Is it possible that our legislators are trying their best to make Illinois the California of the Midwest, without the mountains or beautiful weather? Our Governors, most certainly, are competing. Both have wildly inflated egos, both ignored their own directives during the height of the pandemic, and both have designs on the White House.

We already have many other similarities as well. Our largest cities are infested with crime and plagued with Soros backed prosecutors. English language and math proficiency for all students also is bleak for both states, although Illinois is worse. California is 50% and 34%, while in Illinois it is 29.9% and 25.8% for English and Math. And both states are losing population in record numbers. The 2020 figures show California losing 182,000 of its population of 39.5 million and Illinois has dropped 104,000 of its 12.5 million total population.

Instead of addressing these and other serious issues, our august lawmakers are trying to stay neck and neck with the Golden State on woke bathroom policies. Our General Assembly just passed an amendment (HB 1286) to the “Equitable Restroom Act,” that allows that “[a]ny multiple-occupancy restroom may be converted into an all-gender multiple-occupancy restroom.” It goes on to describe a variety of requirements for partitioned stalls and urinals. It was passed by a vote of 60 to 40, all Republicans voting against it.

Why?

California passed a similar bill that was signed into law by Newsom last year. The reasoning for the legislation was thin. One explanation was that parents could take their opposite sex minor child into the restroom with them . . . But, wait. Hasn’t that already been going on everywhere, forever?

Then there was the explanation that it allowed for more equitable gender inclusion. Isn’t that a separate argument? Haven’t we already been fighting that issue as it relates to gender identity, allowing people to use the restroom of the sex they identify with rather than their biological sex? I guess it answers the problem of the non-binary. If you don’t identify with either sex, where do you go? Literally, where do you go? Voila, an all-gender restroom.

Some pundits claim that the sex separated restroom prudery didn’t begin until the Victorian era, although many also mention that Paris began using separate public restrooms in the 1700’s.  What nobody mentioned is that throughout most of the world there were no public facilities other than outhouses, alleys and the great outdoors. Ancient Rome had public toilets, but I could not find any definitive source that could say one way or the other if facilities were separate for men and women. Logic indicates they were, since Roman baths were used by men and women, but there were separate designated times for men and for women to use them. Even in Rome, modesty prevailed.

Harvard Law Professor and columnist for the New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, has a more practical reason for combined restrooms. Saving time. In an article she wrote in 2016, Gersen recounted the occasion when she took the bar exam at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. She had to go to the restroom, but the ladies room had an “enormous line.” Instead of waiting, she walked into the men’s room, where there was no line, used one of the many empty stalls and expeditiously returned to successfully complete her exam. It wasn’t fair, according to Gerson, that the women had a long line while the men had none. So, she corrected the injustice. Professor Gerson observes:

Today, men and women, not assumed to be only heterosexual, are expected to function at work alongside one another, eat at adjacent seats in restaurants, sit cheek by jowl in buses and airplanes, take classes, study in libraries, and, with some exceptions, even pray together. Why is the multi-stall bathroom the last public vestige of gendered social separation? When men, gay or straight, can stand shoulder to shoulder at urinals without a second thought, is there much to back up the view that men and women must not pee or poop next to one another, especially if closed stalls would shield them from view?

Does modesty have no value, privacy and safety no utility, professor?

Why are our legislators devoting time on such issues as this? Is this really something that a majority of Illinoisans want? An identical bill was passed 63-43 in the Illinois House in 2021, but was not voted on in the Senate. Why bring it up again? Why do people with such strange priorities keep getting elected? And why is this a political issue?

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your local state senator to ask him/her to vote against this legislation when it comes up for a vote on the Senate floor sometime this session. Urge them to reject this foolish woke agenda that fails to recognize biological facts. Ask them to protect the privacy, dignity and safety of all Illinois citizens.

Please, speak out against this destructive bill.

Illinois Democrats are hell-bent on passing a new law—the REACH Act (HB 1736 and SB 647)—that will require every school-age child in Illinois public schools to be introduced to homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation through mandatory “comprehensive sex ed.” To be clear, that’s every child from kindergarten on up and the indoctrination will take place every school year, increasing in detail each year. This will be in addition to all the other pro-“LGBTQ” material in which leftists are drowning children via the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards”; the existing “LGBT” school indoctrination law; the homosexuality- affirming “anti-bullying” law passed in 2010; and the novels, plays, movies, essays, and articles teachers are already choosing to teach.

Every year the amount of time and number of contexts in which positive images of and ideas about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation—topics that no adult other than parents should introduce to children or teens—grows. Leftists have been planting a dark, impenetrable forest while self-neutering conservatives fret about the trash tree they just bumped into and left standing. Can conservatives not yet see the forest?

Leftists have their gimlet eyes always focused on the big picture as they play the long game to rule the country. And they know the big picture depends on shaping the hearts and minds of children. While conservatives dismiss the “little” offenses and fume briefly about the big offenses against decency, morality, and truth, leftists continue their march through every institution that shapes culture, including our schools which create our future culture-makers—or as we learned in 2020, our culture-destroyers.

