There exists a slippery slope fallacy, and then there’s a slippery slope—a greased up, iced up, slicked up slope down which America is hurtling. The signs are visible everywhere for those with eyes to see. The signs are nowhere clearer than in the field that once was reasonably called “education” but which has morphed into indoctrination in part because of the gullibility, ignorance, inertia, or spinelessness of so many Americans.
So, let’s skate across the slippery landscape to peek at just one insalubrious sign. As we go, bear in mind the good old days when the homosexual community claimed with faux-earnestness that all they sought was to be left alone to do what they wanted in the privacy of their boudoirs.
Just three months ago in California, against which Illinois competes for worst-run state, parents discovered that their elementary school, Pleasant Grove Elementary School in Elk Grove, California, was sponsoring a secret lunchtime club for—you guessed it—affirming homosexuality, bisexuality, and cross-sex confusion.
All children in grades 3 through 6 were invited, incentivized to attend by the promise of “fun games.” No parental notification was provided. No permission slips were required. No announcement in the weekly activities newsletter appeared. The club, called UBU—which stands for “you be you,” was held during lunch hour because after-school clubs require parental permission slips.
The club, ostensibly for “boys who crush on boys” and “girls who crush on girls” but really for all students, was first exposed by Mary Congdon, the mother of a fourth-grade boy who “came home confused about his gender identity after hearing 3rd Grade Teacher Daniel Bishop talk about same-sex attraction.” What kind of creeper wants to talk to other people’s eight-year-olds about homoerotic attraction?
This kind: Bishop is a presumptuous leftist activist who identifies as a teacher and hosted the stealth club until it was suspended due to the public outcry. In an August 2022 social media post, Bishop cheerily announced that he had found his back-to-school shirt—a t-shirt that read, “I am the teacher Fox News warned you about.” That’s a leftist teacher’s view of inclusion.
When Congdon expressed her concerns to her son’s teacher, she was told, “‘it’s a safe place for students to go and discuss their sexuality without having to come out to their parents.’” Schools are now actively complicit in concealing critical information from parents about their own children.
Congdon then followed up with Principal Deirdre Wood to ask why permission slips were not sent home. Wood reportedly told her Congdon that “they feared parents would say no.” Well, you’ve got to give it to her for saying the quiet part aloud.
Wood also shared in an email to Congdon that deviant sexuality clubs had been started in “in 5 to 10 other elementary schools.”
Leftists, with their curious Newspeakian practice of redefining terms, have redefined “safety” to mean absence of disapproval of behaviors or absence of disagreement with beliefs or ideas. When leftists claim they want to provide safe places for students, they don’t mean places free of physical or verbal abuse. They mean places where students encounter no expression of conservative views on sexuality—views that may be uncomfortable for some to hear.
Of course, leftists don’t apply their principle of safety consistently. They couldn’t care less if conservative kids feel bad when hearing leftists condemn conservative beliefs as hateful and phobic. Leftists want kids to feel bad about their conservative views, even if those views reflect the authentic identities of conservative kids. Leftists’ purported deep love of authenticity is yet another deceit.
To leftists, safety requires affirmation and celebration of all powerful, seemingly intractable erotic feelings. Theirs is a worldview that denies normative sexual morality. And it is a worldview antithetical to the worldview of many people of diverse faith traditions, who no longer feel welcome, included, tolerated, or supported. Instead, many parents distrust school administrators, faculty, and boards of education.
If leftist beliefs about sexuality are wrong—and they are dead wrong—then teaching those beliefs to or affirming them in children does not make children safe. Leftist beliefs put children at serious emotional, relational, and physical risks.
Unbelievably, it gets worse. While ignoring parental concerns about the school’s deception and betrayal of their trust, the district “’sent a flier to all district teachers, inviting them to a training on how to respond to resistance from parents against LGBTQ Clubs.’” The training was titled, “Responding to Resistance.” The training, however, was not merely about “responding” to resistance. It was training on how to resist resistance.
Leftist teachers no longer serve as subordinate laborers for parents. Leftist teachers have arrogated for themselves the right to use their jobs to serve their own ideological, social, and political interests. They treat their moral and philosophical assumptions about sexuality and safety as if they are objective, inarguable facts. They now function as subversive enemies of parents—at least enemies of conservative parents.
The leftist betrayal of parental trust in public schools everywhere is pernicious enough, but what they are doing to children is far worse. They are providing a distorted lens through which young children are being led to misinterpret their normal and natural feelings about themselves and others. Leftists in public schools all over the country, including here in Illinois, are providing this distorted lens to children—including at ages far too young—and they are doing so without acknowledging that there exist other lenses for understanding sexuality.
What these leftist activists are engaged in is propaganda masquerading as education, and it’s evil.
But there is some good news. On March 21, 2024, the National Center for Law and Policy sent a letter to Elk Grove Unified School District on behalf of concerned families demanding that the district “permanently suspend all UBU and Rainbow clubs at its elementary schools.”