Why are so many public schools in Illinois keeping so many secrets from the public? Last August, Christopher Rufo disclosed that Lurie’s Children’s Hospital, unbeknownst to parents or the general public, was collaborating with Chicago area schools to promote “radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204.” Three of these school districts are elementary districts and one is a high school district.

We don’t know how many other school districts receive training from Lurie. But we have learned of at least one other, Palatine School District 15, another elementary school district. In January, Dawn Ravine, Lurie’s Sexuality Education Program Coordinator reportedly provided training to the District’s P.E./Health teachers during a planned institute day.

When parents learned of this training that was provided to the teachers, it came as a surprise since the District had voted to reject the National Sex Ed Standards. Why are the teachers being taught about subjects that were part of those standards, the parents asked? The District 15 school board did nothing to resolve the confusion. Instead of explaining the purpose of the training, the board Chair attacked the critics as liars at the most recent board meeting last week.

Does the school board even know why the training was held?

It appears that this training first exposed by Rufo has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the National Sex Ed Standards will be implemented by any specific district. Instead, it appears to be the result of guidance directed by the Illinois State Board of Education found here.

Several acts and suggested policies were developed after Governor JB Pritzker issued an executive order in 2019 to create a task force to investigate and report on creating affirming and inclusive schools to welcome, support and affirm transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming children and adolescents.  The Task Force issued its report in January, 2020.

It doesn’t look like there was a single conservative, or even a liberal with a differing view, on the Task Force. The ACLU was represented, but neither ADF nor the Thomas More Society were anywhere to be seen. There were several students on the Task Force, but no former students who had de-transitioned. The Task Force sought the views and advice of the Trevor Project, but not the position of the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine. Do you suppose the Governor decided what the report would say before it was written?

The laws, regulations and suggested policies under Pritzker’s administration fully embrace the view that children suffering from gender dysphoria should be affirmed, that children should be allowed to “transition” without parental knowledge or involvement, that trans girls should be allowed to use the same facilities as biological girls and that they be allowed to play on girls teams.

Under Governor Pritzker’s guidance, the Illinois State Board of Education has set up a network of laws, regulations and suggested policies that seemingly tie the hands of local school boards. Ideologically, the board administrators and elected board members in Illinois schools mostly are not inclined to push back against the ISBE. If a majority of the board were so inclined, they likely would get advice from the board lawyers that the schools have to go along with what the state wants. Besides, they would be (and have been) told, suing the state over any issue would be very costly and not good stewardship of public tax funds.

Lost in the discussion is consideration for what is best for the children and what parents want.

Parents are not powerless, however. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on numerous occasions that parents have a right to control what their children are taught. Given the current state of education in Illinois, it might be best for parents to home school their children or to send them to a private faith-based school that focuses on STEM subjects and English. If enough children are pulled out of school, it might prompt a more child and parent friendly environment.

If home schooling or sending children to a sane private school is not possible, the only thing that can be done is for parents to opt their children out of everything they don’t like—sex ed, SEL, counseling by any member of the school staff or any contractor, instruction on any subject other than math, science, biology, engineering, technology, English, or other subject the parents might approve. At the very least, though, parents will have to closely monitor what their children are taught in those classes–what textbooks, websites, videos, research projects, etc.

Illinois government, the ISBE, local boards along with the lawyers and administrators they hire, the teachers’ unions, and activist teachers have proven themselves to be completely secretive and untrustworthy. Inaction and inattention have brought us to this point. The result is we get exactly the government we deserve and there is nobody out there to fix it for us.

Unless parents get involved like they did in Virginia, nothing is going to change.

It has been almost 20 years since it has been documented that children in our schools are in grave danger of being sexually abused by teachers.  In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft completed a U.S. Department of Education sponsored study on Educator Sexual Misconduct.  The seminal findings showed that 9.6 percent of children in our schools, public and private, are victims of educator sexual misconduct sometime between kindergarten and 12^th grade.

Almost nothing has been done about this.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS), at least, has begun to make some steps toward addressing the imminent threat to children by expanding the CPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) and greatly increasing the capability to investigate abuse allegations. They have had some success.

According to their recently released report, from late 2018 until the end of 2022 the OIG opened a little over 1,700 cases and closed almost 1, 400, leaving 300 plus cases still open. With 30 investigators on their staff, that’s not bad.

What is not so good is only 16 criminal charges wound up being filed against the accused and not all of them were convicted. It is not clear how many were convicted or what sentences they received. Moreover, we don’t even know who they were. In the CPS OIG report they are not named. Incredible.

We also don’t know how many of the accused were fired, lost their license, or merely received some kind of internal discipline. One teacher shared “images from a pornographic website while sharing his screen with students,” supposedly inadvertently. The Board gave him a “Level Three Performance Improvement Plan,” whatever that is. It’s essentially nothing. Why?

It appears that most of the accused are still working for CPS, but who knows?

Reading between the lines of the OIG report, it appears that the CPS administration and the Board have to dance delicately through the contractual minefield set up by the teachers unions to protect all teachers regardless of what they might have done. Why would there be any question about firing a teacher who shows pornography to children, whether it was on purpose or accidentally? That teacher should be gone and any union that stands behind him or her discredits itself.

Historically and even to this day, very little attention has been focused on the predators in our schools.  In 2021, Illinois State Representative Michelle Mussman (D-Schaumburg) introduced House Bill 1975, supposedly to address sexual abuse in the schools.  That bill requires educating teachers about educator sexual abuse and how to recognize the signs of “grooming.”  It is a common practice of child sexual predators to “groom,” or seduce, children over a long period of time.  Essentially, the predator will develop an increasingly intimate relationship with the child, introduce secrecy at some point, and eventually sexualize the relationship.

Mussman named the act “Faith’s Law,” after Faith Colson, a former Schaumburg High School Student who had been groomed and sexually exploited by one of her teachers starting in 2001. Based on Dr. Shakeshaft’s study we know that Faith was only one of an estimated 16,000 students in Illinois who were abused by an educator that year.

But what does this bill do to prevent what happened to Faith and 16,000 other Illinois children in 2001? Not much, if anything. The bill requires that teachers be trained to recognize grooming behavior, schools to set up policies to establish better boundaries between teachers and students, and to create a list of sexual abuse response and prevention resources to be made available to the public. The bill also expands grooming beyond electronic activity to include in person and third-party conduct.

This proposal proves that our legislators, including Mussman, simply do not take the protection of childhood innocence seriously, or are too uninformed themselves to fashion a solution.

How could anyone graduate with a childhood education degree and not know what grooming is?  There are mountains of published papers on grooming.  Everyone even remotely connected to issues of child protection knows that grooming behaviors should be viewed as a giant red flag.  Expanding the grooming law does little since you must prove intent to abuse to prosecute.  That’s almost impossible until after the abuse occurs.

Libraries already are filled with sexual abuse prevention resources, most of which nobody reads.  Just ask your librarian.  As for creating policies that establish appropriate boundaries between teacher and student?  If this hasn’t already been done in every school the people in charge should be prosecuted for malfeasance.

This law is little more than virtue signaling.

One reason the problem is so large is due the teachers’ unions.  They actively protect teachers who are predators.  Examples are everywhere of the unions shielding teachers who regularly engage in grooming behaviors.  The unions will not let them be fired.  Teachers have been known to assign obscene materials to children to read as part of a class assignment and nothing happens to the teacher. Even when caught sexually abusing children the unions often go to bat for them.

Another problem is the obscenity exemption for teachers in Illinois.  This allows librarians to provide, and teachers to recommend, highly sexualized and often deranged and perverted books for children to read or study.  Providing this kind of material to children is a typical grooming behavior of predators.  Such materials are used to begin to sexualize the relationship and to arouse the child.  It’s completely legal in Illinois schools.

Senate Bill 818, which was voted for by Mussman and 59 fellow Illinois House Democrats (all Republicans voted against it), makes the grooming problem even worse.  It mandates that all schools implement sex education programs – Kindergarten to 12^th Grade – which are to be based on the “National Sex Education Standards,” although there is a provision that allows each district to opt out of the standards if they want.

Such a farce.  These “standards” were developed by an ad hoc group of sexual progressives.  In addition to Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, Answer, and Advocates for Youth, a host of other left leaning sexual activists developed the document.

Those who created the standards believe that every person has a right to experience sexual pleasure from birth to death, that children have a right to experience sexual pleasure whenever and with whomever they want, that purity is a false value, and that children should be encouraged to experiment sexually with same and opposite sex relationships.  The standards teach that all sexual activity is good as long as there is mutual consent, disregarding that children cannot legally give consent.

Only a handful of school districts in Illinois opted into the standards. In Chicago they were using the perverse standards even before the law was passed.

The National Sex Education Standards do not call for a class in comprehensive sex ed. No. The standards require that sex ed be infused in every class, that it be part of every subject wherever possible.