Illinois made the national press recently for the youth mind-grab called the “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” that require teacher-training/professional licensure programs, all in-house professional development, and all classrooms to be infused with leftist beliefs about race, homosexuality, and cross-sex impersonation. That amendment will be decided in just a few days by a rules committee in Springfield composed of twelve lawmakers and controlled by leftists.

Meanwhile, here comes the REACH Act, which will enable leftists to reach deeper into the hearts and minds of impressionable children to shape their feelings and beliefs about sexuality under the viperish guise of protecting children.

IFI warned parents about this bill when it was first introduced last year. If passed, this legislation will require leftist-created “comprehensive” sexuality indoctrination to start in kindergarten. Currently, sex education is not required in Illinois, but if it is offered, the only type of curriculum that can be used is leftist “comprehensive” sex ed. That’s thanks to a 2013 law. More on that shortly.

Here are some morsels from the REACH Act (highlighted in yellow):

• “It is the intent of the General Assembly that comprehensive sex ed shall [must]… promote awareness and healthy attitudes about gender identity, gender expression” and “sexual orientation … and must be available to students in kindergarten through 12th grade.”

Since when did it become the job of public school teachers to promote “awareness” of homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation? When did it become their job to promote “healthy attitudes” about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation? Who decides what constitutes a “healthy attitude” toward these phenomena, and on what criteria are such judgments made?

• “Comprehensive sex ed in kindergarten through second grade shall [must] include … instruction on the following topics: human anatomy … gender roles … [and] varying family structures.”

Discussing human sexual anatomy in co-ed K-12 classes is yet one more way for our leftists to dissolve feelings of modesty in young children just as those feelings are beginning to develop. Leftists view that as a good thing. Discussions of “gender roles” and of “varying family structures” are ways of introducing little ones to “trans”-cultic beliefs and homosexuality.

• “Comprehensive sex ed in the third through 5th grades shall [must] include information about diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. … and an examination of the harm caused by gender-role stereotypes.”

No requirement that all competing views of “sexual orientation” be included or that criticism of “gender theory” be included.

No requirement that materials be presented that challenge the idea that all “gender-role stereotypes” are socially constructed and imposed.

No requirement that materials be presented that espouse the idea that “gender-role stereotypes” emerge organically from a recognition of sexual differentiation.

No requirement that materials be presented that discuss the possible ways “gender-role stereotypes” may serve a healthy cultural function.

No requirement that materials be included that argue that leftist gender theory is socially constructed and is being imposed on children with little to no public debate.

No requirement that materials be included that explain the serious health risks of chemical and surgical “treatments” to facilitate cross-sex impersonation.

No requirement that materials be presented on the social contagion that afflicts mostly adolescent girls called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.

No requirement that materials on desistance and detransitioning be presented.

• “[C]omprehensive sex ed must include … Discussion about … sexting” with 8-10-year-olds.

Leftists may be unaware of the many 8-10-year-olds who have never heard of sexting, never heard of porn, and don’t have cell phones. In those many cases, the passage of this law would mean the government would be introducing these young children to sexting. The innocence of their children that, at great effort and vigilance, parents have been able to preserve in the midst of this sex-saturated and defiling culture, the government would steal.

• Comprehensive sex ed “may not use stigmatizing or shame-based instructional tools or stigmatize parenting or sexually active youth,” “may not employ gender stereotypes” [you know, like saying only girls menstruate or only boys have penises], and “may not teach or promote any religious doctrine.”

In other words, schools must express only one judgment on homosexual behavior, cross-sex identification, and same-sex parenting: approval. So, what happens when the next sexual lobby gets their sexual identity added to the lawbooks? What happens when polyamorists are successful in having “polyamory” included in law as a “sexual orientation” as they already seek to do?

Enquiring minds wonder why this bill does not include these words: “Comprehensive sex ed shall not use stigmatizing or shame-based instructional tools to stigmatize religiously based parenting and shall not implicitly or explicitly teach or promote views critical of religiously based beliefs on the nature and morality of homosexuality or cross-sex identification.”

This bill follows the aforementioned comprehensive sex ed law passed in 2013. That bill required that any school that has a sex ed curricula in any grade must use only comprehensive sex ed—no abstinence-based sex ed. The bill’s sponsors argued at the time that the law was needed to reduce the number of STIs and unintended pregnancies among minors but then provided zero research proving that comprehensive sex ed achieves those goals better than abstinence-based curricula. And no Republican demanded such research.

The one good thing in the 2013 comprehensive sex ed law was that schools were left free not to offer any sex ed at all. That was then. This is now. The wolves waited for seven years, and then they pounced. Those little ones are so tender and tasty.

Last week, a video went viral of a justifiably enraged father taking a school board to task for the way his district was mishandling the education of children during the pandemic. Why haven’t there been an army of enraged fathers and mothers in Illinois taking school boards, administrations, and lawmakers to task for promoting evil ideas to their children? Why haven’t pastors and priests told parents that training their children up in the way they should go must never include even one positive teaching about homosexuality or cross-sex impersonation? Why haven’t churches made it possible for their members to remove their children from the ideological cesspools that self-identify as schools? Why are Christian teachers calling boys by female pronouns or saying nothing to oppose the sexual integration of children’s private spaces?

