Battleground CRT, “Sex Ed for Social Change”
Scott Sidney May 2022
Ever since the grand pandemic of 2020 parents on both sides of the political spectrum discovered lessons children were learning in their local schools. What they found alarmed them.
The first thing parents uncovered was a curriculum based in racist advocacy called Critical Race Theory (CRT). Christopher Rufo, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute describes teaching that primary and secondary school students were receiving.
“[A] deeply divisive ideology of race essentialism, offering a distorted account of American life to promote a set of radical political ideas. [T]hat America was founded on and defined by racism and that our founding principles, our Constitution, and our way of life should be overthrown.”
The educational establishment both denied CRT was being taught and then not only defended the practice but also insisted it would continue.
Parents in Virginia, having become aware of questionable school curricula, were horrified. They revolted resulting in the November 2021 election to Governor of Glenn Youngkin running on a platform of parental rights. The impetus behind Youngkin’s victory was an assertion by his opponent, Terry McCauliffe, who stated, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
In the wake of that momentous election Progressive school board members were being recalled across the country. Even in the overwhelmingly reliable Progressive stronghold of San Francisco board members were recalled. Parents cited board overreach and “pushing progressive politics instead of acting in the best interests of children.” Ballotpedia wrote of the nationwide phenomenon, “This is the highest number of school board recalls Ballotpedia has tracked in one year since our tracking began in 2010.”
The National Association of School Boards (NASB) fought back penning a letter to the Biden Administration asking the Justice Department to declare protesting parents “Domestic Terrorists” and to use the FBI to threaten parents if they oppose school boards during school board meetings. The tactic backfired spectacularly with many local school boards still withdrawing their membership from NASB.
CRT was just the first flash point in a battle to control school children. Parents are now on high alert for curricula they find objectionable or age-inappropriate. It didn’t take long to discover another disturbing activity: schools were introducing sexual politics to children as young as six.
Amid historically unprecedented increased reports of female gender dysphoria, parents started seeing how school policies, administrators, and teachers encouraged youngsters to first embrace a biologically untenable transformation but also to keep appropriated “transgender” identities from their parents. In fact the school district in Eau Claire, Wisconsin instructed teachers that parents do not have a right to know how their child may identify themselves sexually.
This all came to a head, again, when Florida passed a “Parental Rights Bill” that the usual suspects on the left dubbed, “The Don’t Say Gay” bill. As with every issue that the far left Progressives oppose, they lie about the legislation and its contents. But the purpose of the Parental Rights legislation is to, "reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children in a specified manner.”
While the bill was pending, and in a fit of juvenile obtuseness, adult Florida teachers paraded through their school halls chanting, “Gay! Gay! Gay!” We all know that sex is a difficult enough dynamic for adults to grasp, navigate or even understand. Making intimate human biological forces public school pageantry destroys any respect towards others turning sex into a political performance of singular self indulgence.
In an interview appearing on the Indiana NPR/PBS affiliate wfyi web page, Nora Gelperin (director of sex education and training with Advocates for Youth) reacted to opposition by stating, “It's all part of the same movement by well-funded far-right organizations.”
In the same interview SIECUS reported, “[T]here were 73 “parental rights” bills introduced this year, including the Florida law opponents dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade.”
SIECUS is the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. The SIECUS tagline from their website is, “Advancing sex ed for social change since 1964. [SEICUS] advances comprehensive sexuality education as a means of building a foundation for a long-term culture shift.” In a bid to achieve their ideological leftist “culture shift” Progressive Democrats are not above using blackmail as in this: “Biden Admin: K-12 Schools Must Put Boys In Girls’ Bathrooms To Get Federal Lunch Money.”
These are not tactics a representative government uses to negotiate compromise between opposing points of view. This is authoritarian rule.
Both CRT and Parental Rights are issues over which parents are going to war with educational and administrative autocrats who believe children are wards of the state and do not belong to parents. Leftists believe controlling children advances their far-left agenda: uniformity of thought, one party governance. They defame anyone getting in their way; anyone disagreeing with their imperious plans. There will certainly be more battles. It’s a war over control of the country’s future.
Op-Ed by Scott Sidney