilant atmosphere among the racially mixed crowd, more akin to a parade or block party.
The streets were filled with music, free food and even laughter. When darkness fell — the point at which previous protests have grown tense — no uniformed officers were in sight outside the burned-out QuikTrip convenience store that had become a flashpoint for standoffs between police and protesters.
Nixon appointed Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, who is black, to lead the police effort. Johnson, who grew up near Ferguson and commands a region that includes St. Louis County, marched alongside protesters Thursday, joined by other high-ranking brass from the Highway Patrol as well as the county department. The marchers also had a police escort.
“We’re here to serve and protect,” Johnson said. “We’re not here to instill fear.”
Fox News’ Mike Tobin, Edmund DeMarche and The Associated Press contributed to this report
There are two opposing worldviews vying for the hearts and minds of Americans. One of these worldviews is conservatism. Conservatives believe in such concepts as limited government, low taxation, free-market economics, individual liberty, personal responsibility, constitutional sovereignty, and traditional American values that grow out of our Judeo-Christian heritage. The other worldview is liberalism, or in the language of its proponents, progressivism. Liberals believe in nanny government, high taxes, statist/socialist economics, control through regulation, entitlement, one-world government, and class envy, racial strife, and secular humanist values (There is no definite right or wrong—individuals must decide what is right or wrong for themselves).
One of these worldviews—conservatism—allowed America to become the most powerful, influential nation in the world with the highest standard of living in history. The other worldview—liberalism—is transforming America into a second-rate nation that is financially and morally bankrupt. With these facts in mind, one can easily discern that it matters which of these worldviews—conservatism or liberalism—eventually wins the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans.
Liberals are heavily favored in this epic struggle for several reasons. First, it is always easier to convince people to sit back and let the government take care of them than it is to convince them to take personal responsibility for the quality of their lives. Another reason liberals are favored in this contest is that people are hardwired to envy others who appear better off economically—even when their better standard of living is the result of their entrepreneurial spirit and positive work ethic. Yet another reason that liberals have the edge is that people are hardwired to blame others for their misfortunes as opposed to blaming themselves. These are just a few of the reasons the playing field tilts in favor of liberals, there are many more. However, for the sake of brevity I will skip directly to the bottom-line reason: liberals control the institutions that mold the values and worldviews of America’s children.
America’s public schools have become incubators for producing successive generations of liberals. Nothing about public education supports the development of a conservative worldview. Here is what that stalwart in the faith, J. Gresham Machen, had to say about this dilemma: “Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out…and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.”
Public school students spend more than 30 hours per week for 12 years being indoctrinated by so-called “experts appointed by the state” against everything conservative parents stand for (i.e. limited government, low taxation, free-market economics, individual liberty, personal responsibility, constitutional sovereignty, and traditional American values). Frankly, if this situation is allowed to persist not only will conservatives lose the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans, they will deserve to lose.
As conservatives, we seem to think the battle is about electing the next President of the United States. But battles for the hearts and minds of the people are fought in the trenches at the local level, not in the White House or the halls of Congress. They are fought around the dinner table of individual American families. They are fought in how parents raise their children and what they teach them about right and wrong and responsible principles of living. But conservative parents are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of their children because at least six hours a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year they turn them over to liberal teachers and administrators who persistently undo any good parents are able to do in the comparatively little time they spend with their children.
Here is an undeniable fact: You cannot expect your children to internalize and accept your worldview when you allow them to be raised by teachers who either reject your values or compliantly go along to get along in a system that rejects your values. Christian schools, home-schools, and charter schools help somewhat in this situation, but collectively these alternatives to the public schools are the equivalent of a flea on an elephant. Most children of conservative parents in America attend public schools. This being the case, it is time for conservatives to start fighting at the grassroots level and do the hard work of transforming America’s public schools into institutions of learning rather than publicly-funded indoctrination centers that are better at producing compliant automatons with entitlement mentalities than critical-thinking, self-reliant, productive citizens.
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
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
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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