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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservatives, GET OUT NOW.

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

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

Since diversity re-education is all the rage these days (and if Harris and her shadowy, confused puppet win the election will only get worse), I thought it might be helpful to publish the letter I emailed to Deerfield High School’s principal in about 2007 when I dropped out of an ongoing divisive diversity workshop due to the intolerance, close-mindedness, bigotry, and dishonesty of my un-collegial colleagues.

read the letter

On July 10 at Walled Lake Western High School in Michigan, popular teacher Justin Kucera who taught AP World History and coached varsity baseball and basketball and who by all accounts never brought his politics into his teaching or coaching was fired for tweeting, “I’m done being silent. Donald Trump is our president.” Meanwhile,

Paulette Loe, a now-retired Walled Lake Western teacher, encouraged students to read an article from the Atlantic about “how to beat Trump” while still employed. Nicole Estes, a kindergarten teacher in the district, called Trump a “sociopath” and a “narcissist” on Facebook in 2016 and is still employed at Keith Elementary School [also in Walled Lake Consolidated school district].

It should be unbelievable that a teacher could be fired from a government school for expressing his support for a sitting president while indoctrinators are free to bring their politics into the classroom regularly with no fear of retribution. Sadly, this is now the new normal.

Twelve years ago when I was a member of the English Department at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore working full-time in the writing center, teachers Elliott Hurtig and Jeff Berger-White were teaching the repugnant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Hurtig was also teaching the historically inaccurate Laramie Project, both plays of which espoused politically “progressive,” morally regressive views of homosexuality.

Setting aside the egregious obscenity in Angels in America, I discussed with a purportedly Catholic writing center colleague the ethical problem of teachers presenting resources from only one side of the debate on this most controversial cultural issue. I made the case that in an educational environment, teachers have an obligation to present resources from opposing voices as well. She responded that because she was absolutely sure opposing voices—that is, conservative voices—were wrong, they shouldn’t be allowed to be presented to students.

This is the kind of presumptuousness that has long poisoned education in America from elementary schools through colleges and universities, and has created a dissolute and destructive culture. Leftists demand absolute autonomy and arrogate to themselves the right to indoctrinate other people’s children because they have unilaterally concluded that their political and moral beliefs are objectively true, and opposing views are false. From kindergarten on up, leftists are indoctrinating other people’s children with their arguable leftist beliefs on homosexuality, opposite-sex impersonation, race, sex, American history, and presidential politics with no negative repercussions.

In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills presciently warns about the very arrogance infecting today’s “educators” hell-bent on imposing their beliefs on vulnerable, ideologically malleable students:

The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. … People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief …  that their feelings … are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one. … his own preference … is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety.

In a recent appearance on Mark Levin’s program Life, Liberty & Levin, Dr. John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, chairman of the California Association of Scholars, and author of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities and The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done discussed the root cause of the cultural “shout downs” and riots:

The real problem is way behind the scenes in the classrooms, which the public never sees. … you’ve had a very long campaign of converting the universities into one party campuses. If you go back 50 years … there were 3 left-of-center professors to 2 right-of-center professors. … that’s consistent with a very healthy debate between the left and the right on campus. But by … 1999, a study shows 5 to 1. … By another five to six years later, it’s gone to 8 to 1, and the current studies … coming out now, it’s something like 13 to 1. There’s every reason to believe that that’s getting more extreme all the time because one of these studies looks to the junior ranks—assistant professors, associate professors—and found that the ratio there, left to right, is 48 to 1.  … The hiring being done now is at the rate of about 50 to 1. … So, you’re going to wind up with a complete monoculture within a short period of time. And a one-party campus is a campus that’s dysfunctional. …

The campus is so far left and so irrational now, and it’s leftism that is poisoning the culture. One profession after another is being essentially corrupted. … It’s totally poisoned journalism. It’s poisoned the teaching in the high schools because the high school teachers are all trained on college campuses

Ellis also suggests that parents who continue to send their children to colleges and universities that are in the business of poisoning culture are part of the problem:

Parents have a very fixed attitude, derived from the past, that sending their kids to college is a first rate way to launch them into a life and a career, and then there’s the fact that those great names of the institutions of higher learning of Harvard, Yale, Columbia … are very, very impressive. It casts a kind of spell over the public. They really cannot believe … that what was so glorious is now in fact no longer there.

Conservatives often ask what they can do to help restore health to our ailing culture. Here’s one thing they can do: Don’t send their children to colleges and universities that have “monocultures,” and through those monocultures, poison culture.

Stop being impressed by the worldly accolades poured on the polluted Ivies that now oppose their original mission statements, mottos, logos, and seals. Harvard long ago rejected its original mission statement:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

The Princeton University shield once depicted an open Bible inscribed with “VET NOV TESTAMENTUM,” that signified the Old and New Testaments; a ribbon above the Bible that said, “VITAM MORTUIS REDDO,” which means, “I restore life to the dead”; and a ribbon below the shield with the words “DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET,” which mean, “Under God’s power she flourishes.” Such expressions today would be an embarrassment to the faculty and a trigger to most students.

Dartmouth College’s original motto was “VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO,” which is translated as “A voice crying out in the wilderness,” an allusion to Scripture about preparing the world for Christ. Ironically, Dartmouth is now a cacophonous voice creating wilderness out of the semi-tamed culture Christianity created.

When teachers and college professors preach their leftist sermons in schools, not only do they indoctrinate, but they also leave dissenters at the mercy of social tyrants. In other words, government school preachers and college professors fuel bullying. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills writes,

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first … chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

You know there’s a problem when a left-leaning site like the satirical website the Onion skewers the close-minded propaganda that leftists identify as “education” as it did in a post titled “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea”:

As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion. … Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.(emphasis added for fun).

