Can You See the Forest Being Planted Using Children?

American conservatives are practiced at the art of overlooking forests as they spy with their gimlet eyes single trees to which they sometimes take a damp match and with furious labor manage to singe a single branch. Meanwhile a short distance away and with nothing productive to do, an army of wokesters are fertilizing forests.

Here’s just one instructive arboreal example.

Saticoy Elementary School, a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) K-5 school, has a “Gay Pride and Rainbow Day” assembly planned for June 2 during which a picture book will be read that includes families with two “mommies” or two “daddies.” A parent group is urging all parents to protest by keeping their children home on June 2.

A flyer written in three languages said, “Keep your kids home and innocent on June 2.” After reading the flyer, Roberto Salcedo, a teacher at a nearby LAUSD elementary school, offered this bone-chilling comment about parents who don’t want their six-year-olds to be introduced to any ideas about homosexuality, especially by government employees:

“It was bone-chilling when I first read it. If you really read it for what it is, it’s to incite hatred against people who are different.”

Unlike most people, Salcedo really read it for what it is. He read between the lines. He read the sub-sub-sub text written in invisible ink that can be seen only by people with secret decoder glasses. And he discerned that what the flyer meant had nothing to do with protecting children’s innocence. Oh, no. It really meant, “HATE PEOPLE WHO ARE DIFFERENT!”

Salcedo does what leftists do best: lie. The moral belief that volitional homosexual acts are wrong no more constitutes hatred of homosexuals than does the belief that polyamory is wrong constitute hatred of polyamorists.

In reality, it is possible to deeply love people who hold different moral beliefs and live in accordance with those beliefs. Most people in our wildly diverse world do it every day. Perhaps Mr. Salcedo hates everyone who holds different moral beliefs than he does, but if so, he ought not project his habitus onto others.

No one who believes it is “bone-chilling” and hateful for parents to oppose public schools exposing their children to leftist beliefs about sexuality and “gender” should be teaching in public schools that serve diverse peoples—including theologically orthodox Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims.

The Saticoy District issued a statement that employs the usual wokespeak about “creating a safe and inclusive learning environment that embraces the diversity of the communities we serve.” Apparently, leftists believe the only way to make schools “safe” and “inclusive” is to embrace and promote leftist moral beliefs, while implicitly and explicitly condemning conservative beliefs as intolerant, hateful, bigoted, and “phobic.”

Yeah, that will definitely make conservatives feel safe and included.

In the district statement, officials admit that “our schools regularly discuss the diversity of the families that we serve and the importance of inclusion.” Do these regular diversity discussions include mention of homosexuality and cross sex-impersonation? Do they take place in classrooms? If so, do all conservative parents in the district know about these regular discussions?

How far does the district commitment to “inclusion” extend? If there are poly families in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), will teachers regularly include them in their diversity discussions?

Leftists pretend that picture books about two “mommies” or “daddies” are merely non-judgmental descriptions of diverse family structures that avoid all partisan content. That claim, however, is a crock.

A picture book that includes colorful drawings of two “mommies” is anything but neutral. To better recognize the non-neutrality of such a book, imagine the same book but with colorful drawings of a poly family with three daddies and two mommies or of a consanguineous family in which the parents are brothers (after all, love is love). Would any elementary school read that book to children?

Of course not.

The reason we don’t see such books—yet—is that school officials know such depictions tacitly communicate approval of the relationships depicted. Books that depict families led by polyamorists, sibling lovers, or homosexuals embody a prior moral judgment.

Authors, publishers, and school officials have concluded that homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation are morally acceptable identities, while polyamory and “Genetic Sexual Attraction” are not. But attaching jargon-y terms like “identity” to subjective, erotic desires and feelings about maleness and femaleness does not make homosexuality and cross-sex delusions appropriate topics for public schools. Authors, publishers, and school officials have concluded that homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation are morally acceptable identities, while polyamory and “Genetic Sexual Attraction” are not. But attaching jargon-y terms like “identity” to subjective, erotic desires and feelings about maleness and femaleness does not make homosexuality and cross-sex delusions appropriate topics for public schools.

Schools have no ethical or pedagogical obligation to address in the classroom all phenomena found in our fallen world—not even all phenomena found in and affirmed by families in the communities they serve.

The decision to approve and read such books about two-mommy or two-daddy family structures necessarily depends on having made a judgment. To present neutrally (or positively) family structures at the center of which is disordered sexuality is not neutral.

Moreover, leftist beliefs about sexuality and “gender”—including the idea that affirmation of homoeroticism and cross-sex identification improves lives and makes society better and stronger—are not objective. They are subjective beliefs that government employees have no right to promote as objectively true in their jobs as teachers.

Few things matter more to the survival of any culture than its views on sexuality and family. We ignore this growing forest at our own peril. A country can survive with high taxes and excessive business regulations. No country can survive a debauched citizenry and disintegrated families.