These are not standards. This law destroys every remaining sexual standard established over the last two millennia. And it turns every teacher into an accomplice for every predator in our schools. It is institutionalized grooming on a mass scale and neutralizes any possible good, however little, Faith’s Law might have achieved.

Despicable.

There’s a grand act of un-creation taking place all across this nation. Leftists are busy with this ugly business of un-creating decency, order, justice, compassion, and beauty, and children play a central role in this ugly business. To leftists, children are both objects of un-creation and tools for un-creating society. If we want to see with greater clarity the plans leftists have for the nation, there is no better place to examine than Illinois. Let’s hover above Illinois for a few minutes to get a bird’s eye view of this dark project.

Abuse in Chicago Public Schools

On Jan. 1, 2023—a Sunday—the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Chicago Board of Education released its annual report on “investigations into allegations of waste, fraud, financial mismanagement and employee misconduct” between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022. This year’s report cost taxpayers $6.54 million.

(As a noteworthy aside, the CPS spent $97 million of federal pandemic relief money on “academic recovery + social and emotional learning supports.” Further, CPS plans on spending $430 million more of federal money over the next two years for the same academic, social, and emotional learning problems caused by the refusal of Governor J.B. Pritzker to open schools and the refusal of teachers to teach during the pandemic.)

What is revealed in this report should shock all parents of CPS students and all Illinois taxpayers:

The OIG received 1,825 complaints alleging misconduct, waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement at Chicago Public Schools, including allegations of adult-on-student sexual misconduct.” Of those nearly 2,000 complaints, the OIG opened investigations into fewer than half (39.7%).

Of those 1,825 complaints, 470 were sexual allegations.

Because of a 2018 Chicago Tribune exposé of sexual abuse in Chicago public schools, the OIG “created a special Sexual Allegations Unit” which “has grown exponentially into a team of more than 30 … staff responsible for handling hundreds of sexual misconduct allegations per year.” The OIG report describes the number of cases as “extraordinarily high case volume.”

The complaints include allegations of sexual grooming, sexual intercourse, sexual assault, sexual touching, and graphic sexual texts.

Since many victims are afraid to report sexual abuse, Illinoisans can justifiably assume that the numbers of adult-on-student sexual misconduct cases are far higher than 470.

CPS scores

Apparently, faculty are too busy abusing children to teach them how to read, write, add, and subtract. In September 2022, Wirepoints reported on the abysmal academic performance of CPS:

Student achievement remains badly sub-par at CPS. About 70 percent of CPS students in grades 4, 8, and 11 – and 80 percent or more of its tested black students – aren’t proficient in reading and math. In some schools, reading proficiency is still in the low single digits.

Sex Education Law

Shameful, sub-proficient, and stagnating test scores suggest that Illinois lawmakers—a super-duper majority of whom are leftists—don’t care about educating Illinois children, so where do their interests lie? A recent bill from Illinois Senator Ram Villivalam (Democrat from Chicago of course), points to the educational priorities of Illinois’ leftist ideologues. He proposed a tyrannical amendment to Illinois’ already offensive sex education law.

In 2021, Villivalam sponsored a bill mandating that K-12 schools that offer “health and safety” classes must include indoctrination with leftist gender theories and leftist views of homosexuality. But this bill, which became law, allowed schools to opt out of such indoctrination, which 70 percent of schools did. Can’t have that, thought Big Brother Villivalam.

So, he proposed an amendment during this recent lame duck session to remove the school opt-out option. It didn’t pass during the lame duck session, but mark my words, Big Brother Villivalam will, like the Terminator, be back.

Teachers often defend their teaching about sex by claiming they are “experts,” and by claiming what they teach is “age-appropriate,” so let’s spend a minute discussing purported teacher “expertise” and “age-appropriateness.”

Illinois teachers—including teachers in high performing suburban districts—are rarely “experts” in even the disciplines for which they were hired to teach. Don’t believe me? Ask your children’s teachers if they have advanced degrees, and if they do, ask what field their advanced degrees are in. Relatively few teachers pursue advanced degrees in biology, chemistry, physics, English literature, or history. They don’t, because it’s easier to get an advanced degree—and, thereby, increase their salary—in educational policy as opposed to biology, chemistry, physics, English literature, or history.

If they’re not experts in the field for which they were hired to teach, how are they experts in sexuality? What criteria do they use to establish their sexuality expertise bona fides?

And what criteria do they use to determine the “age-appropriateness” of sex education content. Who established those criteria. So many questions taxpayers never ask.

“Trans” policy

Sex is definitely where the “educational” interests of leftists lie, particularly deviant sexuality. Look no further than the Pritzker family that scurries about the world throwing their money and ample weight behind the effort to promote cross-dressing and child mutilation.

Governor Pritzker’s first cousin, whose transonym is “Jennifer” Pritzker, is the cross-dressing man in woman-face who tried to extort the GOP by proclaiming that if the GOP didn’t toe the line as he toes it in his lady pumps, he would take his money and move to the dark side—which he did.

He and the Pritzker family also use their money to fund university and hospital programs around the world to indoctrinate students into the “trans” cult and to mutilate the healthy bodies of children.

On a local level, upon his first election, J. B. Pritzker created a “trans” cultic task force composed of all lefties to socially construct a plan for “transing” public schools.

Now that leftists control public education in Illinois, our shameless governor/chief propagandist hopes to further diminish the influence of parents on their own children. In Pritzker’s second inaugural speech, he announced his evil plans: “I propose we go all in for our children and make preschool available to every family throughout the state,” and “let’s focus on making [college] tuition free for every working-class family.”

Get ‘em while they’re young and keep ‘em.

Research has long established that college and university faculty and administrations skew wildly left. Further, research has demonstrated that of those students who self-censor out of fear of repercussions, well over half are conservative. And this is the “learning” environment where Pritzker seeks to send more students and at taxpayer expense. Pritzker wants to cram as much propaganda into the minds of as many young people as possible, and wants you, conservative friends, to pay for this indoctrination.

To mix bird metaphors, Illinois is both a canary in a coal mine and a buzzard in a killing field.

Conservative parents, get your kids out of government killing fields now before the buzzards devour them.

For those who for years have been battling critical race theory-infused and sexually deviant material in public schools with little help from their friends, recent developments offer a smidge of hope.

I began opposing both types of resources in about 2005 when I was a member of the highly partisan English Department at District 113’s Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore. At that time, my opposition and warnings fell on deaf ears—well, except for the propagandists. Theirs were hostile ears—very hostile.

Teachers in District 113 were pushing CRT-tainted content in the classroom and in what is loosely called “professional” development. Teachers who claimed to “honor all voices” and “value diversity” were pushing leftist assumptions about sexuality while censoring all dissenting voices in the classroom. They hoped that the voices of conservative parents had been effectively silenced. They were largely right. And now District 113 has wasted taxpayer money to put tampon machines in boys’ bathrooms. That’s what happens when we allow bullying and fear to paralyze us.

Racism and disordered sexuality eagerly promoted by leftist change-agents in government schools are destroying the hearts, minds, and bodies of children; the integrity and safety of families; and all institutions of public life that previously protected order and liberty.

But leftist efforts to unleash chaos by appealing to the most selfish, dark, and ignorant desires of deceitful and desperately wicked human hearts through propaganda and tyranny have awakened the consciences of Americans.

Americans now see what leftists are doing. Americans see that leftists are fostering racism to divide and conquer. Americans see the grifters scamming Americans by creating the illusion that America is awash in racial bigotry and then swooping in to sell their snake-oil to the gullible and intimidated.

Americans of color see their children being taught the lie that they are oppressed victims with no agency in their own lives. Colorless Americans see their children being taught the lie that they are racist oppressors by dint of their tint. And Americans see the fruits of this racist teaching in the riots, arson, looting, and violence that pollute our streets.

Americans see the bizarre explosion of troubled adolescent girls suddenly deciding they are boys trapped in biologically healthy girls’ bodies. Americans see public schools affirming such cultish ideas and behaviors, while concealing their complicity from parents.

Americans of all political stripes see the reprehensible destruction of girls’ sports and the sexual integration of school bathrooms and locker rooms.

Americans see curricula and library book collections permeated with obscene literature that promotes disordered sexuality.

And Americans see leftist lawmakers passing laws that require public schools to introduce and affirm leftist beliefs about homosexuality and cross-sex practices to kindergartners.

But finally with racism and unbounded sexuality unleashing chaos and suffering throughout the public square, aided and abetted by the politicized re-education long taking place in public schools, Americans are using their voices to oppose this evil.

Parents are organizing and confronting partisan and indolent school boards from California to the New York island. And when threatened by hostile, tyrannical board members and the Department of Justice with being labeled domestic terrorists, parents are doubling down rather than cowering.