This is how leftists work:

Slowly they come, step by step, prepared for the wailing of conservatives, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Leftists bide their time, knowing the annoying sound and fury will shortly abate. Exhausted, conservatives will go home, abandoning all that messy, unpleasant opposition to the culture-unmaking of leftists. Conservatives won’t organize, won’t persevere, and won’t sacrifice. And the ones who do fight the evil-doers are alone and isolated because the masses of conservatives don’t want to do the hard work of culture-making.

They don’t want to say or do anything too public–anything that may affect their reputation in the neighborhood, their careers, or their children’s GPA. Even if they have the time and money to educate their children outside of government schools, they don’t want the hassle or expense. They don’t want to sacrifice those fantastic athletic and arts opportunities public schools offer. And they certainly don’t want to turn down a Big Ten or Ivy education for their children even if they—the parents—are feeding the very beasts who are destroying their children and freedom for people of faith in America.

There is no tiny sliver of the hearts, souls, and minds of Illinois school children that presumptuous Illinois lawmakers will allow to remain untouched by corrosive leftist beliefs on sexuality. And there is no child that presumptuous Illinois lawmakers view as too young to be exposed to those corrosive beliefs. Wail all you want, my conservative friends. Big Brother’s minions are patient. They’ll wait for the wailing to cease. They see in the distance a glorious time when wailing will be illegal.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state lawmakers to ask them to vote against the REACH Act (HB 1736 and SB 647). This radical sex education bill is heartily endorsed by Planned Parenthood of Illinois and by Illinois’ premiere “LBGT” activist organization, Equality Illinois, which should tell you everything you need to know about it.

Impressionable students in public schools should not be exposed to body- and soul-destroying messages that promote leftist beliefs about sexuality.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/audio_Another-K-12-School-Indoctrination-Bill-Coming-Through-the-Illinois-Sewage-Pipeline.mp3

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Before you read this, you might want to have a fire extinguisher at the ready, because this news just may light your hair on fire.

State Representative La Shawn K. Ford (D-Chicago) held a press conference on Sunday in which he called for all Illinois schools to cease teaching history because he’s “Concerned that current school history teaching leads to white privilege and a racist society.”

In a press release titled a “Call for the Abolishment of History Classes in Illinois Schools,” Ford proclaimed from his high horse,

When it comes to teaching history in Illinois, we need to end the miseducation of Illinoisans. I’m calling on the Illinois State Board of Education and local school districts to take immediate action by removing current history books and curriculum practices that unfairly communicate our history. Until a suitable alternative is developed, we should instead devote greater attention toward civics and ensuring students understand our democratic processes and how they can be involved. 

Has Ford created and made public the criteria that would be used to evaluate the fairness of “history books and curriculum practices,” or does he just presume that all current history books and curriculum practices communicate history “unfairly”?

The press release announced that speakers would discuss “how current history teaching practices overlook the contributions by Women and members of the Black, Jewish, LGBTQ communities and other groups.” Take note of the implicitly racist bias in Ford’s press release that capitalized “Black” while not capitalizing “white.” Yes, persons of Color can be as racist as Colorless people.

Here’s a translation of Ford’s rhetoric: Ford wants schools to cancel all history classes until all textbooks can be reviewed by Big Brother to determine if they are sufficiently woke (i.e., leftist/revisionist) in their treatment of properly melanated persons, women (i.e., persons with DNA-determined vaginas), homosexuals, and opposite-sex impersonators. In the meantime, Ford proposes teaching “civics,” focusing on presenting BLM and Antifa riots as constitutionally protected intensely peaceful assemblies.

In the early stages of the pandemic, when most Americans were fretting about the Chinese Communist virus, leftists were hatching plans on how to weasel the widely criticized New York Times revisionist 1619 Project into Illinois public schools.

To achieve that goal, Ford first proposed the silly partisan bill HB 4954 to add yet more “commemorative holidays” to the school calendar and mandate the teaching of the Civil Rights Movement, which is already taught in schools everywhere.

Then just two weeks later, Ford, who in 2012 was charged “with eight counts of bank fraud and nine counts of submitting false information to the bank in a 17-count indictment,” filed an even more partisan and dangerous amendment that would require the following:

“The study of the pre-enslavement history of Black people from 3,000 BCE to AD 1619, including instruction about ancient civilizations, kingdoms, kings, queens, and warriors; their contributions to medicine, literature, technology, architecture, and economics; and their achievements,” and “The study of the reasons why Black people came to be enslaved.”

The amendment was the brainchild of community activist Meleika Gardner who also wrote the amendment.

According to Scene Chicago, Gardner attributes the murders of “her father, a stepfather, her nephew, and several friends to gun violence due to systemic racism,” which she seeks to eradicate through school indoctrination. I’m unable to find, however, any identification by Gardner of the systemically racist acts that allegedly killed her loved ones or explaining exactly how these racist acts killed them. It seems, for example, that her nephew, Xavier Joy, was the tragic victim of robbery in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South Side that is 98 percent black. Maybe some intrepid reporter will ask Gardner for some specific details on how systemic racism killed her friends and relatives.