Leftists are fond of saying that free speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences. They fail to acknowledge that if those consequences are loss of employment, First Amendment speech protections are, in effect, nullified. And we all know, leftists couldn’t care less.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Education-in-a-Pro-Propaganda-Culture_podcast_01.mp3

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There are myriad reasons why young people are abandoning conservative principles, one of which is that our publicly funded schools are run by and our children are taught by fools who revile truth. Neil Rigler, an English teacher at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, is one such teacher.

Last week, Rigler posted a link to an article from the far Left website PinkNews that criticized President Trump’s appearance at the Values Voter Summit, which is sponsored by the Family Research Council. Rigler added this comment:

Why isn’t this the lead story on national news? [Trump] endorses this hate group and supports legalized discrimination. Horrific. (Yet again).

Evidently Rigler is a disciple of the ethically impoverished, anti-Christian hate group known euphemistically as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has deemed the Family Research Council (and IFI) “hate groups.”

But why such a designation for organizations that actually denounce hatred?

The SPLC and Rigler hurl the epithet “hate group” at organizations that hold theologically orthodox views on the moral status of volitional homosexual activity and biological-sex rejection. The SPLC and Rigler evidently believe that moral positions with which they disagree constitute hatred of persons.

Of course, it’s unlikely they apply their underlying principle consistently. It’s unlikely they believe that all moral disapproval of volitional acts constitutes hatred of persons. It’s unlikely they would hurl the epithet “hater” at someone who believes homoerotic love between two consenting brothers is immoral or at someone who opposes the legal recognition of poly-marriages.

Foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little Leftist minds.

Government employee Rigler posted his feckless, pernicious comment on his Facebook page where anyone with a Facebook account can see it, including former, current, and future students. Presumably some of them are theologically orthodox young people.

And Rigler fancies himself “inclusive.”

Unfortunately, Rigler is not alone among our taxpayer-subsidized propagandists who identify as educators and who accuse those who hold values and beliefs with which they disagree of being hateful. Rigler’s comment is emblematic of the openly contemptuous attitude many of our  public school teachers have toward those who hold conservative beliefs and values.

There’s Jason Spoor-Harvey, former Fremd High School social studies teacher and current history department chair at Oak Park and River Forest High School. Spoor-Harvey is “married” to a man and has posted pictures on his Facebook page of his faux-marriage as well as his hearty support for Planned Parenthood. When he was a teacher at Fremd, he posted pictures of Che Guevara and Karl Marx on his official school web page along with this image titled “Evolutionary Theory”:

Rigler and Spoor-Harvey have every right to express their foolish beliefs and values  on their Facebook pages, and parents have every right to say these men are poor role models for their children and refuse to place their children under the their tutelage. The mere fact that Spoor-Harvey is legally “married”—though not in reality married—to a man teaches young people a harmful, untruthful lesson and renders him an unfit role model.

But Rigler and Spoor-Harvey don’t restrict expressions of their political and moral views to their Facebook pages. They express their views in the classroom both through their comments and the materials they choose, like homosexual writer Tony Kushner’s essay titled “American Things,” which Rigler has taught. In this essay, Kushner compares the homosexuality-affirming revolution to the Civil Rights Movement and calls moral disapproval of homosexuality a “social evil.”

There are countless teachers like Rigler and Spoor-Harvey who see themselves as “change agents” and view it as their right and responsibility to use their publicly funded positions to transform the political and moral views of other people’s children. Sometimes they do so by bringing in representatives from partisan organizations to disseminate destructive ideas to children as unassailable truths.

Just last month, Public School District 150 in Peoria, Illinois invited the Central Illinois Pride Health Center (CIPHC) to teach eighth-graders a lesson on “Sexual Orientation and Gender Stereotypes.”

The executive director and founder of the CIPHC is Len Meyer (on the left below), a lesbian who masquerades as a man and is “married” to a woman.

In March 2017, Meyer partnered with Illinois State University for its 19th annual drag show charity fundraiser with proceeds going this year to CIPHC. Meyer said, “I have always been a supporter of the drag show…as a person of the community. I think it is a great opportunity to give students a chance to get involved and get exposure of the cause.”

Do PSD 150 administrators, teachers, and school board members really believe this is the kind of person who should be teaching 13-year-olds? Do they really believe this is the kind of person most parents in their community want to teach their children about sexuality?

The troubling and very hard-to-find “Sexual Orientation and Gender Stereotypes” lesson on the PSD 150 website lists a handout titled the “Genderbread Person,” as a “needed” material for this class. This infamous handout teaches children to sever the connection between one’s sex and gender, or in the words of the Genderbread Person, to break through the “binary.” The lesson outline includes teaching students the meaning of “key terms” like “cisgender,” “queer,” and “intersex,” which is defined as “actually quite common!”

What is never discussed in the lesson is whether the beliefs of the “LGBTQ” community are objectively true or good. No dissenting views are included.

Christian parents should not allow their children to be trained up by men and women who view Scripture as hate-filled, ignorant bigotry.

Christians should not allow their children to be trained up by men and women who do not recognize the intrinsic value of all human lives—and all means all—including those yet in their mothers’ wombs.

Christian parents should not allow their children to be trained up by adults who don’t recognize and respect the immutability and profound meaning of sexual differentiation.

Christian parents should not allow their children to be trained up by adults who believe that inclusivity and compassion demand the affirmation of sexual perversion or confusion or the relinquishment of physical privacy.

Christians parents should not allow their children to be trained up by those who cannot see that marriage has a nature central to which is sexual complementarity and without which a union is not in reality a marriage.

Churches must begin today to create affordable schools for their church families. For diverse reasons, many families are unable to homeschool and unable to afford Christian private schools. Churches should view the education of children in their flocks as a mission field, with mission funds going toward making disciples of them. No matter how nice they are, people like Neil Rigler, Jason Spoor-Harvey, and Len Meyer cannot properly educate children.