As a result of the collusion between the National School Boards Association (NSBA) with the Justice Department to crack down on critics of leftist school boards, seventeen state school board chapters have withdrawn from the NSBA, taking with them $1.1 million in dues, which constitutes about 42% of the NSBA’s annual income from dues. More money will be lost as these state school boards withdraw too from participation in NSBA-sponsored events. Other local chapters are considering doing likewise. This is but a small step in loosening the grimy, grasping grip of unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats on education, which should be a local matter.

In droves, teachers are electing to leave the far-leftist, culturally regressive, morally repugnant National Education Association. World magazine reported that the NEA has lost 65,000 members since 2019. One teacher profiled by World is Tracy Hiebert, a black woman and decades-long teacher, who left the NEA because of its support for “critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, and inappropriate sex education.”

I’ve saved the best for last: Parents are pulling their kids out of school. Since the start of the pandemic, Chicago Public Schools has lost 25,000 students, and nationwide 1.5 million students have left public schools.

In a macro-burst of righteous indignation, creativity, and deep love for their children and this nation, parents are choosing alternative ways to educate their children. They are sending them to existing private schools or co-ops. They are homeschooling. And they are creating new micro-schools/co-ops that take many forms.

IFI has long argued that churches must view the children in their congregations as a mission field. Churches should make it possible for any member who wants to exit public schools to do so, either by making the necessary funds available to parents to send their children to existing Christian private schools or by creating affordable schools.

Christians can donate their skills, knowledge, time, and money for this revolutionary project. Retirees in good health with free time can contribute significantly to such a venture. Christians with financial resources can provide help in many forms from curricular material to scholarships. Christian teachers trapped in our taxpayer-funded breeding grounds of lies could provide enormous help in establishing schools that are conducive to human flourishing.

Americans of all ages, races, ethnicities, religions, and nations of origin long to live in a union that is again touched “by the better angels of our nature” rather than drowning in the basest impulses of our fallen nature.

The vast web composed of public schools and all the ancillary organizations affiliated with them, including colleges and universities that train future teachers, organizations and individuals that profit from selling their “diversity, equity, and inclusion” wares to schools, political advocacy groups (e.g., GLSEN, the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance), teachers’ unions, the American Library Association, and the Modern Language Association, are all controlled by leftists. The bias is systemic. Changes will not come in time for children in school today. But as we pull our children out, we must continue to oppose what leftists are teaching those children remaining in public schools. It is a stewardship issue. Our money is being used to indoctrinate children with lies, and these children will be our culture-makers shortly.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Smidge-of-Hope-on-the-Education-Horizon.mp3

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system—rife with systemic bias against conservative views of sex and sexuality—has announced its newest effort to cultivate “inclusivity” and “equity” in all of its K-12 schools. The “social justice” activists, pudden-heads, and lemmings who lead the CPS have banned all single-sex bathrooms for children and staff. Instead, children and staff are free to use any bathroom they are “comfortable” using.

Subjective feelings now trump objective scientific reality in determining bathroom usage policy. All bathrooms are now co-ed. No word yet on how the CPS plans to include and respect children and adults who are uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with opposite-sex persons.

As of December 1, 2021, all bathroom signage in CPS schools was supposed to be replaced with signs making clear that multiple occupancy bathrooms are now sexually integrated bathrooms.

What is especially noteworthy and alarming is that this policy allows not just “trans” students and teachers to invade the private spaces of opposite-sex persons; it allows all students and teachers to do so. This misguided policy will also affect all visitors to the school who will be forced to use co-ed bathrooms.

In a Twitter video, CPS Title IX Officer Camie Pratt explains that the new signage “will make it clear that all restrooms are open for use by anyone who feels comfortable.”

ICYMI: We’re requiring all schools to adopt new signage to make our restrooms more inclusive. This is a big step forward for gender equity for our students and staff. pic.twitter.com/4JPBdd1jQy

— CPS – Chicago Public Schools (@ChiPubSchools) November 30, 2021

Banning sex-based bathrooms necessarily excludes all children and staff who believe feelings of modesty and the desire for safety and privacy when engaged in personal bodily functions emerge from and are based on sexual differentiation. In other words, girls, boys, women, and men who believe biological sex matters are excluded from policy consideration. All that matters in bathroom usage policy and practice are the radical beliefs of those who affirm controversial, ahistorical, anti-science “gender theory.”

Now, any 5th-grade boy who is “comfortable” using a formerly girls’ bathroom is free to use it with 1st-grade girls. Any 12th-grade boy may use a formerly girls’ bathroom with 9th-grade girls. Any male staff member may use formerly women’s bathrooms. And in schools that permit adult staff members to use student bathrooms—as many do—male teachers will be free to use formerly girls’ bathrooms with female students.

How will these co-ed bathrooms be monitored to protect against sexual abuse or consensual sex? And how will the CPS retain students and staff now that the CPS has stripped them of their human rights? In Feb. 2021, U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-NY) reintroduced her bill that seeks to protect girls and women in refugee camp bathrooms. Meng explained,

[U]nfortunately, many bathrooms in refugee camps do not provide appropriate safety protections. … [O]ften times the restrooms are mixed-sex, public, and without locks. … These conditions create a lack of privacy and dignity and make women and girls afraid to use the restrooms, fearing that they may be assaulted and subjected to violence while using the bathroom. These types of conditions are unacceptable. Nobody should have their safety jeopardized in order to care for their most basic hygiene needs. (emphasis added)

The new CPS policy and the accompanying signage implicitly teach children that physical privacy has nothing to do with physical embodiment as male or female. The explanations offered by leftists about this radical policy change teach children that in order to be respectful, inclusive, compassionate, and equitable, they must relinquish their feelings of modesty, their desire for privacy, and their good and right beliefs about the meaning of biological sex.

Case in point, WGN-TV cites self-identifying “education program manager” Curran Cross who says, “We want to make an environment as respectful and inclusive as we can.”

Cross believes respect for “trans,” “nonbinary,” “genderfluid,” and “gender nonconforming” girls and boys entails disrespecting the natural and good feelings and right beliefs of those who do not want to use bathrooms with opposite-sex persons.

Further, conservative parents do not want their children’s school undermining their beliefs about modesty and privacy.

Curran Cross

Word to Cross, respect for humans does not require disrespect for their objective sex which never changes.

A parent identified as “Mandal Golden” told WGN-TV that “I’m fine with [sexually integrated bathrooms]. … We have boys and girls at home, it’s the same policy.”

Generally speaking, in one’s home, by age 7-8, brothers and sisters are not sharing the same bathroom at the same time, except for tooth-brushing.  And they’re not sharing the same bathroom at the same time with unrelated opposite-sex peers, strangers, adults, and older kids.

Golden also claimed that his or her kids are “not scared to use the washroom at home.” Maybe they would be scared or uncomfortable if they were using the bathroom at home and in walked an unrelated child of the opposite sex who was four years older.

Moreover, while safety is a serious concern, it is not the foundational issue. The foundational issue pertains to the meaning of biological sex. “Trans”-cultists believe it has no meaning—except, of course, when it matters to them as when they lop off healthy body parts to masquerade as the sex they are not and never can be.

The end goal of the “trans” cult and its ideological allies has never been the freedom of a small number of gender dysphoric persons to access opposite-sex private spaces. The end goal has always been the eradication of all public recognition of sex differences. No more sex-segregated bathrooms, dressing rooms, locker rooms, saunas, dorm rooms, nursing home rooms, prison cells, sports, or book clubs. The policy CPS has implemented signifies a giant leap toward that end.

No child can be properly trained up in the way they should go by adults who don’t respect the reality and meaning of biological sex. The systemically corrupt and crumbling public school system needs to collapse. Get your kids out now. And on your way out, find out exactly who came up with the dumb idea of co-ed bathrooms. He, she, or they need to feel the righteous wrath of taxpayers.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/No-More-Single-Sex-Bathrooms-in-Chicago-Public-Schools.mp3

The Chicago Board of Education voted 5-2 on Wednesday, February 26, 2020, to stop celebrating Columbus Day and replace it with “Indigenous Peoples Day.” This latest example of political correctness comes on the heels of calls for paintings in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) that contain images of white people to be removed. CPS has the largest collection of early 20^th century murals in the U.S. Most of them were commissioned by the Work Projects Administration as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

CPS has created a new educational steering committee to evaluate all future artwork displayed in the schools saying they will, “evaluate concerns raised about specific works of art to ensure equity and cultural responsiveness.”

A district statement read, “The district recognizes that some works of art in schools do not reflect the district’s values of diversity and inclusion.” This statement is ironic considering most of the paintings that are being suggested for removal feature Native Americans pictured peacefully with early white missionaries and settlers. Apparently, “diversity and inclusion,” means excluding white people.

