Illinois’ opportunistic governor and his Springfield collaborators just can’t stay out of the national klieg lights—lights which are illuminating everything that goes wrong whenever leftists are in charge.
In the past two weeks, Illinois has garnered national attention for the dubious honor of being the first state to require all public schools to “screen” students in grades 3-12 for mental health problems. On July 31, the paternalistic Pritzker signed this intrusive, presumptuous, and costly bill into law.
At the bill signing, Pritzer proclaimed that mandatory mental health screenings will “help us break down the stigma that too often is a barrier to seeking help.” What exactly is his conclusive proof for such a claim? Has anyone asked for it? And is stigma-dismantling the job of public schools?
Then there’s the question of whether leftists in public schools are able to provide help. Chicago public schools can’t even teach arithmetic.
For decades, Democrat beliefs, values, practices, policies, and laws have been instrumental in the creation of the miasmic culture that has led to increased emotional and mental problems among children, and Illinois Democrats believe they have the solution.
The insidious beliefs and policies about sexuality, gender, marriage, family, and religion that have sprouted from the malformed, polymorphously perverse imaginations of leftists since the 1950s and 1960s have damaged children in myriad and incalculable ways. And now leftists think their malformed imaginations can fix the children they’ve harmed.
Second wave feminists poisoned the hearts and minds of multiple generations about the nature, purposes, and roles of women, men, marriage, and the family.
The false and disturbing ideas of women like Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Catherine MacKinnon continue to bear rotten fruit.
Perverts like Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner then came along dragging their sexual obsessions out of their closets and fever dreams and into the open where they metastasized and gave other men the freedom to indulge libidinous impulses—impulses that must be restrained if we have any hope of creating a culture conducive to human flourishing.
The development of oral contraception coincided with and threw into high gear the sexual revolution.
Disordered sexual predilections like homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation found the soil they needed to grow like invasive weeds in a well-designed garden.
Sexual activity was severed from procreation and marriage. Procreation was severed from marriage. Sexual activity was severed from biological sex. Marriage was severed from biological sex. And then biological sex was severed from biological sex—that is men started pretending to be women and vice versa.
There remain few social structures that provide a proper understanding of the nature, meaning, purposes, and good of women as women and mothers, men as men and fathers, of marriage, and of sexual activity.
As always when societies cease to function well, children are the first victims.
The nation’s children—at least those in dysfunctional and perverse family structures who spend their formative years in government indoctrination centers—are lost, broken, hurt, and angry. What they don’t need is to be evaluated by Big Brother’s minions—minions schooled in leftist ways of assessing and treating mental health issues.
And obviously, those children raised in happy, healthy, intact families with one mother and one father do not need the state to evaluate their mental health.
Remember, the leftists who are mandating mental health screenings are the same leftists who believe women should be legally permitted to kill their offspring throughout the entire nine months of gestation for any or no reason.
These are the same people who want to help minors access abortions without their parents’ permission or knowledge.
These are the same people who passed a law prohibiting children who experience unwanted to same-sex attraction from being able to access counseling to help unpack potential causes for their feelings and help these children align their feelings with their moral beliefs.
These are the same people who want to prohibit Christians with biblical beliefs on sex and “gender” from being allowed to foster and adopt children who need homes.
These are the same people who want to allow minors to access puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital butchery without their parents’ knowledge and permission.
And these are the same people who shut down schools unnecessarily during the COVID pandemic, which caused mental health problems in many children.
The thoughts and emotions of even healthy children and adolescents are naturally mercurial and malleable. Being asked questions on issues they have not considered has the potential to cause problems where none had existed.
Leftists with few if any boundaries have far less concerns about the suggestibility of children. While conservative parents try to protect their children from exposure to age-inappropriate ideas, leftists have no understanding whatsoever of age-inappropriateness.
Leftists thrive on introducing vulnerable, malleable, suggestible children to radical, subversive, and inappropriate ideas. It’s their stock-in-trade. It’s how leftists socially construct the next generation of unquestioning adult anarchists.
Leftists want children to question everything. Question their parents, question the faith of their families, question taboos, question laws, question their own feelings, question their sex, question their mental health. And in this state of chaos and instability, leftists swoop in, fill the minds of other people’s children with drugs and pernicious ideas. They provide distorted lenses through which they encourage children to view (and misinterpret) their feelings.
Illinois leftists tried getting a similar bill passed in Jan. 2024 as part of an omnibus bill that failed. But leftists never give up, so they tinkered with it—made it even worse—and passed it.
The first attempt, titled the “Wellness Checks in Schools Program Act,” was voluntary for school districts and was “opt-in,” meaning parents had to proactively sign a permission slip or no screening would take place. This new law requires all districts to provide screening, and parents must sign an opt-out form to exempt their child from being screened. If parents forget to sign the opt-out form, their child will be screened.
It’s worth nothing that not one Republican in the Illinois Senate opposed this dreadful bill—not one.
Not all children are mentally unwell, and the solution to the mental health problems of children does not rest with either Big Brother or leftists.
Parents: don’t let agents of change and servants of the puppet masters in Springfield get any further inside your children’s heads than they already are. OPT YOUR KIDS OUT OF MENTAL HEALTH SCREENINGS, set to begin in 2027.