Axios Chicago’s Carrie Shepherd—an opinion writer masquerading as a reporter—recently wrote about the efforts of Illinois public schools to defy President Trump’s order to cleanse schools receiving federal funds of leftist ideological programming on cross-sex impersonation.
Shepherd calls these efforts to decolonize curricula of arguable pro-“trans” content “persistent attacks on transgender people.”
For the past forty years, leftist cultural conquerors have usurped public resources to spread their assumptions on sexuality and gender as if they were unassailable, objective facts. Americans have had enough and made that clear when they elected President Trump.
But leftists are nothing if not presumptuous and tenacious. So, they are fighting back.
Illinois’ leftist State Board of Education Superintendent Tony Sanders is miffed about Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which seeks to withhold federal funds from schools that promote “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”
At his recent appearance before the Illinois House Elementary and Secondary Education Appropriations Committee, Sanders emphatically affirmed his commitment to “equity” using the infamous meme of three people standing on boxes to see over a fence–a meme favored by presidential loser Kamala Harris. The meme is used to point to the importance of subordinating equal treatment to sameness of outcome. In other words, Sanders values equity over equality.
Sanders is at odds with the Trump administration and over half the country who want schools with programs that treat “individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations” to lose federal funds.
The Trump administration seeks to withhold federal taxpayer dollars from going to schools that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of a minor student, including through school staff or teachers or through deliberately concealing the minor’s social transition from the minor’s parents” and from schools that sexually integrate restrooms and sports.
That’s a bridge too far for the deceitful activist Sanders who secretly sexually integrated restrooms and locker rooms in District U-46 in 2016 when he was the district’s superintendent.
I wrote about this shameful story of a grievous injustice perpetrated against not just parents but also the one honest board member in the district at the time—a story that should have prevented Sanders from ever being promoted to the position he now holds.
As justification for defying President Trump’s executive order, Sanders points to Illinois’ disastrous 2019 law that mandates that starting in kindergarten, public school students must be taught positively about the “roles and contributions” of homosexuals and crossdressers. Here’s a mildly revised version of what I wrote at the time:
In order to teach all children in grades K-12 about the roles and contributions of homosexuals and cross-dressers, lawmakers and school leaders must have first determined that there is nothing morally questionable about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation. To prove that’s the case, ask yourselves if Illinois lawmakers would pass a bill that requires schools to teach about the roles and contributions of polyamorists, sex workers, kin-lovers, or zoophiles.
We all know they wouldn’t. If there were a polyamorist, sex worker, kin-lover, or zoophile who had contributed something monumentally significant—so significant that it must be discussed—educators would talk about the contribution, while remaining mum about the contributor’s sexual peccadillo. If the peccadillo were brought up, teachers certainly wouldn’t describe it positively.
Why wouldn’t they? Surely, there are some kids who experience unchosen, powerful, and persistent sexual attraction to multiple people at the same time, or identify as a sex worker wannabe, or who love a relative, or have an erotic attraction to animals. Why wouldn’t lawmakers require that the contributions of polyamorists, sex workers, kin-lovers, and zoophiles be taught and that their sexual proclivities/identities be positively affirmed? Is the reason for not affirming these identities that they’re judgmental, puritanical, non-inclusive, intolerant, hateful bigots?
Sanders has personally concluded that homoerotic attraction and the desire to masquerade as the opposite sex constitute “cultures” that must be “uplifted” in public school curricula. So, far, he hasn’t yet concluded that other sexual predilections constitute cultures meriting curricular upliftment. Just give him a few more years of evolution.
Meanwhile those parents whose religious beliefs include the view that homosexual acts and cross-sex impersonation are disordered and injurious do not enjoy the privilege of seeing their cultures uplifted in curricula. Funny how that works.
Axios activist Shepherd asserts that “Studies have shown that creating a more inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ students through history lessons, professional development for teachers, and gender and sexuality alliance groups leads to more positive outcomes for LGBTQ+ students.”
I spent a bit of time looking into the research Shepherd cites to support her activist position in favor of leftist gender dogma in public school curricula and professional development. Surprise, surprise, it comes from leftist researchers and organizations like the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. One of the central goals of these researchers is to eradicate stigma, which is a euphemistic way of saying schools should eradicate moral beliefs that leftists don’t like, which is clearly not the role of public educators.
Public schools have anti-bullying policies that prohibit physical and verbal bullying. Efforts to use anti-bullying sentiments to eradicate conservative moral beliefs via indoctrination with leftist ontological and moral beliefs are misguided and unethical.
Axios’ activist Shepherd would be well-served by reading this month’s article by Professor Mark Regnerus titled “The Dirty Science” published in First Things magazine. Regnerus is a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and president of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture.
Regnerus offers a firsthand account of the politicized assaults from within the academy on research results that contravene the assumptions and desires of the “LGBT+” communities and their allies.
Regnerus’ story of what happened to him and his description of the state of gender and sexuality research should deeply trouble all fair-minded, compassionate people committed to truth:
The saga has a lesson for us about the ideological capture of the scientific community: No one is trusted to collect and evaluate social science data on LGBTQ topics who does not assent to certain analytic decisions and conclusions that flow from them. That’s not science, of course. That’s collusion.
The chief end of public education is not to help children and teens feel good about their feelings. The misbegotten notion that schools should (or must) be places where adults help children feel good about all their feelings presupposes that all feelings emerge from some metaphysical reservoir of truth.
While teaching children math, science, world languages, reading, and writing, schools should be places where children are kept physically safe from the predations of other children and adults. Ideally, schools would be places where children’s mental health would be protected as well, but that ship sailed when the sexual revolution barge rammed into our schools. Schools can no longer protect and preserve the mental health of children because the people in charge have no understanding of mental health.
The adults who have colonized and control public education think that mental illness is a sign of mental health, and, therefore, they seek to affirm mental illness and ensure that their false beliefs become systemic.
Of course children who have no standards for assessing the goodness or rightness of particular desires would prefer to be educated in a place where they never encounter a dissenting idea, where no one is permitted to look askance at their fetish-driven costumes, where no peer may titter when Mary insists everyone call her “he,” or where girls flee the locker room when John enters and starts to undress. But such a place is not, in reality, a safe space. It’s an oppressive, destructive space that harms all children, including those in thrall to moral and ontological delusion.
Our publicly subsidized schools are now controlled by men and women who lack the ability to think soundly about the necessary limits of self-identities constituted by subjective feelings and of the critical place of moral reasoning. As such, public schools are no longer fit for the training up of children.
Not one public dollar should go to subsidize harm being done to children via gender and sexuality indoctrination. Kudos to President Trump.