Sarah Dennis, a social justice advocate, says her children were taken on a field trip to Bateman Elementary where they saw a mural that contained white women wearing head-coverings (a religious symbol that was common in early American history). Head-coverings are still worn today by Illinois citizens in the Amish and Mennonite communities. Her response is, ““We went out into the hallway and stared at it. I asked them, ‘What do you see? What kind of message does it send to the children who attend here, about who is important?’”

Other commentators called the art, “racist, dated and offensive.” This kind of disregard for religious practice and historical accuracy is reflective of the new postmodern deconstructionist mindset that seeks to tear down existing social structures and replace them with new politically correct ones.

Ironically, the Italian-American community that hosts more than 500,000 citizens in Chicago alone, released a statement against the removal of Christopher Columbus as a historical figure in the schools:

For Italian Americans, who endured horrific discrimination and continue to be the subject of stereotypical degradation in popular culture, Christopher Columbus is a symbol for the resilience of a people that have helped shape the cultural landscape of this great nation.

Is CPS seeking to represent all cultures equally and fairly or do they seek to give preference to some people groups while excluding others? This is the inequality that often happens when multiculturalism gets hijacked by special interest groups who seek to promote their own agendas.

Some paintings have already been removed. Last year at Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, students from the Social Justice Club successfully pressured administrators to remove Ethel Spears’s 1937 mural Child and Sports – Winter because the painting included only white children.

This follows the example of other schools around the nation that have removed any paintings of America’s founders (e.g., George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry) because they owned slaves.

Teaching history demands telling the truth about the mistakes that have happened in American History. We don’t want to lie to our children, telling them that America’s past was perfect. That can be done, however, without removing any reference to the positive impact made by European settlers. They were not all slave-owners, oppressors and racists. And even those who were often contributed in ways that have helped all future generations of Americans including historically oppressed groups.

The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, though written by flawed humans, have helped all Americans. Oppressive regimes like Communist regimes scrub history to advance an ideology. As Americans we should seek to tell the whole story: the good, the bad and the ugly. We can’t do that if ideology leads to censorship.

THIS SATURDAY! IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

As if the sexualization and radical politics were not enough cause for alarm, the latest data shows public schools are failing Illinois children academically, too — and big time! Indeed, the vast majority of high-school graduates are unprepared for basic college work.

According to a recent report by Chicago Public Media, almost two thirds of the new students enrolled in Chicago-area community colleges placed below college level on their placement exams. That means they must complete remedial education to proceed, even under the watered-down “college” standards that exist today.

Furthermore, even though the colleges only offer two-year degrees, just one in ten of those students in remedial classes — euphemistically dubbed “developmental education” — end up graduating within three years. By contrast, the figure is about one third among students not in remedial education.

One developmental English professor at a community college in Chicago, Tara Whitehair, was quoted revealing that many students lack even a “basic foundation” in “literacy.” Comparing that to the “foundation for a house,” Whitehair said it “takes time” to bring students up to that level.

In previous generations, graduating from 2nd or 3rd grade without strong literacy skills would have been unthinkable. Today, however, according to the government’s own literacy data, many high-school graduates would struggle to read their own diploma.

Other professors interviewed for the story confirmed the extent of the disaster. “When I ask them to go to a [reading] and say, ‘What is this text saying? Put this into your own words’ … they can’t,” Wright College English Professor Carrie Mocarski said. “They can’t comprehend the writing. … Generally we’re not talking about academic journals, we’re talking about newspaper articles.”

The reporter confirmed the dismal situation. “Students also haven’t learned to write academic essays,” reported Kate MgGee in an in-depth piece about “Starting College Behind.” “Many don’t know how to craft a thesis statement or cite research. They struggle with sentence structure, topic sentences, vocabulary and grammar.”

If these were 3^rd graders, or even perhaps 5^th graders, it might be understandable that they struggle with sentence structure, grammar, or vocabulary. Yet it completely boggles the mind to contemplate how anybody could graduate from junior high — much less high school — without being able to write a thesis statement or cite research.

The problems begin early, though. According to 2019 results from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as “America’s Report Card,” less than one third of American 8th-grade students are proficient in any core subject. That includes math and English. In 4^th grade, NAEP data show well over a third of children are “below basic,” which means they cannot read at all.

Despite spending an astonishing $17,000 per pupil annually, the 12^th highest in the nation, Illinois is slightly worse off than the atrocious national average when it comes to NAEP scores. But it is not the money that is the issue — some of the highest spending districts, such as Baltimore and Detroit, have among the lowest scores in the nation.

Other data confirms the fact that American children are getting dumber and dumber with each passing generation. The SAT, for instance, must be regularly re-centered to conceal the ongoing plunge in scores and educational levels.

According to recent ACT’s data, which also relies on standardized testing, just two out of five high-school graduates were ready for college work, with the numbers continuing to drop. Only about one in four graduating students had the “foundational work readiness skills needed for more than nine out of 10 jobs recently profiled in ACT’s JobPro database,” ACT researchers found.

Incredibly, instead of addressing the real problem — a fraudulent K-12 “education” that leaves students unprepared for anything except collecting welfare and contemplating “gender identity” — lobbyists are working to scale back or even eliminate remedial education completely. More tax-funded “financial aid” to the students, even when the overwhelmingly majority will never graduate, is also being advocated, along with more hand-holding by ever more “advisors.”

Others wring their hands and blame “poverty,” “systemic racism,” “oppression,” and all sorts of other real and imagined problems. And yet, Americans today are dumber than ever before, despite the nation and its people being richer and less racist than ever before. Data from the 1800s, for instance, reveals that Americans were far more literate than compared with today.

With government schools pumping out illiterate and innumerate graduates by the millions after bilking taxpayers for more than $200,000 per child over the span of 12 years, the question must be asked, “What are the schools actually doing?” The answer is simple: indoctrinating, sexualizing, and confusing the children on an unprecedented scale.

In any other industry, these sort of abysmal numbers would be prosecuted as fraud and extortion. But when it comes to government schools, the education establishment simply demands more money and more victims. This is absolutely outrageous. It should not be tolerated for another instant.

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

In Chicago Public Schools, captive students are being indoctrinated to believe that one of the very first societies in the world to end slavery was actually a monster defined by the evils of slavery — almost as if this monstrous nation had invented it.

This narrative is peddled despite the fact that the nation in question sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its finest men to eradicate slavery — not only ending it domestically, but eventually, worldwide, too.

And this slanderous lie is peddled despite the fact that institution of slavery has been ubiquitous throughout human history — at least until America and the Christian West put an end to it.

Indeed, in the African nation of Mauritania, slavery did not even become a crime until 2007, and the institution remains firmly entrenched there, as it does across broad swaths of Africa and the Middle East.

But supposedly, it’s America that is evil.

Welcome to the upside world of America’s “progressives” — the post-modernist absurdity where good is evil, evil is good, up is down, and truth does not even really exist.

During a recent visit to Chicago, self-styled “journalist” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a fringe left-wing race-monger, argued that the real history of America begins not with the Pilgrims in 1620, but with the almost unknown arrival of a slave ship the year before.

“It is a moment that is really at the basis for so much of American life, the very definition of American freedom, our culture, our politics,” claimed Hannah-Jones, founder of the so-called “1619 Project” and a prominent propagandist for the racist New York Times.

This absurd narrative has now been embedded into government schools in Chicago, with Hannah-Jones giving a “shout out” to CPS CEO Janice Jackson for forcing it on the child inmates under her control.

During an interview with the tax-funded “Chicago Tonight” show on WTTW, Hannah-Jones admitted that this is a “radical re-framing” of history.

Of course, it is also an absurd and shameful re-writing of history that turns reality upside down and deliberately misleads innocent children.

But in Chicago and beyond, radical anti-American activists have been working for decades to completely re-write U.S. history, literally flipping reality on its head for the purpose of undermining liberty and the United States.

In reality, America is a unique and special nation — perhaps the first to be founded on the biblical principles brought over by the Pilgrims.

This would lead directly to the creation of the first self-governing Godly republic since ancient Israel.

And eventually, this would lead to the ending of legal slavery worldwide and the near-universal acceptance of what America’s Founding Fathers said in the Declaration of Independence was a “self-evident” truth: the idea that “all men are created equal.”

Like virtually every society throughout all of human history, some Americans originally tolerated slavery.

However, it was because of America’s founding, and the biblical principles and worldview upon which it was founded, that this ubiquitous scourge was practically eradicated from the face of the Earth, beginning in the Christian West and then slowly spreading around the globe.

Before William Wilberforce in Britain would use God’s Word to explain why slavery was evil in the sight of God, many of America’s Founding Fathers were plotting to systematically end slavery for the first time in human history.

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, for instance, was one of the original and most fervent anti-slavery crusaders to ever walk on the planet up until that time.

Calling slavery a “national evil” and blasting the slave trade as “criminal conduct” and a “violation of the laws of humanity,” Madison demanded in 1810 that Congress devise “further means of suppressing the evil.”

