If you want to know what “progressive” teachers think of conservative parents, please take a gander at the following blog post from recently retired Deerfield High School English teacher (and former colleague) David Hirsch. On October 6, 2022, Hirsch published a post titled, “Watch Out Parents: Big Conservative Is Not Just Coming After Teachers and Librarians” in which he makes a number of mindboggling claims. Warning—Irony Alert:

We need to talk about how you are interacting with your children at home. What are you teaching them? How are you modeling well? Are you making the right choices – the best choices? Would your legislators and political leaders approve of how you are raising your children? Do you talk about CRT? Are you too accepting of gender non-conforming behavior or ideas? Would you allow your child to use they/them pronouns? If so, Big Conservative might knock on your door for this kind of thought crime.

We hear about parents’ choice. That is the rationale for a slew of censorship across more than a dozen states. However, which parents? What choices? For the most part, these book-banning (and sometimes burning) movements are aligned with a far wrong wing political agenda. They do not reflect ALL parents’ choices, just a specific conservative religious and usually white one.

So this isn’t just about parents having a say in what their kids read in school. This is about ideologues having control over your children’s educations. Teachers and librarians were the first to experience this intense scrutiny and vitriol, but this movement will not end with them.

You may think, what I teach my children in my own home is not anyone’s business but my own – and you would be right as long as what you were doing was aligned with Big Conservative. But if it is not, your behavior might be labeled child abuse and you as a negligent parent.

Several states banned children who identify as a gender other than the one assigned at birth from receiving any interventions. They criminalized the act of assisting these children from even exploring anything beyond their gender at birth – even if their parents did it!

So if you are looking at teachers and librarians and thinking, just pick less controversial texts, just make your lessons about the subject area and not about social issues, know this: that same message will be tailored for parents who don’t agree with the censors and extremists.

Let’s go one step further: How will these wrong wing censors know you are veering away from their prescribed curriculum? Your children will tell them. The idea that children would “turn in” their parents was common in totalitarian and fascist regimes. Whether it was the Hitler Youth, the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers, or Communist Youth reading Mao’s Little Red Book, this technique has deep roots in authoritarian governments’ control of parenting.

… this is just the first battle in a larger war for who decides what your child learns – in and out of school.

As with abortion, immigration, and elections, choice just means sticking with Big Conservative’s point of view; freedom means the right to express opinions that echo specific politicians in a specific party. They are not advocating for freedom and choice, they are creating vehicles to coerce and control – and their reach will not end at the schoolhouse – if we don’t stop it, it is going to ram through the door and enter your house!

Time and space don’t permit addressing all of Hirsch’s risible rhetoric and claims, but I’ll try to cover the most ironic.

1.) What constitutes “Big Conservative”? Regressive leftists control public schools, teachers’ unions; academia (including college and university departments of English, library science, political science, education, and theater); the American Library Association; the National Council of Teachers of English; the Modern Language Association; the Illinois State Board of Education; most press outlets; the FBI; the American Psychological Association; the American Medical Association; the American Academy of Pediatrics; the publishing industry; Hollywood; the Nobel Committee for Literature; and social media.

No member of “Big Conservative” has made any demands regarding what pronouns parents use with their own children in their own homes. Meanwhile conservative teachers have lost their jobs for refusing to use incorrect pronouns with students. Leftist teachers and even school districts are openly calling for faculty to conceal from parents if their child is pretending to be the opposite sex at school. Leftist teachers openly admit on TikTok that they seek to indoctrinate other people’s children with leftist views on sex and gender. California will usurp custody of gender-dysphoric children who manage to make it to la-la land from other states.

2.) Hirsch next refers to “wrong wing book-banners” and “burners.” I watch and read a fair amount of news, but somehow, I missed stories about book burners. I have, however, seen firsthand how leftists in public schools ban books. I saw it at Deerfield High School. They do it clandestinely by simply never choosing materials that dissent from whatever leftist ideas they want to advance.

For example, during my last three years (2005-2008) of employment in the writing center at District 113’s Deerfield High School, multiple teachers taught material that espoused leftist views of homosexuality in Freshman Advisory, English classes, and theater classes. Not one of these teachers presented resources that espoused dissenting ideas.

Similarly, the school library had scores of books espousing leftist views on homosexuality and race, while having not one book espousing conservative views.

I viewed this imbalance as evidence of book-banning aligned with a leftwing agenda and pedagogically dangerous, but not Hirsch. Does Hirsch think teachers can help kids learn to think critically without reading material from the best thinkers on both sides of controversial cultural debates?