Ford and Gardner were joined at the press conference by their collaborator, Evanston alderman Robin Rue Simmons, who tied the amendment that would mandate yet more leftist propaganda in government schools to both slave reparations and the riots destroying America:

Simmons, who has spearheaded the push for reparations in Evanston, called education “a key piece of what repair looks like.” Acknowledging the recent Black Lives Matter protests and nationwide “awakening” to the oppression black people face, she said “now is the time” to fight for this bill.

The collaborators know that it would be infinitely easier to get brown, yellow, red, and white Americans who have never owned slaves to support paying reparations to blacks who never were slaves if these Americans have been propagandized.

Ford, a former history teacher in Chicago Public Schools, made this jaw-dropping statement to Fox News:

We know that the history books that we have were written years ago, decades ago, centuries ago by pretty much one group of people, and that’s white men.

Does Ford think teachers are today using textbooks written centuries ago? Is he so racist that he thinks white people can’t write about historical events involving black people? Does he believe black people are similarly incapable of writing about historical events involving white people? I guess we should be glad Ford is no longer in the classroom.

Ford’s policies are likely shaped more by his desire for political power in a leftist city than by principle. When running for mayor in 2019, Ford was asked by the homosexual newspaper Windy City Times if he has any “experience working in LGBTQ-related issues.” Ford, who pretends to be Catholic while supporting abortion and issues related to homosexuality, acknowledged that his lesbian sister is a “strong adviser on issues.”

If this Trojan horse filled with 1619 Project swamp gas looks like it’s going to pass in the Springfield swamp, some good conservatives should file an amendment that would require a complete history of slavery throughout the world to be taught and would require that all resources used in history classes be ideologically balanced between conservative and leftist. So, if resources by 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones are used, then equal time must be spent studying resources by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter.

Let’s make sure Illinois children know that between 1501-1866, more enslaved Africans went to Brazil/Portugal (5,848,266), Great Britain (3,259,441), France (1,381,404), Spain/Uruguay (1,061,524), and the Netherlands (554,336) than the United States (305,326), and that “Less than one-quarter of white Southerners held slaves,” and that it is estimated that “3,776 free Negroes” owned slaves.

And let’s make sure they study the work of prolific black scholar Thomas Sowell who writes that,

Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18^th century. People of every race and color were enslaved—and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed. Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others.

Sowell further points out the hypocrisy of leftists on slavery:

The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

Sowell offers a corrective to the myopic perspective offered by America-hating leftists—a corrective of which students should be made aware:

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance. Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. …

Every American should be troubled by the goals of leftist demagogues and censors in government schools. Sowell makes clear that they are not interested in ascertaining truth but, rather, they seek to distort children’s understanding of America for power and money:

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

Why did Ford collude with other leftists to concoct this amendment? Leftists understand that it’s easier to forge 15-year-olds into good leftist foot soldiers than it is to forge 25-year-olds and easier still to squeeze malleable 5-year-olds into desired shapes by plunking them into government Play-Doh molds. Leftists want to prevent freethinkers who may later become incorrigibly resistant to leftist dogma and then have to be cancelled.

Conservatives best get their kids out of government indoctrination centers and re-education camps pronto. Leftists are not winning the culture war by the persuasive force and rationality of their ideas but by indoctrination and intimidation.

The Orwellian anti-freedom sharks smell and taste the blood of conservatives in the water. Every day that conservatives choose fear over courage, capitulation over resistance, and silence over bold dissent, they sacrifice the future freedom of their children for one more hour of uneasy peace.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact your state lawmakers and urge them to vote no on both HB 4954 and Rep. La Shawn Ford’s amendment, which would politicize the teaching of history in Illinois schools and foment more division.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Leftist-Lawmakers-and-Activists-Call-for-the-Cancellation-of-All-History-Classes_audio.mp3

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This article has been updated to correct errors and add additional information.

Full-Term, Preborn Babies Can Be Killed For Virtually Any Reason

Why, I kept asking myself last week, are so many Americans so livid about Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) signing into law a bill passed jubilantly by the state legislature that makes it possible for women to abort full-term babies. Sure, the bill is morally repugnant and the jubilant applause by the legislature was grotesque, but 19 other states—including Illinois—allow full-term babies to be killed and for the same reasons. Seven other states and the District of Columbia allow full-term babies to be killed for any or no reason. Two other states allow full-term, healthy babies to be aborted if they were conceived during rape or through incest.

Toward the end of last week, just as outraged pro-life voices were dying down, it came to light that a new bill was proposed in Vermont which many mistakenly believe would legalize unrestricted abortion throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. They were mistaken in that unrestricted access to abortion through the entire nine months of pregnancy has been legal in Vermont since 2014. The bill proposed in Vermont merely enshrines in state law the existing legal right as a “fundamental right.” Pro-baby-killing advocates are preparing for the day Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Late-term abortions are banned in 20 states except if the mother’s “health” is deemed at risk by allowing the baby to grow to term. But here’s the catch: “health” includes any physical, emotional, psychological, or familial factors that affect “well-being.” With that ambiguous and wildly broad definition, virtually any woman can have her baby killed at any point in her pregnancy.