This “1619 Project,” though, wants Americans — and especially children in government schools who don’t know any better — to believe that the great Christians who made this all possible are actually the culprits for the evils they helped eradicate.

Naturally, the half-baked project is being spearheaded by the New York Times.

Ironically, though, the Times has a long and sordid history of this sort of racism and deadly dishonesty.

In 2018, for instance, the Times hired virulent racist Sarah Jeong to serve on its editorial board. Among other outrages, Jeong admitted it was “kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” She also argued that “white people” are “only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” The raw, seething hatred shocked America, but the Times saw no problem with it.

Before that, Times “journalist” and Soviet apologist Walter Duranty helped the mass-murdering Bolshevik regime conceal its ghastly genocide of Ukrainian people via deliberate starvation. An estimated 10 million people were murdered while Duranty deceived Americans into believing everything was just fine.

Another Times “journalist,” Herbert Matthews, marketed mass-murdering communist butcher Fidel Castro to America as an “anti-Communist” so-called “freedom fighter,” even referring to him as the “George Washington” of Cuba. As a result, the nation of Cuba was enslaved and destroyed.

It is bad enough that a dying newspaper would peddle this sort of disgusting and dishonest propaganda to gullible “progressive” adults who pay to read that garbage.

But forcing these twisted lies on captive school children at taxpayer expense should be considered a crime. It is time for the people of Illinois to speak out.

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

Next time you hear some arch-defender of the a-constitutional “wall” of separation between the church and state whose knickers are in a twist because a school allows ten seconds of silence during which students may pray, remember this story, reported last summer by the Chicago Tribune:

Students at a Chicago high school were led into a room with shades drawn and door windows papered over, lit only with candles and scented by incense. They were handed flowers and told to pay attention to instructors, according to one student’s account.

Jade Thomas, an incoming sophomore at Bogan Computer Technical High School, said instructors “chanted in a foreign language” and “threw rice, seasonings and oranges in a pan in front of a picture of a man.” She described the ritual, which she said involved a “secret mantra,” to a rapt audience at a Chicago Board of Education meeting Wednesday.

At one point, Jade said, “they tell us to place the flowers in the pan with everything else, and they ended the song. I felt uncomfortable because I didn’t know what they were saying or who the man was in the picture.”

Jade Thomas’ discomfort was entirely warranted. The program to which she was objecting is called Quiet Time, a euphemistic name that conceals from parents that it’s the practice of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which is Hinduism repackaged (and trademarked) for Western audiences.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, disciple of Guru Dev (aka Swami Brahmananda Saraswati), repackaged Hinduism—which emerged from the ancient religious Vedic tradition—in a form more acceptable to western minds and brought it to American hippies in the 1960s and 1970s. While disciples of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi publicly (and deceitfully) claim that TM is solely a scientific method of relieving stress, they conveniently omit the religious dimensions of the program and practice.

The Chicago Board of Education is colluding with the University of Chicago Urban Labs, which is, in turn, partnering with Hollywood director and long-time Transcendental Meditator David Lynch to experiment on Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students.  They hope to determine whether introducing students secretly to Hindu religious practices can “help youth reduce their toxic stress, succeed in school and stay safe.”

The Quiet Time website includes this claim:

Transcendental Meditation, the core intervention of the Quiet Time Program. … does not involve any religion [or] philosophy.”

“Does not involve any religion”? Lol. You be the judge of that claim. As a former TMer married to a former TM teacher, I’ve already judged that claim.

Decades ago when I became a TMer and my husband a TM teacher, mantras—the secret word repeated soundlessly during meditation—were assigned during the “initiation” ceremony that Jade Bogan described, which is called a puja. Initiates were asked to bring a piece of fruit, a new handkerchief, and flowers to the ceremony which was conducted in a darkened, incense-filled room in front of a de facto altar. The TM teacher would then begin the ceremony which was conducted in Sanskrit, so the initiate had no idea what was being spoken. Much later after studying in Spain with Maharishi and becoming a TM teacher, my husband learned the Sanskrit words spoken during the ceremony:

To LORD NARAYANA, to lotus-born BRAHMA the Creator to…GOVINDA, ruler among the yogis…to SHANKARACHARYA the redeemer, hailed as KRISHNA and BADARAYANA, to the commentator of the BRAHMA SUTRAS I bow down. To the glory of the LORD I bow down again and again, at whose door the whole galaxy of gods pray for perfection day and night…GURU [Dev] in the glory of BRAHMA, GURU in the glory of the great LORD SHIVA, GURU in the glory of the personified transcendental fullness of BRAHMAN, to Him, to SHRI GURU DEV adorned with glory, I bow down…with Brahman ever dwelling in the lotus of my heart…to That [Brahman], in the form of Guru Dev, I bow down.

At various points during the ceremony, the teacher would pause and ask the initiate for one of the gifts they were asked to bring which the teacher would then place on the altar, thus making the initiate an unwitting participant in a distinctly religious ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, initiates were given their mantras, which, as it turns out, are the names of Hindu gods.

Initiates were prohibited from telling anyone their secret mantras, which I eventually learned were chosen according to the initiate’s age. My mantra was pronounced “ah-ing” and is intended to honor the Hindu goddess of Saraswati.

So, does that sound like it “does not involve any religion”?

As to the claim that TM involves no philosophy, ask any long-time meditator about transcendental consciousness, cosmic consciousness, unity consciousness, god consciousness, and sidhis. If you have the patience to slog through Maharishi’s thicket of religious/philosophical dogma, click here.

David Lynch created the David Lynch Foundation, which then created the Center for Wellness and Education in order to promote TM by renaming it Quiet Time. Unfortunately, CPS is not the only school district introducing children to the ancient Vedic practice of TM.

TMers continually cite positive effects. They even take credit for civil conflict ending, claiming that any place where at least 1 percent of the population is meditating, peace ensues. Maharishi claimed that,

the nature of life is to grow. Ninety-nine people can violate their own nature to grow and maybe weave around non-growth. One man, having a desire to evolve, having a desire to progress, having a desire to grow, by nature, he’ll take up Transcendental Meditation. On that basis, he will start producing a harmonious influence around him. Without knowing how he does it, without knowing the mechanics of how the radiations go from a more orderly mind to influence the less orderly minds around him, without knowing it, invariably he’ll be producing a harmonious influence in the whole society. Then the whole society will find a trend in the direction of evolution.

Here are two questions that Chicago Board of Education members should be asked:

1.) If it is legal and appropriate for public schools to promote and teach ancient Vedic/Hindu meditative prayer practices, is it legal and appropriate for schools to promote and teach Muslim prayer practices, Kabbalistic meditative practices, and Christian prayer practices?

2.) If the possibility of a reduction of problematic behaviors justifies the formal implementation of Hindu religious practice in public schools, will public schools now permit the implementation of other religious practices in order to determine their efficacy in positively affecting school climate?

For years, the TM organization has been plagued by myriad criticisms for deception like its failure to acknowledge its religious nature or promises of superpowers (sidhis) like Yogic flying. Over 40 years ago, Maharishi told his disciples that by attending longer residential courses during which attendees would meditate for extended periods of time and receive additional magic words (i.e., sutras), they would start levitating and shortly thereafter flying. Of course, the TM organization profited from these longer courses.

Well, here we are decades later and to my knowledge, no TMer is flying. You can find amusing videos online of TMers still “hopping.” Well, you can find videos of hale and hearty men “hopping” whilst huffing and puffing. I’ve yet to see a video of a frail elderly woman “hopping.”

There are also criticisms of the studies the TM organization touts regarding its efficacy as well as more serious concerns about potential risks to mental health. For more information about TM from a former meditator, click HERE.

In the interest of parental rights and transparency, I hope CPS administrators in schools that are teaching ancient Vedic meditative techniques will reveal to every parent the criticisms of Transcendental Meditation leveled by many.

In the interest of intellectual consistency, I hope those virulent opponents of 10 seconds of silence in public schools during which students may pray (but are not taught prayer practices) will direct their virulence to schools that teach repackaged Hinduism to students.

And in the interest of fiscal transparency and accountability, I hope some public watch dogs will find out if any local, state, and/or federal money is lining the pockets of the David Lynch Foundation.

Here’s more on TM:

Transcendental Meditation in the New Millennium (Part One)

Transcendental Meditation in the New Millennium (Part Two)

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Transcendental-Meditation-and-CPS.mp3

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In the wake of the shocking Pennsylvania Grand Jury report which revealed that 301 priests sexually abused more than a thousand children, Attorney General Lisa Madigan announced that her office would investigate Catholic dioceses in Illinois in pursuit of “a complete and accurate accounting of all sexually inappropriate behavior involving priests in Illinois.”

We applaud this decision and her desire for truth, transparency, and accountability. Justice must be pursued and children must be protected.