3.) Victim Hirsch refers to “intense scrutiny and vitriol” experienced by poor, pitiful, put-upon leftist teachers and librarians. To whom and what is he referring? Is he referring to parents justifiably angry about the obscene material teachers select to teach to kids, like when his colleagues Jeff Berger-White and Elliot Hurtig taught the eye-poppingly obscene Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes? Or is he referring to heated school board meetings when presumptuous teachers have gotten their long overdue come-uppance for teaching the obscene comic book Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe?

Maybe Hirsch should publish a post sharing what his DHS colleagues say about conservative parents behind the scenes. Readers concerned about “vitriol” might be interested. And maybe Hirsch could share the truth that leftist teachers don’t want any scrutiny. They want to create the selection criteria that allows them to select books that align with their beliefs and values and deselect (i.e., ban) books that challenge their beliefs and values.

Leftist teachers want absolute autonomy to choose to teach whatever they want and say whatever they want in their classrooms. And don’t believe any leftist teachers who say they want parents to be “advocates” for their own children. Those teachers unequivocally do not want conservative parents advocating for their children if that advocacy cramps leftist style.

4.) Hirsch frets that several states have banned gender-dysphoric children from receiving interventions. What he neglected to mention is that the interventions banned for gender-dysphoric minors are medical interventions with irreversible effects and for which there are no long-term studies proving their safety.

Ever the propagandist, Hirsch describes such bans as “criminalizing” the act of exploring gender. No, lawmakers are criminalizing untested medical interventions that cause irreversible effects. The “trans” cult claims “gender” has nothing to do with physical embodiment (which is why the claim that doctors “assign gender at birth” is so absurd). Leftists claim “gender” is constituted by subjective, internal feelings about one’s maleness, femaleness, both, or neither. Therefore, “exploring gender” does not require altering biochemistry or lopping off body parts.

5.) Hirsch frets too about children sharing with their own parents what is taught in publicly subsidized classrooms. He compares children who tell their parents what government employees/public servants are teaching in the classroom to Hitler Youth and Mao’s Communist Youth.

Can Hirsch really not see how his analogy grotesquely fails? Hitler and Mao used children to turn on their parents by reporting to the government. Teachers like Hirsch are the government. He wants children to align themselves ideologically with the government against their own parents—just as Hitler and Mao did.

To make clear his point, in Hirsch’s screed to leftist teachers, he refers to their students as “your children,” saying “Your children will tell them.”  The students of leftist teachers are not those teachers’ children. Hirsch inadvertently happened on one truth: This technique of separating children ideologically from their parents has deep roots in authoritarian control of parenting. Hirsch just can’t get right who the authoritarians are.

6.) Finally, ironist Hirsch warns that conservative parents—you know, “far–wrong wingers”—are the ones who abuse the rhetoric of freedom and choice in their unholy quest to “coerce and control,” a quest that will not “end at the schoolhouse door.” Hirsch believes the conservative quest to control “will ram through” the front doors of leftists. Hirsch’s solution? Leftist teachers must stop conservative parents now—in public schools.

Conservatives, GET OUT NOW.

postscript: Hirsch returned to DHS for two days in November to talk to students, librarians, and teachers. I wonder if he told kids from conservative families that he views them as “far-wrong wingers.”

WARNING: Not for younger readers

Let’s hope that audience members at the Dan Savage speaking engagement this coming Sunday, April 29, 2012 at Elmhurst College demonstrate the good sense and courage that several high school students recently demonstrated.

Dan Savage, the vulgar, vitriol-spewing, homosexual sex columnist was for some bizarre reason invited to be the Friday keynote speaker at a national convention for high school journalism students held in Seattle, Washington last week.

Savage, being Savage, employed his usual anti-religious, obscene rhetoric, and when some offended high school students walked out, the middle-aged Savage called them “pansies.”

In the convention’s program, Savage is described as a “popular, sex advice columnist” who offers “frank, funny advice on sex and relationships” and “creates a safe space for all audiences to discuss ‘taboo’ topics.” Two things to note: 1. The event planners knew exactly what they were getting in hiring Savage for an event for high school students. 2. In academia, a “safe space” means a place where volitional homosexuality must be affirmed as moral. The presence of any dissenting ideas renders a space “unsafe.”

After Savage’s presentation, faculty adviser for students from Overland Park, Kansas, Jim Mccrossen, told his students that “‘it is important to be challenged in what you believe because you never become stronger in anything if you are not challenged.'” When I worked at Deerfield High School, English teacher Jeff Berger-White made this same claim in our local press when defending his decision to teach the obscene, homosexuality-affirming play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by homosexual playwright Tony Kushner:

‘There are going to be times during their years in high school, if we (teachers) are doing are (sic) jobs well, when most students should feel intellectually, emotionally, and even morally challenged.’ 