Two states allow healthy babies to be killed in the womb in the 9th month if they were conceived in rape or through incest (AR, UT). Killing full-term babies is no less barbaric because they were created via criminal acts of someone else’s doing.

Seven states allow full-term babies to be killed if the babies have “lethal” abnormalities, which is de facto infanticide.

Take a gander at the chart provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation which lists the 20 states that allow late-term abortions for “health” reasons and the 7 that allow it for any or no other reason.

Also, take note of Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Those places are virtual killing fields. They don’t even require the pretense of a “health” reason for women to abort their full-term babies. In those 7 states, there are no bans on abortion at any stage. It’s open season on babies who, through no fault of their own, have the misfortune of being conceived in the wrong womb.

Since all 50 states and D.C. allow late-term abortions that threaten a mother’s life—as distinct from her “health”—it’s important to understand the inconvenient truth “progressives” don’t want Americans to think about: There is no life-threatening condition that would ever necessitate the direct, intentional, active killing of a baby in the womb. There are relatively rare occasions in which continuing a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, but ending a pregnancy does not require the direct, intentional, active killing of a baby.

Doctors can induce delivery or perform a C-section to save a woman’s life in a life-threatening or emergency situation without dismembering, crushing, burning, or chemically inducing cardiac arrest in a baby. In some induced deliveries or C-sections, babies will not survive, but that is wholly different from intentionally killing them. Obstetrician-gynecologist and former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino explains:

Let me illustrate with a real-life case that I managed while at the Albany Medical Center. A patient arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe pre-eclampsia or toxemia. Her blood pressure on admission was 220/160. A normal blood pressure is approximately 120/80. This patient’s pregnancy was a threat to her life and the life of her unborn child. She could very well be minutes or hours away from a major stroke.

This case was managed successfully by rapidly stabilizing the patient’s blood pressure and “terminating” her pregnancy by Cesarean section. She and her baby did well.

This is a typical case in the world of high-risk obstetrics. In most such cases, any attempt to perform an abortion “to save the mother’s life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in providing appropriate, truly life-saving care. During my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such cases by “terminating” pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero.

GET WOKE, AMERICANS! Full-term babies can be legally exterminated in the womb for virtually any reason or no reason in most states in the U.S. Take your righteous anger at this barbarism and do something useful.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Cuomo-Re-Recording-3.mp3

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There’s a remarkable news story coming out of Erie, Illinois. A wise and courageous school board has voted to remove a homosexuality-affirming picture book titled The Family Book from its elementary school library. Further, it has voted to remove all materials created by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a partisan advocacy group committed to using public schools, including elementary schools, to advance their moral, political, and ontological beliefs. 

The Family Book was written by homosexual author Todd Parr and recommended by GLSEN. The “Alternatives to Marriage Project” highly recommends The Family Book for managing “both to naturalize and celebrate family diversity” and describes it as a favorite “among the toddler set.” “Naturalize” seems an ironic choice of words to describe a book that includes types of “parental” relationships that are unnatural and, by design, sterile. The “Alternatives to Marriage Project”  is a group committed to “equality and fairness” for “same sex couples and those in relationships of more than two people.”

Treating homosexuality and heterosexuality as equivalent is not a neutral position

Treating homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexuality does not reflect a neutral ideological position. Treating homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexuality is a leftist position. Believing that homosexuality and heterosexuality are morally and ontologically equivalent is a controversial, unproven belief that public schools — particularly elementary schools — have no ethical right or obligation to promulgate.

Leftists try to make the case that including books that treat homosexuality positively reflects ideological neutrality and balance since there are already so many books that depict heterosexuality positively. But that argument is based on prior acceptance of yet another Leftist assumption, which is that homosexuality is simply the flip side of the sexuality coin. It’s not. Homosexuality is a disordering of the sexual impulse.

Humans were quite obviously created anatomically and biologically as heterosexual beings. Using any objective criteria, all humans are heterosexual.  There exists no argument about the morality of heterosexual acts per se, so the number of books in a library that depict heterosexuality positively is irrelevant to any discussion of the appropriateness of including a book that depicts homosexuality positively. Publicly funded schools have no right to make available to young children ideas and images that many believe are profoundly immoral.

What neutrality or true diversity of opinions would look like in public schools

A neutral position would take one of two forms: Neutrality on topics involving homosexuality can be demonstrated by simply not addressing it at all; or neutrality can be demonstrated by including picture books that affirm homosexuality and picture books that portray homosexuality as immoral and destructive. Of course, neither side of the debate is going to like the second option.

Further, the opposite of a homosexuality-affirming book is not a heterosexuality-affirming book. The opposite of a homosexuality-affirming story would be a story that is critical of homosexuality. A picture book that dissents from the view that homosexual-led familes are equivalent to heterosexual-led families is not a book that depicts heterosexual-led families positively. A picture book that offers a dissenting view from one that positively depicts homosexual-led family structures would be one that negatively depicts homosexual-led family structures.

