Perhaps you missed the story about a Naperville, Illinois elementary school where third-grade teacher, Nicholas Cosme, a 25-year-old man who “paints his nails like a woman does—and is teaching eight-year-old boys” in his class at Elmwood Elementary School to do likewise. According to the DuPage Policy Journal, he has asked his students for their pronouns, “suggesting the boys … might ask him to refer to them as ‘she.’” To top off his lesson, he read to his young students the picture book My Shadow is Pink, in which “a young boy who likes to wear dresses inspires his father to also wear a dress.”

No ideological grooming going on here. Move along.

In response to a parent complaint, the school issued a statement to the DuPage Policy Journal defending Cosme’s actions because they “align to Naperville 203’s efforts to cultivate a culture of inclusion that values the dignity and uniqueness of each individual.”

So, in the service of “inclusion” will Elmwood Elementary School introduce young children to polyamory? Zoophilia? Genetic Sexual Attraction? Kink? If not, why not?

What about parents who believe cross-dressing undermines the dignity of boys and men? How does Elmwood Elementary include representations of those people?

Perhaps you missed the story from Paterson Elementary School in Fleming Island, Florida, where last January, parents Wendell and Maria Perez were called from their 12-year-old daughter’s school following her second suicide attempt in two days. The parents were told that she attempted to hang herself in a school bathroom over her “gender identity crisis,” and that they weren’t notified earlier because of their Catholic faith, which the school rightly surmised would have led them not to affirm her gender confusion. The parents also learned that school counselor Destiney Washington had been secretly meeting with their daughter for months and facilitating her social transition at school.

Subsequently, the Perez’s found proper counseling for their daughter. Her sexual confusion resolved, she accepts her sex, and she no longer experiences suicidal ideation. The parents are now suing the district.

Florida father Wendell Perez tells the state surgeon general that Clay County District Schools secretly "transitioned" his 12-year-old daughter without his knowledge and "affirmed" a male name and pronouns, which contributed to her attempted suicide in a school bathroom. pic.twitter.com/VY8Le9KqCi

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 23, 2022

Perhaps you also missed the news story from Richard J Kinsella Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut about 77-year-old school nurse Kathleen Cataford who was suspended for a personal Facebook post that Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez described in a letter to the entire school community as “inappropriate,” “harmful,” “hateful,” and “inconsistent with what we stand for.” Here’s the allegedly hateful post:

Buyer beware. Investigate the school system curriculum … CT is a very socially liberal, gender confused state … As a public school nurse, I have an 11 yo female student on puberty blockers and a dozen students identifying as non-binary, all but two keeping this a secret from their parents with the help of teachers, SSW [social service worker] and administration.

Teachers and SSW are spending 37.5 hours a week influencing your children, not necessarily teaching [your] children what YOU think is being taught. Children are introduced to this confusion in kindergarten by the school SW [social worker] who ‘teaches’ social and emotional regulation and school expectations.

Science tells us that a child’s brain continues development into the early 20’s, hence laws prohibiting alcohol, tobacco, vaping and cannibis. But it’s ok to inject hormones into confused prepubescent children and perform genital mutilating surgery on adolescents! How incongruent is that thinking!

Which part of this is inappropriate? Is it inappropriate to expose publicly that teachers, social service workers, and administrators are conspiring to keep secrets from parents?

Which part is harmful? Is it harmful to warn parents that teachers are doing far more than teach the subject for which they were hired to teach? Is it harmful to point out the inconsistency in allowing prepubescent children and teens to make irreversible, life-altering decisions before the decision-making parts of their brains are fully developed?

Which part is hateful? Is calling the mutilation of children’s genitalia “genital mutilating surgery” hateful or true? If Torres-Rodriguez would spend some time reading the tragic accounts of detransitioners, she might find such a description true and accurate. If she has a tidbit of courage—which seems unlikely—she might even change her de facto policy of supporting social, chemical, and, presumably, surgical efforts to conceal children’s sex.

I will grant Torres-Rodriguez one point: the ideas expressed by Kathleen Cataford are very likely inconsistent with what district leaders stand for. They stand for deceit, hubris, and ignorance.

