A Homewood-Flossmoor reporter for the Southtown Star, John Ryan, posted a criticism of my article about a Homewood elementary school that has spent public money on the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum. In it, he explained that he “requested the Illinois Family Institute forward . . . the names of any parents from the Homewood area they’ve heard from who have a problem with the program.”
First, IFI does not give out the names of parents who contact us about school issues. Second, my article was not written in response to a parental complaint. I wrote it to expose the content of SEED to the uninitiated and uninformed. Many schools spend public funds on SEED, and very few parents know with any degree of detail what SEED is all about. That certainly is the case in Deerfield where the school in which I worked until last August has offered SEED for many years. In all communication with the public, the administration provides brief, general descriptions with benign-sounding phrases that conceal the highly politicized, leftist nature of the foundational theories on which SEED is based. I would expect that few Homewood-area parents or community members are familiar with the specific content of SEED training for staff and faculty.
Mr. Ryan mentioned seeing little evidence of SEED’s promotion of homosexuality in the third-grade class he observed. But I never claimed that the third-grade version included what the adult version includes. What I said was that when the District newsletter described the SEED teacher-training, it failed to mention the fact that the SEED curriculum for teachers addresses homosexuality. As evidence for my claim that SEED promotes liberal views of homosexuality in the teacher-training program, I provided both the analysis by Barbara Anderson and the book titles that SEED has recommended in the past.
My point is that taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to fund the promotion of arguable, unproven theories about the nature and morality homosexuality, and District 153 has, indeed, used public funds to subsidize the leftist agenda of SEED through the seminars offered to teachers.
But apparently the issue of homosexuality has been introduced to Churchill elementary school children which I didn’t expect. Mr. Ryan reported that he “asked Jeanette Nichols, a Churchill teacher who instructs the SEED sessions with students, if she’s ever addressed the issue of homosexual orientation, [and] she said only as part of a lesson on how derogatory terms can hurt people.” This is how all organizations committed to normalizing homosexuality maneuver the topic into public schools. They use anti-bullying and “safe-school” programs to normalize homosexuality.
Historically, anti-bullying programs focused on non-behavioral conditions like race, biological sex, physical appearance, or disability. There is no evidence that homosexuality is analogous to race or biological sex, which are immutable, heritable conditions with no behavioral implications. Homosexuality is inextricably connected to behavior that many view as profoundly immoral. Therefore, homosexuality is ontologically much more similar to polyamory, which is the emotional and sexual attraction to multiple people at the same time, than it is to race or biological sex.
Imagine a school anti-bullying program that would define polyamory to third-graders, tell them that they should never call polyamorists derogatory names, and that they should try to see things from a polyamorist’s perspective. I assume and hope that the community would vigorously oppose such a program.
And why would they oppose it? Would they oppose it because they want polyamorists to be bullied? Of course not. The reason that society doesn’t include immoral behaviors in anti-bullying programs is that sensible people realize that to do so would have the unintended effect of undermining legitimate and necessary moral disapproval. In other words, if we include conditions defined by immoral behavior in anti-bullying programs, we will eradicate not just bullying, but we will also eradicate the belief that the immoral behavior is wrong.
Children and even adults fail to make the distinction between uncomfortable feelings that result from bullying and uncomfortable feelings that result from moral disapproval. If children hear that bullying makes kids feel bad and that moral disapproval makes kids feel bad, they will come to believe that their legitimate moral disapproval is tantamount to bullying, which is exactly what supporters of programs like SEED are hoping will happen.
Mr. Ryan is also bothered by my disparagement of the term “social justice.” What Mr. Ryan apparently doesn’t know is that the term means something entirely different from justice. It’s an innocuous-sounding term that grows out of “critical theory” and masks a particular set of troubling philosophical commitments.
As I’ve written before, “social justice” theory as embodied by SEED and promoted by the likes of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and deceased Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, is essentially repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. Social justice theory emphasizes redistribution of wealth and values uniformity of economic and social position over liberty. Social justice advocates seek to use the force of government to establish economic uniformity.
Its other dominant features pertain to race, gender, class, and sexual orientation/ identity/ expression. Social justice theory as I’m describing it encourages people to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics that demarcates groups according to which group constitutes the “oppressors” and which the “oppressed.” Those who are identified as the “oppressors” need not have committed any acts of actual persecution or oppression, nor feel any sense of superiority toward or dislike of the supposed “oppressed” class. The problem with social justice theory is that it promotes the idea that “institutional racism,” as opposed to actual acts of mistreatment of individuals by other individuals is the cause of differing lots in life.
Social justice theorists cultivate the racist, sexist, heterophobic stereotype that whites, males, and heterosexuals are oppressors. For example, the preeminent “social justice” advocate at Deerfield High School, English teacher Dan Cohen, has said repeatedly that those who are white, male, and heterosexual are oppressors. This is an offensive, prejudiced stereotype that robs minorities of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives, telling them that their lot in life cannot improve through their own efforts but only through an appropriate degree of self-flagellation on the parts of the purported oppressors. It cultivates a sense of perpetual victimization and powerlessness on the parts of minorities and an irrational and illegitimate sense of guilt on the parts of whites, or men, or heterosexuals.
Finally, social justice theory is distinctly anti-American and hyper-focuses on America’s mistakes and failings. Social justice theory diminishes or ignores the remarkable success America has achieved in integrating virtually every ethnic and racial group in the world, and in enabling people to improve their lots in life through economic opportunity and American principles of liberty and equality.
Critical thinkers, whether parents, teachers, students, or reporters need to study the ideas of both “social justice” proponents and critics of social justice/critical theory. If Mr. Ryan is truly invested in learning about “social justice” theory, he might want to look to someone other than Jeanette Nichols. He might want to spend some time reading what F.A. Hayek, Antony Flew, Sol Stern, and Thomas Sowell say about it. I suspect they’ve thought about it more deeply than Ms. Nichols.
If Mr. Ryan is interested in another perspective on social justice theory, he could start here.
You can contact Mr. Ryan at jryan@southtownstar.com