Who really censors?

The use of the terms “book banning” and “censorship” represents yet another “tool” in the bulging toolbox of manipulative and hypocritical strategies used by those who have lost their moral compasses and seek to pervert the moral compasses of other people’s children in public schools. Teachers make choices all the time about what books should be purchased with limited resources. And particularly in elementary schools, the criteria used to determine book choices include considerations of age-appropriateness. Although leftwing extremists may think picture books that affirm homosexual family structures are appropriate, they, leftist ideologues, are not the ultimate arbiters of appropriateness.

Charges of censorship are leveled at only conservatives. When, for example, high school teachers refuse to have their students study any resources on the topic of homosexuality written by conservative scholars while at the same time having them read novels, plays, or articles that espouse liberal ideas, we rarely if ever hear them called censors.

I’m speculating here, but I doubt whether any school district that chose not to purchase a picture book that positively depicted polyamorous families or families in which the parents were siblings would be accused of book banning or censorship.

I can already hear the cacophonous howls of indignation from “progressive” ideologues. How dare I compare morally neutral homosexual relationships to immoral polyamorous and incestuous relationships. But that’s the crux of the debate that homosexuals think is settled: Many still believe that homosexual acts are profoundly immoral.  And if homosexual acts are, indeed, objectively immoral, then family structures that center on homosexual couples are inherently morally flawed.

Are picture books that address homosexuality centrally about love?

The problem with picture books on the subject of homosexuality is that they ignore — as they must — the central issue: the morality of homosexual acts. That’s what makes this debate about picture books so dishonest and so dishonorable: In picture books for young children, leftists can’t address the fundamental and abstract question of sexual morality, and, therefore, they get away with saying with feigned wide-eyed innocence, “But this book is just about love.” No, it’s not, and they know it.

Homosexuality, unlike heterosexuality, is constituted by only subjective feelings and volitional acts, which are legitimate objects of moral assessment. The morality of homosexual acts is central to any presentation of homosexuality, and it is the morality of homosexual acts that is intellectually, pedagogically, and developmentally inappropriate in elementary schools.

The Family Book vividly captures the emotive dimensions of families in colorful, whimsical, and appealing illustrations, which makes it all the more troubling. Books like Parr’s lure little ones into an ideological snare before they’re old enough to realize it. It doesn’t matter that Parr in his moral ignorance thinks he’s doing a good thing. His good intentions, shaped as they are by moral delusion, do not mitigate the offense of presenting perversion as positive. Adding sugar to poison doesn’t make it less toxic; it makes it more likely to be consumed.

Should minor positive references to homosexuality get a pass?

And the fact that in his book, the positive images of homosexual families are few, doesn’t justify the inclusion of this book in a public elementary school library. Should libraries include picture books with just one or two positive references to polyamorous families? As I have written earlier, cultural change rarely happens through dramatic, single events, but rather through the slow, accretion of little events that we ignore or dismiss as minor. All that pro-homosexual dogmatists have to do to get their resources into public schools is make sure their references to homosexuality are few and indirect. Once in, they gradually increase the number and directness of homosexuality-affirming messages.

Must bullying prevention efforts include affirming homosexuality?

Of course, homosexual activists are dragging in the bullying issue again as a means to intimidate the Erie administration and school board. They’re making the case that choosing not to include resources that affirm homosexuality will contribute to bullying of students who identify as homosexual or whose caretakers are homosexual.

Should we apply that principle consistently? Will the absence of resources that affirm polyamory contribute to bullying of students who identify as polyamorous or whose caretakers so identify? Will the absence of resources that affirm promiscuity contribute to the bullying of promiscuous students? Will the absence of resources that affirm laziness contribute to the bullying of “slackers”? (Just to be clear to homosexual activists who seem to struggle mightily with analogies: I’m not comparing promiscuity and laziness to homosexuality–homosexual acts are far more serious moral offenses. I’m extrapolating the argument that absence of affirmative resources contributes to bullying to conditions other than homosexuality.) No elementary school librarian, teacher, administrator, or school board member would entertain the fanciful notion of including polyamory-affirming resources in school libraries or curricula as a means to combat the bullying of students being raised by polyamorists.

The homosexual website Chicago Pride reports that a lesbian teacher from Minnesota says that choosing not to include homosexuality-affirming resources in elementary school libraries sends “a strong message that gay and trans issue [sic] are inappropriate to discuss in a classroom setting.” In other words, she believes that it’s important to discuss homosexuality and “transgenderism” in elementary school classrooms. Wow.  We now have educators that believe that it’s important in elementary schools to discuss issues related to the sexual predilections and acts of  1.7 percent of the population.

Is it the responsibility of elementary schools to affirm every family structure or sexual phenomenon?

It’s important is to understand that the mere fact that a particular family structure (or sexual phenomenon) exists does not mean public schools are compelled to teach about or affirm it. It’s tragic that selfish adults deliberately create motherless or fatherless family structures, but schools have neither the obligation nor the right to affirm those immoral structures even in order to make children feel better.