Let’s try two brief thought experiments:

1.) Let’s imagine that one day a Jewish girl from an Orthodox family decides to identify as Muslim. She changes her name to Aayat, which means “verses in the Quran.” At school, she tells her counselor and teachers that she wants to be referred to by this name because it reflects her authentic identity. She also requests a place to pray Dhuhr at its specified time near noon and a place to change into her hijab where there will be no biological boys. Finally, she tells her counselor that her parents would strongly disapprove of her trans-religious identity. In other words, her parents are not “safe.” Therefore, she wants the school to keep her trans-religious identity secret from her parents.

2.) A high school girl from a strict Muslim home converts to America’s civil religion: atheism. A long-time fan of actress Ellen/Elliot Page, she changes her name to Elliot. She changes from her hijab at school into typical American clothes, including shorts, short skirts, and figure-hugging tank tops. She changes into gym clothes in the presence of boys who pretend to be girls and use the girls’ locker room—a practice to which Muslim parents would strenuously object. She shares restrooms with those same boys. She requests that all staff (and peers) refer to her as “Elliot” and conceal their duplicity from her parents who would be shocked and angry with their daughter’s choices.

Some questions:

Would schools honor the requests of these girls?

Would parents object to schools accommodating such requests?

Since some schools today provide “transition closets” outfitted with gender-specific clothing for “trans”-identifying students to change into while at school, would schools provide “transition closets” for trans-religionists, replete with attire to match their new religious identities while concealing them from their parents?

There was once a time in American public schools when teachers served in loco parentis—in place of the parents. That is, schools assumed some parental “rights, responsibilities, and liabilities” during the time minor children attended school. Those rights and responsibilities were assumed to be delegated by parents to schoolteachers and administrators to ensure “student safety and supervision” while at school.

The doctrine of in loco parentis has morphed as teachers have expanded the areas of children’s lives over which they assume dominion, as teachers have grown in social and political power, and as they have redefined “safety” in accordance with their dogmatic sex/gender ideology.

Now teachers believe they have a right to “educate” the “whole child” which means teachers believe that the minds, hearts, bodies, and wills of other people’s children belong to them—the social constructionist “educators.” These presumptuous dogmatists believe they have dominion over what material may, should, and must be presented to children, including material that espouses—not objective facts—but arguable assumptions.

Jeff Berger-White, an English teacher at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, who fifteen years ago was teaching the obscene play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes until the community found out and whose wife, Juliet Berger-White, is an activist for “trans”-cultism, offers a glimpse into the hubris of teachers today.

In addition to teaching an obscene pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” play, Berger-White once claimed in the local press that it is the job of English teachers to challenge the emotions and morals of students, a claim that likely would surprise many parents.

More recently, in a Character Strong podcast about testing metrics, Berger-White made some revelatory claims:

I think school boards, I think administrators want something easy and quantifiable. They want to be able to say to their constituents, “Look, their reading scores have gone up. Look, the math scores have gone up.” But, um, what about our humanity? What about teaching empathy? What about teaching in this moment … the anti-racism movements across the country. …? I think all those things are essential and vital.

Were English, math, science, social studies, world languages, and P.E. teachers hired to teach empathy and “anti-racism”? Is that what parents expect them to teach? Is empathy—that is, identifying with someone and feeling what he feels—always good? Should teachers be teaching other people’s children to put themselves in the minds and hearts of people who experience disordered desires?

It is unclear what Berger-White means by “humanity,” but for many, affirming false, destructive ideas, as Berger-White does, erodes rather than cultivates our humanity.

Perhaps Berger-White should limit the scope of his endeavors to teaching students to communicate civilly and leave their emotional and moral development to their parents and those who share their parents’ beliefs and values.

And that would include parental views on what Berger-White and other leftists refer to as “anti-racism.” Parents might like to know if Berger-White is referring to the arguable critical race theory-derived ideas that racists like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Kimberle Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Glenn Singleton profit so handsomely from promoting? If so, many taxpayers would heartily disagree that public school teachers should be teaching “anti-racism.”