But we want to encourage the attorney general not to stop there. Prior to the Pennsylvania revelation, the Chicago Tribune published a deeply disturbing report exposing similar abuses of our children in Chicago Public Schools. This report revealed that more than 520 cases of juvenile sexual assault took place in Chicago’s public schools over the past ten years. That is an average of one per week.

How many cases were prosecuted? Which cases were covered up and by whom? How many predators are still working in our schools and have access to our students? How many cases were not reported?

If the Pennsylvania scandal is the catalyst for an investigation in Illinois—and we agree that it should be—shouldn’t the Chicago Tribune exposé be the impetus for an investigation of all school districts in Illinois going back further than a decade?

A hotline has been set up to report incidents of child sexual abuse in Illinois: 888-414-7678.

Years of concealing crimes, ignoring victims and protecting abusers isn’t unique to one institution. All crimes against children demand a full accounting. Predators must be exposed, prosecuted and removed from positions of power that provide them access to minors.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact the Attorney General’s office to encourage them to investigate the sexual crimes against our children in public school systems across the state of Illinois.

If you have information that would help stop a predator from preying on children and put him behind bars, please call the hotline: 888-414-7678. The hotline is answered by trained staff during business hours, and messages will be returned if contact information is provided.

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois! 

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In August 2018, the results of a grand jury investigation were published regarding sex-abuse allegations within the Roman Catholic dioceses of Pennsylvania.

While it is shocking and disturbing to read, we need to be impacted by the full force of how heinous the crimes against these children were. The report reveals:

We subpoenaed, and reviewed, half a million pages of internal diocesan documents. They contained credible allegations against over three hundred predator priests. Over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church’s own records. We believe that the real number – of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward – is in the thousands. Most of the victims were boys; but there were girls too. Some were teens; many were pre-pubescent. Some were manipulated with alcohol or pornography. Some were made to masturbate their assailants, or were groped by them. Some were raped orally, some vaginally, some anally. But all of them were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all.

When Church Leaders Abuse

It is unconscionable that men put in positions of leadership–especially those who claim to represent God–could so  cruelly abuse those placed in their care. But it is not only clergy who have abused children and covered up the abuse. According to a new report, Chicago public schools and Child Protective Services failed to adequately protect school children from sexual abuse. Abuse happens in every sector and corner of society. Predators often seek occupations where they will have unsupervised access to children. Upon being discovered molesting children, one Catholic priest reportedly sought new employment with Walt Disney World where he was reportedly hired and worked for the next eighteen years.

There is a deeper level of violation when the abuser is someone in a position of authority, especially when that person is trusted to care and protect children, such as a police officers, doctors, teachers, coaches, scout leaders, school staff, therapists, and clergy. Children are taught to trust and respect these kinds of authority figures and so are more vulnerable to grooming.

When someone who claims to be working for God abuses children or teens, the damage can be irreparable and often includes anger at God, Christians and the church.

A Christian Response to Church Abuse

As a Protestant, I grieve for all those who have been victimized by abuse. We should hold all perpetrators accountable for their crimes. Those who abuse others should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and institutions that helped cover up crimes should also face prosecution.

It is understandable that those who have been abused by church leaders want nothing more to do with the Church, or Christianity. Just as we don’t impute blame to all doctors, coaches, or teachers for the evil actions of some, we ought not judge all priests guilty for the grievous sins of the abusive priests. We should judge the any ideology, philosophy or religion against the life and teaching of its founder.

Those who know anything about the teachings of Jesus know that He condemned the actions of those who abuse children in the strongest possible terms.

And (Jesus) said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!” (Matthew 18:3-7, NIV)

Those who abuse children are not following the teaching or example of Jesus. Those who truly follow the teachings of Jesus stand with the abused in seeking both  justice and healing. Even though we fight for justice, in this life it isn’t always served. One day, however, there will be a Day of Judgment when all the wrongs are ultimately punished.

Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil. Although a sinner does evil a hundred times and may lengthen his life, still I know that it will be well for those who fear God, who fear Him openly. But it will not be well for the evil man and he will not lengthen his days like a shadow, because he does not fear God. (Ecclesiastes 8:11-13, NIV)

Lessons Learned

One of the things we are learning from these investigations, as well as the #MeToo and #MeChurch movements, is just how pervasive sexual abuse is in society. Unfortunately, there are no safe spaces. Here are some things we should learn that might help to reduce this kind of abuse moving forward:

• Listen to the victims. Several of these victims told their parents and were not believed because the parents couldn’t conceive that a “man of God” would do such a thing.

• Make sure your church screens any members who work with children. Our local church runs an extensive background check on any members who work with children. They also make sure the adult volunteers work in pairs or teams, so they are never alone with minor children. If your church doesn’t practice this kind of precaution, insist they must, and if need be find another church.

• Be very cautious when leaving small children to be supervised by non-family members.

• Teach your children to exercise their voice and defend themselves. Educate your children on the dangers of sexual abuse and teach them how to speak up, say no, fight back and report any unwanted physical abuse.

• The institution is never more important than the individual. Many of these large organizations covered up these crimes for fear that it would either tarnish their reputation, or that they would face legal and/or financial repercussions. Prideful face-saving is a sin. If you know something, say something.

As Christians, we stand with all victims of abuse in seeking complete justice on their behalf and praying for healing.

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“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!”
—Lady Macbeth

By the fall of 2017, kindergartners in Washington State will be taught to “understand the range of gender roles, identity, and expression across cultures.”1 For those unclear about what precisely will be taught, the kindergarten curriculum developers provide a helpful glossary that includes a definition of “gender”:

Gender: A social construct based on emotional, behavioral, and cultural characteristics attached to a person’s assigned biological sex. A person’s social and/or legal status as male or female.

• Gender expression. The way someone outwardly expresses their gender, whether consciously or unconsciously.

• Gender identity. Someone’s inner sense of their gender (see Transgender).

• Gender roles. Social expectations about how people should act, think, or feel based on their assigned biological sex.

Kindergarten now marks the starting point for government indoctrination of children into the brave, new, sexless, science-denying orthodoxy of the “transgender” movement, the end result of which is not a more compassionate society, but a society in which there is no public recognition of, or respect for, sexual differentiation.

In early May 2016, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) joined the ranks of the foolish by issuing guidelines pertaining to gender-dysphoric students in K–12 schools. Students who wish they were the opposite sex may now use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, and on school-sponsored overnight trips, they may room with opposite-sex students.

These guidelines also apply to “gender non-binary” students who don’t “identify” as either male or female and to “questioning” students who aren’t yet sure which sex they would like to be. In other words, these students may make their restroom, locker room, and hotel room selections in accordance with their unstable sexual confusion.

In an effort to facilitate student confusion, the CPS “guidelines” mandate the use of Newspeak by faculty and staff, requiring them to lie by using opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric students.

Exploitation of Title IX

One week later, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Education (ED) issued an almost identical edict, except theirs came with a threat of the loss of federal funds for non-compliance with what they euphemistically describe as “significant guidance.”

Elementary, middle, and high schools all around the country have been accommodating requests (or demands) from parents to have their gender-dysphoric children granted access to restrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams that correspond to the sex these children wish they were rather than the sex they actually are. In a case in Illinois, a male student sued his district for the right to unrestricted access even to the girls’ locker room, which includes showers. Often school administrations are accommodating these requests without informing the parents of students whose privacy is being invaded.

The DOJ and the ED, through the intrusive Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is an unelected collective of bureaucrats, have proclaimed that henceforth, in the section of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination based on “sex,” the word “sex” includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” Further, sex-segregated restrooms constitute discrimination based on “sex,” meaning that schools have no legal right to maintain separate restrooms for boys and girls.

There are multiple problems with this creative argument, the first of which is that the word “sex” in Title IX means sex.

Second, progressives themselves relentlessly assert that sex and “gender identity” are wholly distinct.

Third, Title IX specifically states the following: “A recipient [of federal funds] may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.“2

Fourth, neither the DOJ nor the ED has lawmaking authority, so neither can change the definition of the word “sex” in Title IX.

Exploitation of Title VII

But the Barack Obama administration had still more government power to wield illicitly in its quest to eradicate sex-segregation. Like the ED, the DOJ under Attorney General Loretta Lynch has declared that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” The abuse of Title VII is far more dangerous than that of Title IX because it has broader applicability.

Whereas Title IX applies only to schools, Title VII applies to every business in the private sector with over 14 employees, to every government entity, and to every religious organization, including religious schools of every grade level from elementary through college.It even applies to churches, which are exempt only from the prohibition of religious discrimination. Churches and other religious institutions are not exempt from the ban on “sex” discrimination.