Thomas More College of Liberal Arts professor Anthony Esolen offers this parable to illustrate where we are culturally:

Imagine a scene of wholesale destruction. Every old and venerable structure has been reduced to rubble. People relieve themselves in the street. Sometimes they copulate there, too. Their “music” is little more than grunting and groaning. Their rulers are on the take. There are hundreds of thousands of old books in the mountain of stone and mortar that used to be the library. Most of those books are far beyond the capacity of the people to read. They sneer and snort at Shakespeare, because they can’t understand him. They’ve never even heard of Virgil. A lot of these people have taken to cannibalism.

Now then—you have retained some vague memory of a more noble way of life.  You have therefore arrived at a great truth. It’s perfectly obscure to most of your fellow rubble-pickers, who mock you and call you a prude, a Neanderthal, a medieval monk, a madman, a hater of the hungry, and so forth. Your precious truth is simply this: it is wrong to eat human flesh.

Well, that is no great burst of enlightenment, but it is a beginning. So what do you do?  Will you be content to say, “My children will do everything that everyone else is doing, but they will not eat human flesh?” They will be subhuman and subcultural, but their taste in dining will be restricted just a little?  Is that all?

Will you say, “Our family is not anthropophagous, but we will send our children to be taught by the same fellow that all the other parents use,” the one with the squalid leer, dabbling in excrement, contemptuous of any wisdom from the past?

…

What do you do, then?  Turn back, O man.  It’s time to recover and rebuild.

Churches should start the recovery and rebuilding project now. We’re very late. Some of our children are cannibals.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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Another high school graduation has been marred by politically correct fecklessness. This time it wasn’t a controversy over a student’s speech that marred the event but instead an award that tainted what should have been a joyous family affair.

This year Deerfield High School (DHS) on Chicago’s affluent North Shore awarded one of its highest honors, the John F. Kennedy Medal of Honor award to a student who very publicly “identifies” as  “genderqueer and pansexual.” As reported by the Chicago Tribune, “Earning the John F. Kennedy Medal of Honor this year was Sorrel Rosin. Principal Kathryn Anderson said the award is given to a person who demonstrates courage in the pursuit of excellence.”

Former principal Audris Griffith described the JFK Medal of Honor as “an award the high school gives out to students exemplifying personal bravery and responsible action.” What did Rosin do to deserve this award? Apparently, he received this award for identifying as genderqueer, cross-dressing at school, and starting “her [sic] own initiative, called The Gender Neutral Project…. The goal of this project is ultimately to create and distribute stickers that make spaces, such as public bathrooms, safer and inclusive of people of all gender identities.” Rosin explained his motivation for the Gender Neutral Project:

I had a lot of issues this year with being late to class and missing class, because I just had to go to the bathroom, and I think one of the hardest things this year was changing for gym because there’s two locker rooms, neither of which I fit into.

Even though Deerfield High School has two co-ed restrooms, that was not enough for Rosin. In a Change.org petition, he demands more:

*** MY SCHOOL DOES HAVE 2 GENDER NEUTRAL RESTROOMS BUT THEY ARE IN VERY HARD TO ACCESS AREAS AND MOST PEOPLE IN THE SCHOOL DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THEM. THERE IS NO GENDER NEUTRAL LOCKER ROOMS ***

To be clear, these are multi-occupancy co-ed restrooms, available to any boys and girls to use at the same time. These are not single-occupancy restrooms, nor are they single-sex restrooms that only gender-dysphoric students of the opposite sex may use. They are multi-stall, co-ed restrooms. In Rosin’s view, the problem is DHS need more of these restrooms. He wants them more centrally located. And he wants co-ed locker rooms.

But if Rosin is willing to change his clothes around girls who identify as bigender and genderfluid (i.e., sometimes they identify as boys), and around boys who identify as girls, and around boys who identify as genderqueer, genderfluid, bigender, trigender, agender, and gender-nonbinary, why won’t he change in the boys’ locker room? If he’s comfortable changing around all these different manifestations of maleness, why the opposition to changing in the boys’ locker room?

How does he know the gender identity of the boys in the boys’ locker room? Does he know with certainty that none of the boys in the boys’ locker room “identifies” as agender, bigender, trigender, gender fluid, genderqueer, gender-nonbinary, or “trans”? He certainly can’t tell their gender identity by anatomy, hairstyles, or clothing choices (the latter two of which are arbitrary social constructions wholly unrelated to maleness—or so we’re told ad nauseum).

What does this sad event teach about public school leaders who believe the effort to eradicate public recognition of sex differences in restrooms and locker rooms constitutes “courage in the pursuit of excellence” and “responsible action”? It teaches first that they are not equipped to teach and train children. Such leaders are at best ignorant and foolish.

Second, it teaches that parents should not put their children in any context where they will be taught and trained by such fools.

A look at Deerfield High School’s 2015 JFK Medal of Honor recipient offers a glimmer of hope that all is not yet lost. Political correctness and the obsession with using taxpayer-funded schools to advance anarchical Leftist views on sexuality may not have wholly overtaken the hearts and minds of “progressive change agents.” Some may still be able and willing to recognize and honor true excellence and responsible action as they did when they awarded the JFK Medal of Honor to Heath Ogawa:

The son of a Japanese father and American mother, Ogawa…was raised in Japan, went to public school there and was not a very good student before fate catapulted him to the United States.

“On March 11, 2011, my life changed…. With the earthquake, tsunami and possible radiation poisoning my parents made the decision to send me to live with family friends in Highland Park.”

Living in a condominium in Deerfield later on and taking care of himself, Ogawa said some friends were jealous of his independence — but he did not see it that way.

“I was filled with responsibility and loneliness…. There was no dinner waiting for me when I got home, just the breakfast dishes I hadn’t washed. I didn’t learn how important family was until I opened the door to an empty condo.”

