IFI Update: Day of Silence Walkout

The Day of Silence fast approaches, so Illinois Family Institute wants to encourage parents to spread the word about the Walkout. As you call your local high schools, be prepared for evasive, lawyerly responses from administrators.

I just spoke with Mr. Pryma, the principal of Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook IL. When asked whether students would yet again be permitted to remain silent during instructional time in order to participate in the GLSEN-created political action, Day of Silence, Mr. Pryma responded that students have a constitutionally protected right to remain silent all 180 days of the school year. Apparently, with a straight face he is trying to suggest that the expectations for student participation are precisely the same on the Day of Silence as they are on any other day of the school year.

I then told him that generally if students refuse to answer a teacher’s questions or give a presentation, they are disciplined and/or lose points. In other words, a refusal to participate usually results in some negative consequences. I further explained that the ACLU and Lambda legal have written that a “school can regulate what students say. . . and it can also insist that students respond to questions, make presentations, etc.” Mr. Pryma then said that if silence or refusal to speak ever becomes disruptive, the administration will address it.

This is the standard administrative talking point. Administrators publicly claim that this day of political action is not disruptive, often despite the fact that many of their faculty members, including even politically liberal faculty members, do view it as disruptive. When I worked at Deerfield High School, the conservative teachers dreaded the Day of Silence, and even many liberal teachers opposed it. The best teachers want only to teach their subject matter. They have no interest in using their position, their power, and public resources to transform the views of their students to align with their own socio-political values and vision. It is only the activist ideologues who are committed to abusing their positions, their power, and public resources in the service of propagandizing students. And those activists are not educators; they are exploiters.

Mr. Pryma may not realize that many of his own staff as well as many parents and other taxpayers who subsidize public schools do, indeed, view formally sanctioned student silence in the service of a GLSEN-created political action as disruptive.

When I asked Mr. Pryma whether teachers will be allowed to remain silent during instructional time, he responded that “Teachers are required to present lesson plans.” Someone smarter than me will have to figure out whether that it a yes or a no.

Schools are fully capable of combating bullying without implicitly or explicitly affirming controversial, unproven beliefs on the nature and morality of volitional homosexual behavior, and they can certainly combat bullying without allowing instructional time to be hijacked for political protests. Public educators who acquiesce to the exploitation of public education for political purposes are either activist ideologues or spineless cowards, trembling at the specter of the GLSEN bullies tarring them as bigoted homophobes.

Virtually all organizations committed to legitimizing homosexual behavior seek to use public education to accomplish their morally dubious social goals. And they have all ages of children in their sights. Organizations like GLSEN, the Safe Schools Coalition, the National Education Association, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Anti-Defamation League seek to expose even elementary school students to their pernicious ideology using public money. These organizations seek to eradicate the belief that marriage is intrinsically and objectively the union of one man and one woman. They seek to eradicate the view that volitional homosexual behavior is profoundly immoral. They seek even to normalize “transgenderism.” And they seek to use public money to advance these radical, subversive, corrosive sexual views.

How young do children have to be before the conservative community will, with courage, conviction, vigor, perseverance, and boldness, take a stand against the use of public money to inculcate children with evil ideas that will result in sexual anarchy and untold suffering?

Parents, call your local high school and middle school principals and ask whether students and/or teachers will be allowed to remain silent during instructional time without consequences in support of the GLSEN-created political action DOS. If they answer yes, call your child out of school. If we don’t oppose the usurpation of public resources to advance destructive and unproven ethical beliefs, their presence will only increase. Don’t let your children see acquiescent conformity as way to negotiate life, and don’t leave to your children a society of in which sexual deviance is celebrated and truth is censored.