So if the Obama administration’s redefinition of the word “sex” to include “gender identity” prevails, even churches couldn’t prohibit gender-dysphoric persons from using opposite-sex restrooms. The decree—it can’t veraciously be called a law—would mandate that gender-dysphoric guests at church weddings or attendees of concerts and athletic events at Christian colleges be allowed in opposite-sex restrooms.

Since men are permitted to go shirtless on beaches, at pools, in public parks, in high-school swim classes, and on swim teams, there would be no legal warrant for prohibiting women who “identify” as men but forgo bilateral mastectomies from going shirtless as well.

Sex Segregation versus Racial Segregation

Progressives, who never tire of exploiting race as an analogue for sexual deviance, compare racially segregated restrooms to sex-segregated restrooms, again misconstruing the issues. Racially segregated restrooms were unjustifiable because they were based on the false belief that people of different races are ontologically different. Sex-segregated restrooms are justifiable because they are based on the true belief that men and women are different—a true belief that even homosexuals implicitly acknowledge when they say they are attracted only to persons of their own sex.

When announcing the DOJ’s lawsuit against North Carolina following that state’s passage of a law prohibiting de-sexed, co-ed restrooms, Attorney General Lynch said, “It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference.”

If there is no more difference between men and women than there is between blacks and whites—as Lynch clearly implies—then how is it justifiable to maintain single-sex restrooms or showers anywhere? Why not allow men and women and boys and girls to share the same restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters, and hospital rooms just as blacks and whites do?

Lynch also suggested that the unwillingness of women to share restrooms with gender-dysphoric men is evidence of fear, disrespect, misunderstanding, closed-mindedness, unfairness, lack of compassion, unjust regressive discrimination, and the denial of equality. If that’s the case, then how would she characterize the unwillingness of gender-dysphoric men to share restrooms with non-gender-dysphoric men? If separate restrooms for men and women are analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites, then aren’t separate restrooms for gender-dysphoric men and normal men also analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites?

Justifying Deception

The left uses the little-known history of some cross-dressing men successfully deceiving women in restrooms as a perverse ethical justification for allowing men in women’s restrooms. The argument goes something like this: Since gender-dysphoric men in especially convincing disguises have successfully deceived and violated the privacy of women who don’t want to share restrooms with men, let’s just openly allow gender-dysphoric men to continue to invade women’s privacy.

That’s analogous to arguing that since some peeping Toms successfully spy on women through windows without being found out, there’s no harm done, so no foul. Or, since some husbands commit adultery without their wives ever finding out—again, no harm, no foul.

Others believe, however, that the deception per se is harmful. The use of ever-more-elaborate disguises—including chemically and surgically facilitated ones—by gender-dysphoric men to conceal their sex from women who don’t want to use restrooms with objectively male persons is comparable to peepers using ever-more-sophisticated technology to peep.

Questions for Progressives

There are still more critical questions that should be posed to anyone who supports de facto co-ed everything, questions that will expose the incoherence of the subversive un-sexing of America:

1. Why should gender-dysphoric men and women be allowed to dictate that restrooms, showers, locker rooms, shelters, and hospital rooms no longer correspond to objective, immutable sex?

2. Why should gender-dysphoric men be able to dictate that they get to use restrooms with only women, but actual women are prohibited from saying they should get to use restrooms with only women?

3. If stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from women in restrooms, and curtains provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from women in changing areas, why don’t stalls and curtains provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from other men in men’s restrooms and changing areas?

4. If there is a mismatch between a person’s sex and his feelings about his sex, how can progressives be certain that the error resides in the body rather than the mind? If a person has XY chromosomes that have commanded his brain to produce and release male hormones to which his body is able to respond, thereby developing normal, unambiguous, healthy, fully functioning male anatomy, he is clearly male. If he nevertheless desires to be—or insists that he is—female, might this not be an error of his mind?

5. If a man “identifies” as “bi-gender” and has appended faux-breasts to his torso while retaining his penis, should he be permitted to decide at will which locker room he uses in the altogether?

6. Those who suffer from gender dysphoria claim that their DNA and the genitalia it shapes are wholly unrelated and irrelevant to “gender” and “gender identity,” and that genitalia shouldn’t matter when it comes to restrooms, changing areas, and showers. They further claim they want to use restrooms with only those whose “gender identity” they share. So, why do gender-dysphoric men demand to use women’s restrooms? How do they know that the males using the men’s restrooms do not “identify” as women, and how can they be sure that the females using the women’s restrooms do “identify” as women? Is it possible that gender-dysphoric men are basing their restroom choices on genitalia? If so, why are they permitted to do so, but actual women are not?

7. Leftists claim that people who don’t want to share restrooms, changing areas, showers, shelters, and hospital rooms with persons of the opposite sex are hateful. If it’s hateful for women to say they want to share these facilities only with other women, why isn’t it hateful for gender-dysphoric men to say they want to share them only with women?

8. Progressives routinely mock opponents of co-ed restrooms, asking whether historical restroom practices that require restroom-usage to correspond to sex will also require “genitalia police” to determine whether restroom-users are in reality the sex that corresponds to the restrooms they seek to use. Well, in the mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up progressive world, will there be “gender-identity” police demanding proof that all restroom-users are either the sex that corresponds to the restrooms they seek to use or have proof that they have been diagnosed as gender-dysphoric? If not, how will women know if their fellow restroom-users are actual women, or gender-dysphoric men masquerading as women, or male predators masquerading as gender-dysphoric men?

9. If the views of Obama and Lynch prevail and gender-dysphoric men are permitted in women’s restrooms, on what basis could all other men be prohibited from using women’s restrooms? Normal men couldn’t be prohibited from using women’s restrooms based on their male sex because men would already have been allowed in. And normal men couldn’t be prohibited from using women’s restrooms based on their “identification” as males because that would constitute discrimination based on “gender identity,” which Obama and Lynch argue violates Title IX and Title VII.

The Final Chapter

The editorial board of the Charlotte Observer opined that “the thought of male genitalia in girls’ locker rooms—and vice versa—might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort.”3 This comment reveals what many Americans don’t realize: identifying as the opposite sex does not require or necessarily include any surgery, cross-sex hormone-doping, or even cross-dressing; the mere assertion of one’s “gender identity” is sufficient.

Of course, none of those actions can efface the truth of sex; all they can do is mask it. But Americans should disabuse themselves of the rationalization that sharing a shower with Caitlyn Jenner might not be so bad as long as his testicles have been given the heave-ho and his pesky penis has been tucked inside.

And this brings us to the final chapter in the dystopian cultural narrative the left is writing: the end of sex-segregation everywhere. The elimination of the binary. No more public recognition of or respect for objective maleness and femaleness. “LGBTQQAP” activists and their ideological allies seek to create a solipsistic, make-believe world in which nothing outside the self is recognized as real or meaningful. Objective, immutable, biological sex, which is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy, will become a hoary relic of the past. Even language will be co-opted to serve an ontological and epistemic lie.

A compassionate society helps those who suffer from disordered thoughts and emotions. It does not affirm confusion or facilitate fiction. This most profound distortion of reality and morality must be resisted. •

1. Washington State Health and Physical Education Standards (March 2016), 32
2. 34 C.F.R. Part 106, Subpart D, §106.33: www2.ed.gov/policy/rights/reg/ocr/edlite-34cfr106.html.
3. “Taking the fear out of bathrooms,” The Charlotte Observer (May 13, 2016): charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article77475147.html.

In my eight years with IFI, I have had good experiences with journalists, including even leftist journalists. They have largely treated me graciously and chosen comments from our interviews that accurately represented IFI’s positions on issues. Last week, however, that streak came to a screeching halt. I had an experience that bore out the charges of bias leveled against the mainstream press.

After reading my article on the Chicago Public Schools new “guidelines” that permit gender-dysphoric students and teachers to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, Bettina Chang, a writer for Chicago Magazine, interviewed me for some twenty minutes on IFI’s views of the guidelines. When her article came out two days later, I was, to put it mildly, surprised.

The bias of Chang is evident not only in the space allotted to quotes from leftists but also in the particular quotes from our 20-minute interview she chose to include and in her remarkable defense of her bias.

Amount of space allotted to leftists vs. conservatives

Chang included quotes from representatives of four far-left, pro-“LGBT” organizations: The Center on Halsted, Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, Chicago Gender Society, and Howard Brown Health.

Chang included quotes from one conservative organization: Illinois Family Institute.

She used 33 words from The Center on Halsted, 101 words from the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, 86 words from the Chicago Gender Society, and 75 words from Howard Brown Health. She also paraphrased additional ideas from these organizations.

From our 20-minute interview, Chang used 8 words.

The 8 words she chose from our interview represented two points, one of which had nothing to do with the substance of the arguments against the use of opposite-sex restrooms by gender-dysphoric students, and the other misrepresented what I said.

Interview comments to Chang

To better understand the problems with her article and her defense of it, it’s important to know more about my initial answers to her questions.