Hardly able to speak English and not knowing how to read a word of it, Ogawa told how he embraced his studies, athletics and friendship. Earlier this month he became a state gymnastics champion in the long vault and in March became the thirteenth best diver in Illinois. He will go to Lake Forest College in the fall to dive.

…

“He shows all of that and lifts all of our spirits,” Griffith said. “On snowy days we would see him riding his long skate board because it was the only way he could get to school.”

In his Change.org petition, Rosin shared that he, like so many other children and teens, has been bullied. Bullying is a persistent and tragic reality that grows out of the fallen nature of humans and the immaturity of youth. Teens are able to recognize disordered behavior, but many are unable to control how they respond to it. Adults who ignore the nature of adolescent culture and allow children to cross-dress at school increase the likelihood that these children will be victims of bullying.

Sorrel Rosin deserves compassion, empathy, and prayers because he’s human, confused, and hurting. Neither Rosin nor anyone else deserves an award for efforts to normalize sexual deviance.

A final word about courage: Admirable courage is not merely doing something bold and uncomfortable. It is not overcoming fear in the service of transgressing all boundaries.

Admirable, award-deserving courage demonstrates perseverance, boldness, and discomfort in the service of a worthy goal, and a worthy goal is one that is informed by goodness and truth. Eradicating the public recognition of and respect for sex differences is not a worthy goal, and pursuing it—no matter how difficult the effort—is not worthy of honor. Surely, there was one student in DHS’ 2017 graduating class who demonstrated courage in the service of a goal that all families would view as worthy.

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One of the central tactics used by liberals to impose coercively an incoherent and science-denying “trans” ideology on, well, everyone, is to hurl epithets at dissenters. And if that means adults hurling epithets in the direction of children, so be it. Leftists can’t have children running around our streets even thinking the emperor has no clothes. And they certainly can’t have girls refusing to share restrooms with the emperor.

Two comments left on Illinois Family Action’s Facebook page in response to my article titled “The Enemies of Truth Wage War in Districts 211 and 15” illustrate the terrible way liberals seek to manipulate those who believe that congenital physical embodiment as male or female matters.

Simone McLellan Kentish accuses those who support sex-segregated restrooms and locker rooms of intolerance, ignorance, unjust discrimination, and bigotry:

The TRUTH is that a gender dysphoric child is going through so many challenges of his own dealing with discrimination and ignorance that the farthest thing from his mind would be to ogle another student of the same sex he identifies with.

The TRUTH is that the locker room issue is a convenient excuse intolerant people are using to justify their own bigotry.

My own child will soon be graduating from a D15 school and moving on to a d211 school. I am thankful she’s being brought up in an environment where tolerance and understanding prevail.

Jill Mayes goes even further in her defense of intellectual and moral incoherence:

“Enemies of Truth”?!? Ugh! This religious hatred breaks my heart. Do you even know any transgender people? Life is hard enough without people causing trouble for one another especially children … especially in the name of God. Honestly, this is the most unChrist like behavior I can imagine. Please stop.

Seriously? The most un-Christlike behavior Mayes can imagine is opposition to co-ed locker rooms? Has she heard of ISIS?

There is no doubt that gender-dysphoric children experience challenges, but the proper response to their disordered and futile attempt to reject their immutable biological sex should not be to allow them to invade the private spaces of opposite-sex children.

The objections to co-ed restrooms and locker rooms articulated in the “Enemies of Truth” article have nothing to do with “ogling.” The central objection to the sexual integration of private spaces pertains to the intrinsic meaning of biological sex, particularly with regard to modesty and privacy.

Whether Kentish and Mayes acknowledge it, allowing an objectively male student in girls’ private spaces (or vice versa) necessarily means that objective, immutable biological sex has no intrinsic meaning relative to modesty and privacy.

If, however, biological sex has meaning, then biological males who wish they were girls have no more right in girls’ locker rooms than do biological males who are content with their sex. Either objective, immutable biological sex matters or it doesn’t. If it matters, then boys and girls should not be sharing private spaces. If it doesn’t matter, then there is no reason to have any sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters or semi-private hospital rooms anywhere.

And if biological sex doesn’t matter in private spaces, then why is District 211 requiring the boy who is pretending to be a girl to use a private changing area? Doesn’t that requirement suggest that biological sex does, in reality, mean something?

When I worked at Deerfield High School where my children attended and were swimmers, I could walk into the locker room where the girl swimmers were changing and showering to talk to my daughter. I could not walk into the boys’ locker room to talk to my son. If during my children’s high school years, I were to have “transitioned” to a male, should I have been prohibited from entering the girls’ locker room and been permitted to enter the boys’?

Despite Kentish’s claim, it is not bigotry that leads girls to desire separation from boys when changing clothes. And it is not bigotry that leads girls not to want to do their business in a stall next to an unrelated boy doing his business. It is natural and good for girls and boys to want to undress and do their business in sex-segregated spaces.

Since Mayes objects to my claim that proponents of co-ed restrooms are enemies of truth, perhaps I should clarify what I meant and to whom the comment was directed.

• Anyone who claims that people can change their sex is an enemy of truth.

• Anyone who claims that private spaces should correspond to subjective feelings about biological sex rather than to objective sex is an enemy of truth.

• Anyone who claims that compassion, inclusivity, love, or Christ demands the sexual integration of restrooms and locker rooms is an enemy of truth. The Bible teaches that God created us male and female. God prohibits cross-dressing. And God prohibits bearing false witness. The love that Jesus embodied and taught does not affirm all human desires, beliefs, and actions. Quite the contrary. Jesus himself said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”

• Anyone who believes that the government (i.e., public school administrations) has a right to require employees to lie by referring to gender-dysphoric students by opposite-sex pronouns is an enemy of truth.

• Anyone who believes that it is a good thing to give minors puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, or double-mastectomies is an enemy of truth.