Some questions for this homosexual activist teacher:

• Why should her pedagogical view that controversial topics like homosexuality and gender confusion should be discussed in elementary school classrooms be imposed on every school district?
• What is her defense for the belief that these topics, for which moral considerations are central, are intellectually and developmentally age-appropriate?
• Since she believes that these topics should be discussed in elementary schools, is she willing to have children exposed equally to resources that affirm homosexuality and those that disapprove of it?

GLSEN is quoted as saying that they are “’reaching out’” to the Erie Community Unit School District to “’understand their decision to reject the unanimous decision of a community-based committee in favor of the adoption’” of GLSEN’s Ready, Set, Respect! curricula about which IFI has written.

Questions about curricula selection committees

I wonder who served on this community-based committee. How many people served on it? How were they selected? Did those who formed the committee ensure that all ideological views on homosexuality and its presence in elementary school curricula were represented? How many character development curricula were reviewed? What criteria were used in the selection process? Who established the criteria? Did all members of the committee read all the curricular resources? Did they investigate the biases and controversial history of GLSEN, including that of its founder, Kevin Jennings?

These are some of the questions that should be asked in order to hold accountable those who made the boneheaded decision to use GLSEN resources.

This news story shouldn’t be remarkable, but because we see so few public school administrations and teachers with the wisdom and spine to oppose the efforts of homosexual activists to impose their beliefs on public schools — or infuse curricula with their beliefs — the courage of the Erie Community Unit School District stands out.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to offer words of encouragement and support to the School Board President Charles Brown and Superintendent Bradley Cox, who you can bet your bottom dollar will be on the receiving end of vicious attacks from the advocates of “tolerance.”

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In a May 28, 2011 Wall Street Journal article, Bari Weiss said this about David Mamet, one of America’s foremost contemporary playwrights, who in the last few years has experienced a conversion to political conservatism of sorts.

Before he moved to California, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet had never talked to a self-described conservative.

Mamet said, “I realized I lived in this bubble.”

Weiss also reported that one of the basic truths Mamet realized is that “Real diversity is intellectual.”

Both the image of a person who has never talked to a conservative and the notion that real diversity is intellectual reminded me of one of the more pressing problems affecting public high schools: the absence of intellectual diversity on controversial topics.

A recent event at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois offers hope that public schools may someday demonstrate a genuine commitment to diversity without which they cannot foster critical thinking.

Stevenson High School’s school-sponsored club, Truth Seekers, hosted a debate between AP Biology teacher Brett Erdmann and AP Calculus teacher Neal Roys on the competing theories of Neo-Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design. This debate was followed by a lively Q & A. Approximately 70 adults, including both district employees and community members, and 250 students attended the debate.

Not only did administrators not place any obstacles in the path of club members who sought to hold this event, but they supported and facilitated the students’ efforts. In an email correspondence with IFI, Principal John Carter wrote that “We want students to be as prepared as possible to collect information from a variety of sources, critique that information, and come to their own educated conclusions.”

Superintendent Eric Twadell wrote:

The debate received great response from our students and was a wonderful reflection of the hard work, dedication and passion of our teachers …. we do believe that students should have the opportunity to learn and study a diversity of topics including those that some might consider “controversial.” In fact, as a teacher in the Social Studies Division here at Stevenson, for many years I taught students intelligent design every semester in my World Religions class. Our Stevenson High School Vision Statement calls us to create a culture of inquiry and engagement with challenging academic material, the recent debate was a great opportunity to engage students in important and relevant dialogue.

Dr. Carter and Dr. Twadell expressed important sentiments that all schools endorse in words but many teachers ignore in practice. Instead of presenting students with the best resources from scholars on both sides of disputed topics, many teachers present resources from only scholars whose views line up with theirs and then when challenged about the imbalance, say, “Well, students are free to disagree.”

How can students intelligently disagree when they’ve studied works that espouse ideas from only one perspective? Students are entitled to have their views informed by the best thinking on both sides of controversial or disputed topics.

Stevenson’s website offers this description of the Truth Seekers Club which is as remarkable as the event it sponsored:

Truth Seekers explore topics that matter to students. So we start each semester with student nominations of topics. In a typical semester, students nominate 70 topics. Then we vote to narrow the list to the top 10. During a typical meeting, we explore the topic for the week through any of the following activities: Group Discussion, Video Clip, Guest Speaker, Informal Friendly Debate, Formal Debate, Hot Seat. Once per year, we organize a large venue event to which we invite all interested students, staff and community members.

The first requirement is to keep an open mind to the possibility that truth exists and can be found by those who diligently seek it out. The second requirement is that students agree to form a view of reality that is free from contradictions. Views of reality that contain contradictions will not hold water. Some students attempt to avoid rejection of a cherished yet contradictory world view by separating their beliefs into two non-overlapping realms: public and private. However, the contradiction, like acid, will burn a hole in the world view causing it to leak once again.