I explained that IFI believes restrooms and locker rooms should correspond to students’ objective, immutable sex rather than their feelings about their sex because physical embodiment as male or female is profoundly meaningful and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy.

I asked rhetorically why gender-dysphoric boys should be permitted to go to the bathroom, change clothes, or shower with only girls but girls should be denied that right.

I suggested that if curtains and stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate objectively male students from females, then there remains no reason to maintain any single-sex restrooms for any students.

I asked how the Left can be sure that if there is a mismatch between mind and body, the error rests with the body and not the mind.

Chang asked me to respond to the Leftist belief that prohibiting gender-dysphoric students from sharing restrooms with opposite-sex students is equivalent to prohibiting blacks from sharing restrooms with whites, which I did both in our initial conversation and an email that followed. Here was my response:

The only difference between blacks and whites is skin color, which is analogous to eye or hair color. So, would skin color (or eye or hair color) be relevant to restroom, locker room, shower, or shelter usage? Of course not. Even whites have diverse skin, eye, and hair colors. No one suggests that any of those color differences are relevant to feelings of modesty or the desire for privacy. So, any imposed separation was generated not by feelings of modesty or the desire for privacy. Rather, imposed separation of races in restrooms was motivated by racism.

Now with regard to sex, virtually everyone—including gender-dysphoric persons and homosexuals—acknowledge that men and women are substantively and significantly different. When homosexuals claim they are attracted only to persons of the same sex, they are implicitly and necessarily saying men and women are different, and those differences include bodily differences. When gender-dysphoric persons say they don’t want to use restrooms or locker rooms with persons of their same sex, they are saying there are fundamental and significant differences between men and women, and those differences include bodily differences. In fact, the intense desire to have an opposite-sex body is the central desire of virtually all gender-dysphoric persons. They are necessarily saying that their desire to use opposite-sex restrooms is based on those physical differences. They are demanding privacy based on sex differences while denying that privacy to others.

And if the demand for privacy based on objective sex differences is equivalent to racism, then why is the demand of gender-dysphoric persons for privacy based on sex differences not equivalent to racism? If separate restrooms for men and women are analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites, then are separate restrooms for gender-dysphoric males and non-gender-dysphoric males analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites as well? They are acknowledging sex differences and demanding to have those desires accommodated. So, why are sex differences meaningful only for those who have gender dysphoria but not for those who don’t?

So, from all those comments, here is what Chang wrote:

But acknowledgement remains an obstacle for conservative groups. Suburban-based Illinois Family Institute posted a blog this week decrying the CPS policy. The author, Laurie Higgins, says she does not believe the medical consensus that transgender people are mentally healthy, adding that “physical embodiment” of a sex should dictate bathroom use—though the group has no plans to petition CPS for changes to the policies because “that’s for community members to do,” she says.

That’s it.

While she got IFI’s position correct that we believe restroom use should correspond to physical embodiment as male or female, she conveniently omitted the reasons we believe that. She also omitted the points about the incoherence and inconsistency of the CPS guidelines that I raised through rhetorical questions. She did, however, manage to include six words about the unimportant point that IFI is not getting directly involved in efforts to overturn the CPS guidelines.

Chang’s defenses of her bias 

Even more interesting are Chang’s defenses of her imbalance.

First she told me “Sadly my editor has cut down the portion where I quoted you because he wanted me to focus on Chicago-only groups.”

Then she told me this stunner, which oddly has nothing to do with the location of IFI’s office:

[I]n writing the story, I could not ignore that your opinion is based on factual inaccuracies.

We address the question of balance by looking at accuracy as well as representation. It is your personal belief that transgender people are mentally ill, which is why you are against the policy. I think that’s important for our readers to know, and I included that in the article. I asked follow up questions to get a better view of how you came to that conclusion, but the reasoning you provided was too far outside the facts to responsibly report. [emphasis added]

Her rationalization of bias is remarkable for two reasons, the first of which is that I never said that “transgender people are mentally ill.”

Second, Chang is factually and absolutely incorrect when she claims that my opposition to gender-dysphoric persons using opposite-sex restrooms is based on my “personal belief that transgender people are “entally ill.” In point of fact, I told her specifically that IFI opposes gender-dysphoric persons in opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms because we believe objective, immutable physical embodiment as male or female is deeply and profoundly meaningful and is the source of the desire for privacy and feelings of modesty.

Here’s what I said when she went fishing for a statement from me about the mental health of gender-dysphoric persons: I asked how leftists can be sure that if there’s a mismatch between mind and body, the error rests in healthy, normally functioning bodies. And I said that the highly politicized mental health community is prescribing protocols that do not advance health.

What’s more remarkable still are the opinions of leftists that Chang evidently believes are based on factual accuracies and, therefore, suitable for print:

• From the Center on Halsted: “It’s a great day for gender-diverse students in CPS.” What is the “fact” on which this opinion is based? Gender-diverse students may have the opinion that it’s a great day, but what is the objective and accurate fact upon which that opinion is based? What is the objective factually accurate definition of “great”?

• From the Center on Halsted: “This is an affirmation of their viability as human beings.” What does this even mean? And what is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that affirmation of viability of gender-dysphoric persons as “human beings” requires allowing them in opposite-sex restrooms? What is the objective factual accuracy supporting the implicit opinion that people who oppose opposite-sex persons in their restrooms view gender-dysphoric persons as not viable human beings?

• From the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance: “Obviously it’s helpful when people have the support of their parents, but if it’s not possible, it’s great that a student can still be who they are in school.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that it’s “great” that a student can pretend he or she is the opposite sex at school? What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that parental support requires affirmation of the desire to be the opposite sex is based?

• From the Chicago Gender Society: “You’re not born with hate. You have to be taught hate. Like we’ve seen in North Carolina and Mississippi in recent months.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that people who oppose opposite-sex persons in restrooms hate them?

• From Harold Brown Health: “So for kids to have the option to be in a safe environment…it’s a new day. A clean slate.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that allowing gender-dysphoric girls in boys restrooms and locker rooms enhances school “safety.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that allowing gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms creates a “clean slate”?

Apparently, leftists believe that opinions must be based on “factual accuracies” as defined by them. Hint: These factual accuracies are actually assumptions with which leftists agree.

So much for fair and balanced reporting and intellectual diversity.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) just issued guidelines that allow gender-dysphoric students and teachers to use restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to the sex they wish they were rather than the sex they actually are. In public schools, staff and faculty regularly use student restrooms, so adult men who wish they were women may now use girls’ restrooms, and adult women who wish they were men may now use boys’ restrooms.

These new guidelines apply to all schools from elementary through high school, and they apply not just to restrooms and locker rooms but to overnight school trips as well. Now boys who wish they were girls will be able to stay in rooms with girls and vice versa.

These morally and intellectually incomprehensible guidelines also apply to “gender non-binary” students who don’t “identify” as either male or female and to “questioning” students who aren’t yet sure which sex they would like to be. In other words, these students may make their restroom, locker room, and hotel room selections in accordance with their fluid, unfixed sexual confusion.

The CPS guidelines also require faculty and staff to use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric students. Since pronouns correspond to one’s sex–not to feelings about one’s sex–this means that the government is requiring staff and faculty to lie.

CPS erroneously believes that these guidelines are necessary to create “an environment of complete tolerance and respect” for every “student and adult” and promote “safe and inclusive schools.”

The CPS is decidedly not, however, tolerating or respecting those who believe that physical embodiment as male and female is profoundly meaningful and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy. These guidelines will not ensure the inclusion of those students, parents, staff, and faculty who believe it’s immoral to share restrooms, locker rooms, or hotel rooms with persons of the opposite sex.

If safety is defined as the absence of uncomfortable feelings, then these guidelines do not ensure the safety of those who don’t want to do their business with an unrelated person of the opposite sex doing his or her business in the stall next to them.

CPS needs to explain why gender-dysphoric persons have the right to use restrooms with only those who share their “gender identity,” but other students have no right to use restrooms with only those who share their objective, immutable sex. Why should restrooms, locker rooms, and hotel rooms correspond to feelings about one’s sex rather than one’s actual sex?

In the service of inclusivity, why not make all restrooms, showers, and hotel rooms completely co-ed? Why not allow all boys and girls to make these choices? Why should only students who wish they were the opposite sex or aren’t sure if they want to be a boy or girl be allowed in opposite-sex restrooms? Isn’t that discriminating based on “gender identity”?

The truth is it is not the feelings of students about their sex that make girls and boys not want opposite-sex students in their restrooms, showers, and hotel rooms. It is the actual sex of students that makes girls and boys not want opposite-sex students in their restrooms, showers, and hotel rooms. What possible difference does it make to girls if the boy in their restroom, shower, or hotel room wants to be a boy or not?

Parents of CPS students are once again ill-served and disrespected by the Chicago Public School system.