The blame for locker room controversies in public schools rests not with parents who believe that biological sex matters but with parents of gender-dysphoric children who are trying to impose their arguable assumptions about “gender identity” on everyone and on their liberal allies who seek to humiliate and stigmatize dissenters. And here’s where children come in.

Policies that permit co-ed restrooms and locker rooms implicitly teach what Kentish and Mayes explicitly say: They teach all children that their desire not to share private spaces with opposite-sex persons is intolerant, ignorant, unjustly discriminatory, bigoted, hateful, and un-Christlike. When Kentish, Mayes and countless other “progressives” vilify opponents of co-ed restrooms and locker rooms, they are necessarily vilifying and shaming conservative kids. And that is shameful bullying.

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On Monday, I wrote about World Hijab Day during which non-Muslim teachers in public schools adopted the religious practice of hijab, wearing the head covering that some Muslim women wear voluntarily and some are coerced into wearing. Hijab is a controversial practice even among Muslims, many of whom see it as a symbol of a form of political Islam called Islamism that oppresses women.

World Hijab Day and other public school events expose the hypocrisy of “progressives” when it comes to their responses to Islam as compared to their responses to theologically orthodox Christianity.

Hypocrisy #1: Modesty and chastity

While “progressives” heap scorn and ridicule on school districts that enforce dress codes that prohibit skimpy skirts and décolletage-baring tops, “progressive” teachers don hijabs in solidarity with Muslim women whose religion requires them to protect their modesty by covering their hair and sometimes their entire bodies from the top of their heads to the tips of their toes.

While “progressives” mock conservative Christians for their commitments to chastity until marriage, they demonstrate their solidarity with Muslims who believe that “a woman’s honor lies in her ‘chastity.’”  Muslim women Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa inadvertently expose the hypocrisy of “progressive” American women when they describe the beliefs foundational to hijab:

[T]he “hijab “is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and thus must not be tempted by the sight of our hair…. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.

“Progressive” American women who believe women have no responsibility for the sexually abusive actions of men don hijabs to demonstrate solidarity with a religious practice that holds women responsible for men’s abusive actions. “Progressive” American women who march in the streets wearing clitoris costumes and “p*ssy” hats, reveling in the words of Madonna who offered to perform a sexual act on any man who voted for Hillary show solidarity with a religion that covers women from head to toe to prevent men from being tempted.

Hypocrisy #2: Religious persecution

Nazma Khan, who created World Hijab Day in response to being called names for wearing a hijab, asserts that it’s an effort to end discrimination and foster religious tolerance—both noble goals.

That said, is it the role of public school teachers to teach students about solidarity with any religious tradition or political goal, let alone a controversial and divisive one?

In his book Save the World on Your Own Time, Professor Stanley Fish disputes the notion that teachers should “advocate personal, political, moral, or any other kind of views except academic views.” Fish contends that teachers are not hired to do things like “produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about social change.” In Fish’s view, these are tasks properly left to “preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, [and] inspirational speakers.” I would add parents to that list.

But if fostering solidarity with persecuted groups is part of the teaching responsibilities of public school faculty, why are they not fostering solidarity with the most persecuted religious group in the world: Christians.

The one religious group in America that “progressives” deem worthy of mockery—including even savage mockery—are theologically orthodox Christians. So, why do “progressives” detest theologically orthodox Christians so intensely?

They hate them primarily for three reasons:

1. Christians believe that absolute, objective, transcendent truth exists.

2. They believe that homoerotic activity is immoral.

3. They believe that marriage has a nature central to which is sexual differentiation.

Guess what? So do the majority of Muslims—including even moderate Muslims.

World Hijab Day reveals the hypocrisy of Leftists who hold theologically orthodox Christians in disdain because of their historical Christian beliefs regarding sexuality while participating in an event to show solidarity with the Muslims who hold similar positions.

In a 2013 Huffington Post piece on the persecution of Christians worldwide and especially in the Middle East, liberal Dr. Kelly James Clark, who heads up an interfaith organization decries the silence of the Western media and the U.S. Government:

In early November, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Christianity is “the most persecuted religion in the world.” Although met with predictable criticism, Rupert Short’s recent research report for Civitas UK confirms Merkel’s claim—we may not want to hear it, but Christianity is in peril, like no other religion….Short shows that “Christians are targeted more than any other body of believers.” Short is the author of the recently published Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack. He is concerned that “200 million Christians (10 percent of the global total) are socially disadvantaged, harassed or actively oppressed for their beliefs.”

…

Why has the tragedy of Christians in the Muslim world been ignored? Short blames this on the media’s fear that criticizing Muslims is tantamount to racism. I attribute it as well to secular media’s lack of interest in and sometimes even scorn for religious belief.

Western media must overcome its fear of criticizing Muslims and its disinterest in religious belief. Religious liberties are the most fundamental human liberties….In countries where religious liberty is conspicuously absent, one is likely to find a host of other liberties threatened as well.

Last February, New York State assemblyman Democrat David Weprin proclaimed his unwavering commitment to religious liberty in his endorsement of World Hijab Day:

With hate crimes against Muslim-Americans tripling in 2016, it is important we take this moment to stand together with our fellow Americans on World Hijab Day. Rooted in the American principles of religious freedom and liberty, the World Hijab Day movement seeks to end the discrimination and judgment that comes with wearing a hijab.’

…All Americans of all faiths should be allowed to freely exercise…their religious choice without the fear of violence and bigotry. 

It’s refreshing to hear a Democrat passionately endorse religious liberty. Perhaps Weprin will support the right of Christians in wedding-related businesses to decline to use their gifts and labor to serve a type of event that offends the God they serve. These business owners are encountering far worse bigoted persecution than being called names—though they experience that as well. They are losing their livelihoods.