While many parents value expertise, knowledge, and wisdom in their children’s teachers, Berger-White values “authenticity”—whatever that is:

I think we as educators need to be authentic. We all have a kind of classroom persona, but the closer our personas can come to our authentic selves, the better. And if we can find opportunities to share what moves us, what delights us, what saddens us, all the better. Because we model that, our young people see the adults in front of them every day. … When students trust us to be good … shepherds … they’re more likely to buy in.

All that palaver sounds admirable, but here’s the rub. What moves, delights, and saddens Berger-White may be things that do not move, delight, and sadden many parents. And those parents likely don’t want Berger-White socially constructing his preferences in their children.  C.S. Lewis argues that children must be trained to love that which is worthy of love and hate that which is contemptible. I suspect that C.S. Lewis and Jeff Berger-White might be moved, delighted, and saddened by very different phenomena.

Further, many parents do not view as “good shepherds” adults who share obscene material with minors on the public dime, who teach minors to “empathize” with those who embrace homosexual and “trans” identities, and who teach Kendi’s racist ideas.

Dogmatists like those found in Hartford, Fleming Island, Naperville, and Deerfield schools base much of their social constructionist activities on appeals to “safety” as redefined by them. They believe that “safety” is shaped by their arguable sexual ideology. A person or idea is “safe” if and only if it aligns with the unproven assumptions of leftist sex/gender ideology.

If an idea is deemed unsafe according to the nebulous criteria schools use and never share, then propagandists feel justified in banning it from the classroom, the library, and locker room usage policy. If a person is deemed unsafe, leftist activists who identify as teachers feel self-righteously justified in either firing them, muzzling them, marginalizing them, or, in the case of parents, deceiving them.

Parents, get your kids out of public schools, pronto. And churches, help make that possible.

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If we learned anything from the recent midterm elections—and we should have learned a lot—it should be that “social issues” are not the third rail of politics. The claim that they are the third rail is a manipulative lie told ad nauseum by RINOs who are so foolish they don’t understand that the social issues are essential for the health of any society.

From the midterm elections, conservatives should have learned that Republicans won elections from coast to coast in part because they have been “leaning in” to the “social issues” rather than fleeing from them. And we should have learned from the bellicose responses of Leftists that their only defenses are calling names and lying.

Republicans won in part because they justifiably worry about inflation and crime, both the results of doctrinaire leftist Big Government, pro-criminal, globalist policies. Republicans won also because they were disgusted with and animated by the usurpation of public education by leftist change-agents who use their jobs to promote their social, moral, and political ideologies on sexuality—including abortion—and race.

Taxpayers are fed up with obscene, profane, and age-inappropriate materials being presented to their children.

Taxpayers are fed up with divisive, exclusionary, racist, misogynistic, misandrist, misanthropic, anti- science beliefs that leftists identify as unifying, inclusive, anti-racist, philogynist, philandrist, humanitarian, and scientific.

Taxpayers are fed up with paying the salaries of leftwing propagandists who identify as “educators” and “experts” who believe they should have absolute autonomy over the curricula they teach to other people’s children.

Taxpayers are fed up with children being taught that whites are racist oppressors by virtue of their skin color, that masculinity is toxic, that homosexuality is ontologically and morally equivalent to heterosexuality, that all family structures are equivalent, or that boys can be girls–none of which are true.

Taxpayers are fed up with the sexual integration of private spaces and girls’ sports.

Taxpayers are fed up with the Orwellian de facto suppression of First Amendment speech protections as evidenced in speakers being canceled and jobs being lost.

They’re fed up with leftists screeching that conservatives are racist, homophobic, and transphobic when conservatives express their moral or political views with the clarity and confidence that leftists express their deluded, destructive views.

They’re fed up with the lie that conservative moral beliefs about homosexual acts, or same-sex “marriage,” or cross-dressing constitutes hatred of persons who identify as “gay” or “trans.”

I hope conservatives are learning that addressing the social issues is not only critical to winning elections but also that the “social issues” are critical to the health and future of any society. Dave Rubin, Guy Benson, and Tammy Bruce may be smart, articulate, and right on many issues, but embracing their views on homosexuality and marriage will be a political and humanitarian nightmare for the GOP and America.