Some questions emerge from these teachers’ claims: First, is it really the job of public high school teachers to challenge students emotionally and morally? Second, if it is, how often do teachers in public schools provide resources or activities that challenge “progressive” views of homosexuality? How often do they have students read essays by scholars who dissent from the views of Dan Savage or Tony Kushner? How many students have read an essay by Princeton law professor Robert George or Providence College English professor Anthony Esolen or Amherst professor Hadley Arkes? How many students have read any essays at all by a conservative scholar on topics related to homosexuality?

Dan Savage’s signature project, the effort for which he is most well-known, is the “It Gets Better” Campaign in which actors, politicians, and ordinary people affirm homosexuality while telling hurting kids who experience same-sex attraction that life will get better. This has the superficial gloss of a positive message but is based on foundational assumptions that are ultimately socially irresponsible, intellectually bankrupt, and an affront to human dignity — the very opposite of the values Elmhurst College claims to hold.

Here are some of the values and visions that Elmhurst College affirms:

Mission

Elmhurst College inspires its students…to prepare for …ethical work in a multicultural, global society. … [W]e foster learning, broaden knowledge, and enrich culture through…scholarship.

Vision for the Future

Elmhurst College …asks our students to become… academically grounded, intellectually engaged, and socially responsible citizens, who understand and respect the diversity of the world’s cultures and peoples.

Core Values

Intellectual Excellence
We value intellectual freedom, curiosity, and engagement; [and] rigorous debate.

Community
We are committed to… mutual respect among all persons…and fairness and integrity in all that we do.

Stewardship
We are committed stewards of the human, fiscal, and physical resources entrusted to us.

Faith, Meaning, and Values
We value the development of the human spirit in its many forms and the exploration of life’s ultimate questions through dialogue and service. We value religious freedom and its expressions on campus. Grounded in our own commitments and traditions as well as those of the United Church of Christ, we cherish values that create lives of intellectual excellence, strong community, social responsibility, and committed stewardship.

Let’s see if Dan Savage reflects the mission of Elmhurst College to prepare students for “ethical work”; or its vision to have students become “academically grounded” and socially responsible citizens who “respect the diversity of the world’s peoples”; or the college’s core values regarding “mutual respect,” “integrity,” “intellectual excellence,” and “social responsibility.”

Here are some quotes from Savage (with links to videos, lest anyone think I’m cherry-picking quotes or pulling them out of context):

He describes conservative Christians like “Tony Perkins” as “right-wing, fundamentalist, bat sh*t, a**h*le, dou**ebag Christians,” and as the “Evangelical Taliban Christian Family Association.” He also tells “progressive” Christians to start “screaming in Tony Perkins’ face.”  I wonder if such rhetoric creates a “safe space” for people who hold orthodox, historical theological beliefs?

Even with asterisks, I can’t repeat what Savage says at his speaking engagements. If you choose to watch the ones we’ve provided links to, bear in mind that Savage has an adopted son who was between 10-12 years old when Savage was saying things publicly that no father should say even privately (WARNING—GRAPHIC,  OBSCENE LANGUAGE):  HERE, HERE,  HERE, HERE and HERE.  (UPDATE:  We discovered last night that a number of Savage’s YouTube videos were removed after this article was published.)

What is ironic is that after Rush Limbaugh used offensive language to describe a feminist activist, the Obama Administration took him to task, but even Dan Savage’s well-documented history of referring to conservative Christians as “bat sh*t, a**h*le, d**chebags” and advocating the most perverse sexual practices in the most foul language doesn’t stop President Obama from inviting him to the White House.

Elmhurst College claims to value “rigorous debate,” the “exploration of life’s ultimate questions through dialogue,” intellectual engagement, and diversity. If so, will the college be inviting speakers who espouse different views of the nature and morality of homosexuality than Savage and who do so in a different manner, that is to say, without obscene language that degrades rather than develops the human spirit.

Savage’s invitation seems to be part of a larger effort on the part of Elmhurst College to promote arguable assumptions about the nature and morality of homosexuality. Some months ago, Elmhurst College made the national news for being the first college in the nation to ask on its college application whether applicants identify as homosexual, bisexual, or transgender. The administration defended this question by asserting an offensive and absurd comparison of race to conditions constituted by subjective desire and volitional sexual acts.

In so doing, Elmhurst College administrators reveal their own ignorance. And by promoting contemporary ideas about “LGBT identity,” they reveal their theological heresy — not that theological orthodoxy is important to Elmhurst College, which bears virtually no imprint of its theological heritage. But boy oh boy does it proudly show the mark of sexual unorthodoxy to which even pedagogical soundness must bow in obeisance.

Elmhurst College’s Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel, which once echoed with the thoughtful, civil voices of Elie Weisel and Martin Luther King Jr., will now be polluted by the odious rhetoric of Dan Savage.