From their religion of secularism—that is, faith in and worship of secularist assumptions about human nature and man’s relationship to the world—“progressives” arrogate to themselves the right to exercise their religion freely, including in the conduct of their businesses. But “progressives” deny that right to those whose religion includes belief in God. So, while clothing designers can refuse to serve a person based on the designers’ opposition to the beliefs of the person’s spouse, bakers are not permitted to refuse to bake an anti-wedding cake based on their opposition to same-sex anti-weddings. And remember, unlike “progressive” clothing designers who refuse to serve a person, these Christian bakers are happy to serve homosexuals—just not bake anti-wedding cakes.

Hypocrisy #3: Prayer in public schools

Leftist hypocrisy is revealed not only through World Hijab Day but also through the accommodation of  Muslim religious practices in public schools. For example, in addition to some Glenbrook South High School teachers wearing a Hijab all day on Feb. 1, the school provides a prayer space for Muslims as does Glen Crest Middle School in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. In a diverse and welcoming society, such accommodations seem reasonable.

But if those accommodations are reasonable, why was there such vociferous “progressive” opposition to the law passed here in Illinois mandating a moment of silence in public schools that specifically states that it “shall not be conducted as a religious exercise but shall be an opportunity for silent prayer or for silent reflection on the anticipated activities of the day”?

When I worked at Deerfield High School, this moment of silence was a blindingly quick 7 seconds. A student inclined to pray couldn’t make it much further than “Our Father who art in Heaven” before they were hustled on to more pressing homeroom issues like, well, often nothing.

And yet many “progressives” oppose even that, evidently fearing that allowing 7 seconds of silence during which students may pray constitutes the establishment of a state religion. And yet, non-Muslim teachers wearing hijab all day is a religiously neutral act and providing Muslim students with prayer rooms is constitutionally hunky dory. Curiouser and curiouser.

In a radio interview in Dec. 2016, Professor Massimo Introvigne, Director of the Centre for Studies on New Religion, stated that “[religious] intolerance is the antechamber of discrimination which then in turn is the antechamber of…persecution.” He further shared that “between 500 and 600 million Christians…cannot practice their own faith in complete freedom.”

The United States is rapidly moving from intolerance of Christianity to discrimination. While “progressives” twist themselves into a Gordion knot to show deference to, compassion for, and solidarity with Muslims, they regularly and openly demonstrate disdain for Christians. The vitriol directed at conservative Christians in the culture results in Christian children feeling embarrassed to share their beliefs. Would public school teachers show their solidarity with theologically orthodox Christians by wearing crosses visibly for an entire day, or would that be a bridge of tolerance too far?

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A couple of months ago, Deerfield High School (DHS) in Deerfield, Illinois quietly changed a multi-stall girls restroom to a co-ed restroom. Worse still the administration has not notified either parents or students. Rumors are circulating that the administration chose secrecy over transparency in order to avoid controversy.

This is not a single-occupancy restroom, nor is it a girls restroom restricted to actual girls and boys who wish they were girls. Rather, it is a co-ed restroom euphemistically called an “All Gender Restroom,” presumably to divert attention from the reality of what the administration has created. They have created a co-ed restroom that girls and boys may use together.

Of course, schools that allow only gender-dysphoric students to use multi-stall opposite-sex restrooms, have in reality created co-ed restrooms too. In reality, it makes no difference if the boy in the girls restroom dislikes his body and cross-dresses or likes his body and dresses normally. In both cases schools are creating de facto co-ed restrooms.

But DHS has gone a step further than most schools have yet dared to go in the steady march to obliterate respect for and recognition of the nature, meaning, and importance of objective, immutable sexual differentiation. DHS has skipped over the interim step of allowing only gender-dysphoric students to share restrooms with opposite-sex peers. No intermediate step for the “progressive” science-denying administration at DHS. All boys and girls may avail themselves of this co-ed restroom.

It should be noted that during the day this restroom is in a remote part of the high school and therefore a more convenient place for a sexual assault. This restroom, however, is located near the pool and gyms, so during public events like swim meets, basketball games, and pep rallies, it is easily available to any and all community members. A high school girl or a younger sister of a high school girl may be in a stall when a strange adult male enters.

A faculty member posed this question to an administrator about the brave new bathroom world in which restrooms and locker rooms are invaded by opposite-sex students: What would happen if a girl student said she didn’t want to share a restroom with a boy. The administrator said the school would make separate accommodations for the girl.

Our hapless neighbors in Alberta, Canada are willing to make similar accommodations for the properly ordered desires of girls who don’t want to shower and use restrooms with those whose sex they don’t share. In the “Guidelines for Best Practices: Creating Learning Environments That Respect Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities and Gender Expressions,” the Alberta government wrote that “A student who objects to sharing a washroom or change-room with a student who is trans or gender-diverse is offered an alternative facility.”

I told my millennial children (who happen to be DHS alumni) about these bizarre statements. Their first response was incredulity, and then they worked out the absurd implications of such fecklessness. First, one girl will object to using a locker room with a boy and will receive a special accommodation. Next, so many girls will express opposition to using locker rooms with actual boys that schools will have to create restrooms exclusively for actual girls, at which point gender-dysphoric boys will complain that they deeply desire to change and shower with girls, insisting on their “right” to use the new girls-only restroom. And then Leftists will step in to stop all this nonsense, claiming that students have no right to privacy based on objective, immutable biological sex.

Alternatively, parents and their representatives on school boards could insist steadfastly and passionately that restroom and locker room policies and practices recognize and respect immutable sex differences.

Right now Leftists are demanding that schools create de facto co-ed restrooms but will grudgingly permit schools to limit the commingling of sexes to gender-dysphoric students and will grudgingly allow schools to require gender-dysphoric students to use private stalls for excretory functions and changing clothes. But those are merely transitional accommodations.