It’s not just leftist ideas about sexuality that will destroy. Embracing ideas found in critical race theory (CRT) or allowing our children to be taught those ideas as inarguable truth out of fear of being called “racist” will be equally destructive.

Now that many more Republicans have raised their voices against the racist ideas embedded in CRT, leftists are screaming “racist” with increased volume. They feel the wind changing. Their con has been revealed. Their jig is almost up. Well, it will be if Republicans remain unified and fearless.

Not only are leftists shrieking “racist” louder, but they’re also making the disingenuous case that public schools “don’t teach critical race theory.” What they’re not saying is that the ideas promulgated in public schools on race, race relations, and American history are the same ideas on race, race relations, and American history promulgated by CRT and by both the ideologies that preceded CRT and the many money-making operations promoting CRT-derived ideas.

Leftist ideas about identity groups, “systemic bias,” and “systems of oppression” come from numerous ideological frameworks, including critical theory, critical pedagogy, and CRT. Thinkers associated with these theoretical frameworks include Paulo Freire, Herbert Marcuse, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Peggy McIntosh.

Anyone who wonders whether schools teach CRT should spend some time reading what these ambitious scholars promote and then read the resources their local schools provide to students or teachers on institutional racism, intersectionality, oppression, education, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

All the indignant claims from school administrators that they don’t teach CRT are now stinking red herrings tossed out in a frantic attempt to distract opponents from all that inconvenient opposing.

Sure, schools and the organizations that profit from promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in schools may not technically teach CRT and may not use the term CRT. Instead, they extract CRT’s assumptions and repackage them to make them seem less controversial, less scholarly, and more palatable to the gullible among us. For the outside organizations that profit from keeping racism alive, the goal is to make repackaged CRT more marketable to government schools.

From this election, conservatives should have learned that name-calling and lies rather than logic, reasons, and evidence are the chief weapons in the leftist arsenal. They should have learned that courage, boldness, unity, and perseverance in the service of truth are powerful. And they should have learned from the ideological corruption that is now systemic in schools that we must be committed to seeking and speaking truth in the public square even if they have to do it alone and even when doing so is costly.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Social-Issues-Are-Not-the-Third-Rail.mp3

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Written by Ryan Scott Bomberger

I’m half white and half black. My melanin doesn’t change my worth or my propensity to sin. Yet we live in a culture where we are told that our skin color confers upon us a status that is fixed, assigned by an elite class of humans who call themselves “scholars.” They want us to see everything through the broken lens of “race”—a human construct that has only served to dehumanize us throughout history. As a person with brown skin, I reject my assigned “status” and refuse to see everything through that distorted prism.

It leads to blindness.

Instead, I choose to see through the breakthrough filter of Scripture that opens our eyes to the truth of our identity, the perfect bond of love, our oneness through Christ, and the freedom of forgiveness. Our human condition, and the frailty that marks us, can never be illuminated by the darkness of tattered theories.

And that’s exactly what Critical Race Theory (CRT) is.

How can a theory derived from anti-Semites who were virulent racists hell-bent on abolishing the family and religion bring healing to the sin of racism? Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw Christianity as an impediment to their socialist ideology. How can a godless theory be used as an “analytical tool” to address issues needing a Godly solution?

I’m particularly irked by Christians who don’t want the struggle of wrestling with solutions but simply hop aboard the latest bandwagon sponsored by an insanely profitable victimhood industry. Racism is evil as is every other sin known to humankind. Sin diminishes and destroys us. It is a brokenness that cannot be remedied by more brokenness. But for many, the goal is not to offer a solution but a continual subscription.

Famed educator and leader Booker T. Washington, a former slave, explained this industry well on page 144 of his book “My Larger Education”:

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Today, that class of people is of varying hues and NY Times bestsellers capitalize on a form of activism that seeks to divide us, erase equality, and offer forced redistribution in the form of “equity”. Dr. Carol Swain, the brilliant former (black) professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, offers a helpful definition of Critical Race Theory:

“Critical race theory is an analytical framework to analyze institutions and culture. Its purpose is to divide the world into white oppressors and non-white victims. Instead of traditional forms of knowledge, it holds up personal narratives of marginalized minority “victim” groups (blacks, Hispanics, Asians) as evidence (considered irrefutably by its nature) of the dishonesty of their mostly white heterosexual oppressors.”