Naperville Central High School also has a Truth Seekers Club that is described “as a place for students to tackle hot-button issues that are often touched on in the classroom but unable to be given a full treatment due to lack of time, curricular restraints, or overall reticence to air out an issue deemed too controversial.”

The club has tackled controversies regarding world population; feminism; same-sex marriage; abortion; universal health care; global warming; “gay” rights; evolution, Intelligent Design, and the origin of life; and academic freedom and censorship of “politically incorrect” speech.

On the topic of global warming, students watched both Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the BBC documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Students watched the film Demographic Winter, which challenges the dominant view that our world is threatened by overpopulation, and the films Indoctrinate U and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which examine whether American universities are truly bastions of intellectual freedom and diversity.

Now, if only we could get all teachers to value intellectual diversity more than they value the promulgation of their own philosophical and political ideologies:

• Perhaps students could study the unproven, unprovable assumptions embedded in a materialistic or naturalistic world view that claims that all that exists is the material universe.
• Perhaps social studies teachers who use The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn could also have students read some of the criticisms of Zinn’s polemical revisionist history, including those of Sol Stern. And maybe social studies teachers could include excerpts from some of Paul Johnson’s works as companion pieces to Howard Zinn’s.
• Perhaps librarians could be inspired to abandon their de facto censorship protocols (aka Collection Development Policies) and purchase books by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Christopher Wolfe.
• And the subject about which students remain the most ignorant and on which teachers engage in the most vigorous censorship, that is, homosexuality, needs a good shot of real intellectual diversity. For example, those who teach the plays The Laramie Project and Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Tony Kushner’s essay “American Things,” could also teach essays by Robert George, Francis Beckwith, and Anthony Esolen. Students could read the work of scholars who challenge the deeply flawed comparison of homosexuality to race; or who challenge the idea that moral propositions about behavior constitute hatred of persons; or challenge the idea that strong, enduring feelings render behaviors inherently moral; or who examine how we determine morality.

Intellectual diversity is the lifeblood of academia without which there can be no culture of inquiry or critical thinking. Without intellectual diversity, there is no education; there is only indoctrination.

Every high school would be well served by having a Truth Seekers Club. Parents, if you have a teen who may be interested in a club like this, share this article with them. If either you or your child has more questions about Truth Seekers Clubs, contact the clubs’ advisors:

Neal Roys, Stevenson High School Truth Seekers Club advisor: nroys@d125.org

Dan Tompkins, Naperville Central High School Truth Seekers Club advisor: dtompkins@naperville203.org  

Thomas More Society Responds by Seeking Leave of Court to Defend Parental Notice

Chicago, Illinois March 12-Reacting to the recent claim by the Attorney General that the Illinois Constitution contains a right to abortion, attorneys from the Thomas More Society will appear in Cook County court on Monday, March 15, again seeking to intervene in the latest American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit, challenging the Illinois Parental Notice of Abortion Act of 1995. 

In Hope Clinic, et al., v. Brent Adams et al. (No. 09 CH 38661), Thomas More Society attorneys are representing Illinois State’s Attorneys Stu Umholtz (R-Tazewell), Ed Deters (D-Effingham) and Ray Cavanaugh (R-Henderson), and maintain that because there is no right to abortion in the Illinois Constitution, the ACLU’s latest challenge to parental notice is baseless. The Attorney General, representing various Illinois officials who are named as defendants, has moved to dismiss the case on other grounds.

“Because the ACLU has already lost in federal court, its lawyers must prove in state court both the foundational contention that the Illinois Constitution of 1970 guaranteed a right to abortion and the further contention that such a right is even stronger than the federal abortion right upheld in Roe v. Wade, handed down in 1973. The contention that the Illinois Constitution includes a right to abortion is an utter falsehood plainly belied by the historical record. Yet, instead of defending the Illinois Constitution, whose Framers clearly left the issue of abortion to the legislature, the Attorney General has tossed the Constitution aside and conceded to the ACLU its foundational contention that the Illinois Constitution includes a right to abortion,” statedThomas Brejcha, President & Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Society. “Illinois parents have a right to know before their kids are taken for abortions. If the Attorney General won’t defend the parental notice law vigorously, we will do so, until the day when there are no more secret abortions performed on Illinois children.”

The Parental Notice of Abortion Act requires a child under age 18 to notify a parent, grandparent or step-parent in the home, or to go before a judge to get a waiver, prior to undergoing an abortion. The Act was prevented from going into effect in June 1995, by an injunction issued by the federal district court in Chicago. Fourteen years later, in August of 2009, the federal appeals court lifted the injunction. However, before the Act could go into effect, the Illinois Medical Disciplinary Board imposed a 90-day grace period on enforcement. On the day that grace period ended, November 4, the law was in effect for only a few hours before Judge Daniel Riley of the Cook County circuit court granted a temporary restraining order, again halting enforcement of the Act.

Judge Riley has granted Thomas More Society attorneys a special setting for their motion to intervene, at 10 a.m. on Monday. At 10:30 a.m., the court will hear the Attorney General’s motion to dismiss the ACLU’s case. Thomas More Society attorneys will be available for comment following the hearing.

For more information, contact Stephanie Lewis, 312-422-1333.