The next step in their truly wicked effort to “eliminate the binary” will be to demand that gender-dysphoric students be allowed unrestricted access to restrooms, locker rooms, and showers, which is to say, no more requirements that gender-dysphoric students use private stalls for excretory functions, changing, and showering.

Then comes the coup de grace. Leftists will demand that all facilities be open to any sex, including those who are not gender-dysphoric. Once society has allowed objectively male persons unrestricted access to women’s private facilities, there will remain no rational justification for prohibiting non-gender-dysphoric males from using opposite-sex facilities.

Kind readers, if you think this is an absurd line of thinking, you have not been paying attention to how “LGBTQQIAP” activists have been using incrementalism successfully for the past 45 years. These are their pernicious goals, and they count on the ignorance and cowardice of Christians—including church leaders, many of whom refuse to lead. While conservatives cower, stubbornly ignoring warnings, “LBBTQQIAP” activists and their accomplices scurry onward, ten steps ahead and bold as brass.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem
We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington.

Click HERE to register today.  Seating is limited!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-New York) has arrogantly proclaimed that “extreme conservatives” have no place in New York. And who are these “extremists”? Those who Cuomo hopes will leave New York include those who believe that women do not have a moral right to murder babies in utero, those who believe that homosexual acts are immoral, and those who believe marriage has a nature central to which is sexual complementarity.

I assume that Cuomo seeks voluntary relocation of those who dissent from his “progressive” dogma, but who knows what presumptuous “progressive” oppressors will desire for untouchable “conservative extremists” in a few years.

What’s really rich in Cuomo’s statement about “extremism” is his apparent ignorance of history and logic. Cuomo seems to be implying that the number of people who hold a particular moral belief determines the truth or rightness of the belief. So, if most New Yorkers believe in the absolute right of mothers to murder the babies growing within them, then dissenters are wrongheaded extremists and have no place in states in which their views are in the minority. 

A few questions for Cuomo:

1. What if the majority of people in every state were to believe that women have a moral right to murder their babies in utero? Where then do dissenters belong? Where is their place?
   
   
2. Which moral and political beliefs must one hold in order to have a place in New York? Is it just conservative beliefs on feticide, assault weapons, and homosexuality that abrogate one’s right to live in New York, or are there other ideological litmus tests for New York residency?
   
   
3. Historically, Cuomo’s perverse views on feticide and homosexuality have been the extreme views. During those periods of history when Cuomo’s views were extreme, were they objectively wrong as well? And during those periods of history, did extreme “progressives” lose their “place” in all the states in which conservative  views dominated?

Some, including Cuomo, are now trying to argue that Cuomo was merely describing a political reality in New York. They’re arguing that Cuomo was simply saying that since New York is a liberal state, conservative “extremists” will have a difficult time effecting their desired political ends. But here’s what Cuomo actually said:

Are they these extreme conservatives…right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and if they are the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are….Figure out who you are, and figure out if your extreme conservative philosophy can survive in this state. And the answer is no.

Does Cuomo apply this pragmatic philosophy consistently? Does he think extreme progressives have no place in conservative states? Should all extreme “progressives” exit predominantly red states, counties, or cities?

“Progressives” have been fashioning their re-education camps for some years now (i.e., public schools), but perhaps the resistance of “conservative extremists” to curricular propaganda and censorship, and the increasing number of free-thinking “conservative extremists” who are exiting government schools is leading anti-intellectuals like Cuomo to entertain the fanciful idea of sequestration of non-compliants.

Seven years ago as a member of the English Department at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, I was working in the writing center. At that time, I was urging colleagues who introduced students to homosexuality-affirming resources also to expose students to the work of dissenting scholars. A colleague in the writing center—who, by the way, claimed to be Catholic—told me that she was so sure my views on homosexuality were wrong that she didn’t think they should be allowed to be presented in public schools. This is the astonishing view that dominates public schools around the country. Teachers simply assume that their unproven, non-factual moral and political assumptions (as well as re-definitions of terms) are true and arrogantly censor competing assumptions—all the while proclaiming their impassioned commitment to diversity, tolerance, and intellectual inquiry.

Cuomo inadvertently let the dirty, flea-bitten, nasty cat peak its head out of the extreme “progressive” bag, but he’s far from alone. Remember when Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values…. And if you’re gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values,”? Chick-fil-A was unwanted in Chicago because its president Dan Cathy believes that marriage is inherently sexually complementary.

The pernicious reality is that many “progressives,” particularly those in positions of power and influence (e.g., those in the mainstream press, academia, Congress, and the entertainment industry), violate virtually every one of their shibboleths: They hate diversity of ideas; they censor with carefree abandon; they’re arrogant and elitist; they’re intolerant; they hurl epithets, and they’re illogical. And they reserve for themselves the right to decide who gets to speak, work, live, move, and have their being in America. 

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The week before the Illinois Senate was scheduled to vote on a bill to legalize same-sex “marriage,” student members of the Straight and Gay Alliance (SAGA) at Deerfield High School sent this email to every staff and faculty member:

Dear Faculty and Staff,

This Valentines Day, the United States [sic] Senate will be voting on whether or not to pass legislation that would make same-sex marriage legal in Illinois. No matter which way the vote ends up going, it is safe to say that this will be a historic day in the LGBT movement. Your students in DHS’s Straight and Gay Alliance would like to invite you to a school-wide event in which all supporters of marriage and civil equality for LGBT people wear purple apparel; a color that symbolizes allies and togetherness in the movement. It doesn’t matter if it’s a purple bowtie, necklace, skirt, or SAGA t-shirt (we will be selling more if you’re interested in purchasing one). For those of you who are either required to wear a certain color or you don’t have any purple clothes then please feel free to come up to a SAGA student in either entrance of the school tomorrow to get a purple ribbon you can wear as a bracelet. Any of your support is greatly appreciated.

The members of SAGA are excited to see the future changes in our own community due to this legislation. We can honestly say that there is no one who we trust more to support and guide the ensuing generations through this exhilerating (sic) and challenging time than the Deerfield High School faculty and staff. Thank you for all of your generosity and support.

Happy Valentines Day,

Your students in SAGA (emphasis added)

Many teachers did wear purple in support of this controversial and divisive legislative proposal.  I suspect the school did not notify parents and other taxpayers of this organized political event involving district employees during school.

What should deeply trouble taxpayers is that District 113’s School Board policy permits district employees to participate in political activity “relating to the support or opposition of any executive, legislative, or administrative action.” And why is that troubling? Besides the obvious truth that only “progressive” teachers will promote their political beliefs at school, this policy appears to be inconsistent with case law regarding the rights of teachers to engage in speech—including symbolic speech—while on the job.

When I first learned of this employee political action, I spoke with an attorney who told me the following: 

School officials who wear something purple on Thursday would be engaging in expressive conduct while performing official duty. The school club email to the entire faculty has identified what wearing purple expresses. 

A 2006 SC case, Garcetti v. Ceballos, held that “when public employees speak while performing their official duties, (i.e., “job duty speech”), this speech is not protected by the First Amendment and can be the basis for discipline or discharge.”

http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?id=3868

This position is confirmed in a 2008 article by Dr. Martha McCarthy, the Chancellor’s Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Indiana University:

The general legal principle is that public school personnel cannot proselytize the captive student audience.

In…Weingarten v. Board of Education, a federal district court upheld the school district’s ban on employees wearing political buttons at school….The New York court ruled that students might view the political buttons as representing the school if worn by employees. This ruling is consistent with other decisions in which state and federal courts recently have upheld bans on teachers wearing buttons to promote political candidates or to criticize the United States and its involvement in Iraq and Panama.…

Controversies over political expression extend beyond distributing materials and wearing buttons. The Seventh Circuit in 2007 held that a probationary teacher’s expression of her opposition to the war in Iraq during a current events discussion with her students was not constitutionally protected. Also, a New York federal district court held that in an election year, a school district could require a teacher to remove the incumbent president’s picture from her classroom or to post the opposing candidate’s picture to ensure balance.

…While public educators have an absolute right to their political, religious, and other beliefs, they do not have a right to impose those beliefs on students. Thus, restrictions on public employees’ political activities in the classroom will likely be upheld if legally challenged. (emphasis added)

Prior to the day of the SAGA-sponsored political event, I asked Superintendent George Fornero if teachers would be permitted to wear purple on the day of the controversial legislative vote. He didn’t respond, so I sent this email to Fornero and the District 113 Board of Education:

Am I correct that staff and faculty may express their political views on legislative issues? Do teachers have permission to wear, for example, arm bands, bracelets, t-shirts, spats, or purple as part of an organized effort to express support for (or against) proposed legislation?

Since school board policy expressly permits district employees to participate in political activity “relating to the support or opposition of any executive, legislative, or administrative action,” and since district employees were permitted to wear purple in a public and organized political effort to express support for the legalization of same-sex marriage, would district employees be permitted to wear another color in a public and organized political effort to express support for the legalization of recreational drug use or gambling?

I would also like to know how the school board policy cited above squares with case law which consistently holds that teachers do not have a constitutionally protected right to engage in political activity while on the job.

As of this writing, I have received no response from any school board member and this response from Fornero:

I am writing to follow up on your inquiry with regard to the color of clothing worn by staff and faculty. Clothing color is a matter of personal choice, and may or may not be a reflection of person’s support for any particular public policy issue. I have no idea whether staff wore purple two weeks ago and, if they did, why they did so….The School District does not restrict the color of clothing that staff may wear on any particular day, although there are days when staff may be encouraged to wear school colors. There were no restrictions, no directives and no administrative communication to staff with regard to the color of clothing they could choose to wear on Valentine’s Day.…

The issues relating to the first amendment rights of public employees, and the rights of governmental entities to place limits on that speech in the workplace are complex and, as the article you quoted makes clear, regularly being interpreted and reinterpreted by the courts. The policy that is posted on the website is the Board’s current policy, which would govern these matters in our District. We would evaluate any actual situation based on the facts that related to that particular situation…

I have no further information to share.

Fornero’s obfuscatory response is the kind of response that gives politicians and bureaucrats a bad name. He had no idea whether employees wore purple on the day of the same-sex “marriage” vote? Really?

And why would he even mention Valentine’s Day? I didn’t ask whether the administration issued any directives regarding what to wear on Valentine’s Day. My question was whether the administration issued any directives regarding faculty engaging in expressive acts–including wearing particular colors–in support of a political cause.

Further, Fornero apparently expected me to believe that dozens of district employees just happened to wear purple on the day that SAGA members requested they wear purple in support of a controversial public policy issue. If I didn’t already know that he struggles with honesty, I might feel insulted by his apparent presumption that I am either stupid or gullible.

And is Fornero suggesting that the administration will “evaluate” each situation to determine which political issues teachers can express support for or opposition to?

As a District 113 community member, I am entitled to straightforward answers to the straightforward questions I asked.

Is this what we want in our public schools? Do we want teachers to promote their political views while on the government dime? Do we want teachers to exploit their access to our children to try to shape their moral and political beliefs? How do conservative students feel when the teachers who assign their grades have announced their political views on this, perhaps the most controversial topic in the country? And what would administrations and school boards think if an equal number of teachers wore paraphernalia in support of retaining sexual complementarity in the legal definition of marriage? Dueling t-shirts, what a great pedagogical concept.

Every taxpayer in every community should ask their administrators and/or members of their school boards if teachers are permitted to express their views on political issues while on the job,  including through symbolic speech like wearing buttons, armbands, bracelets, t-shirts—or the color purple.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send an email to to Superintendent Fornero, Principal Audris Griffith and the seven members of the District 113’s Board of Education.