As someone who is “biracial,” I’m both the “oppressed” and the “oppressor.” Through no fault of my own, since no one controls the circumstances of his or her conception, I’m foisted into perpetual perplexity simply based on the sins or the sufferings of my lineage. Just to further illustrate the absurdity of this deeply prejudiced CRT approach to classification, I can simply highlight my own origin story. I was conceived in rape. So, am I responsible for my (black) biological father’s heinous act? Of course not. Interestingly, my white father—who chose to adopt and love ten children (of varying beautiful hues) that other men abandoned—is branded as part of the “white supremacist patriarchy” that is guilty of every negative outcome of black Americans. My dad, Henry Bomberger, recently passed away. The only legacy he left behind was one of unconditional love and self-sacrifice. His devotion to us proved that it’s not color that binds us; it’s love.

Despite Scripture’s insistence on the unity of believers and how Christ makes us one (Galatians 3:28), CRT diabolically separates us using the deeply flawed human construct of race. Ironically, in a culture that rejects the science of binary gender the progressive priests of CRT demand we can only be the “oppressed” or the “oppressors”. How nihilistic. It also preaches perpetual “guilt” and undeserved “privilege” based solely on one’s skin color.

Fake guilt will never erase real problems.

As Christians, we are all privileged to know and worship a God who could’ve merely condemned us but chose to redeem and rescue us (John 3:16-17). We are privileged to no longer be slaves to sin (Romans 6:6). We are privileged, through Christ’s strength, to be more than conquerors (Romans 8:37).

The Bible tells us to no longer conform to the pattern of this world in Romans 12:2, yet this is exactly what we do when we embrace the warped worldliness of CRT. Blame, Deceive, Repeat. This destructive pattern is recognizable throughout Scripture. Satan is the accuser, and he constantly coaxes us to embrace the lie instead of the Light.

CRT is a debilitating disease. Its malignancy in the body of Christ is spread by pastors who don’t believe the Word is enough. Some of these leaders apparently think the World has the answers to the temporal and eternal devastation of sin.

Mainstream media gave voice to a handful of black pastors who support using CRT and several who left a major denomination over it. Pastor Charlie Dates, of the Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, exited the Southern Baptist Convention over SBC Seminary presidents’ rejection of Critical Race Theory, despite their clear denouncements of the sin of racism. I thoroughly agree with their statement. I’m not a Southern Baptist, so I have no interest in defending a denomination but merely want to uphold the Truth. Pastor Dates, who embraces unbiblical Black Liberation Theology and the Black Lives Matter movement, issued a defiant (and historically challenged) OpEd sharply condemning those who oppose CRT. He claims the rejection of CRT is due to “fear of liberalism.” I don’t fear liberalism. I wholeheartedly disagree with it because of its dependence on deception and division. Dates strangely then attributed certain social movements to “liberalism” (aka the Democrat Party) such as abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. On all three, Republicans led the fight. But CRT and its advocates value feelings far more than facts.

I don’t think there’s any more eloquent a pastor speaking about cultural issues and Biblical authority than Pastor Voddie Baucham. As a black adoptive father, he embodies what many Christians should aspire toward—Godly character and critical thinking. He exposes and denounces CRT—not with emotionalism (like Pastor Charlie Dates) but with factualism.

Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, credited as a co-founder of “Critical Race Theory” (of course, derived from Marxist Critical Theory) is a leading proponent of this poison. Never mind this accomplished black woman was the recipient of Ivy League education at Cornell and Harvard Law School. But, you know, systemic racism. She sees it in everything…well except the abortion industry which massively and disproportionately kills black lives. Crenshaw, who is radically pro-abortion, pro-LGBT, anti-nuclear family and denies the clearly evident consequences of fatherlessness, blames racism for everything that victimizes black people and other “marginalized” groups. Her organization, the African American Policy Council, is holding an event on April 29th featuring Crenshaw, Brad Sears (Executive Director of UCLA’s dubious and radically pro-LGBT The Williams Institute) and Planned Parenthood’s President, Alexis McGill Johnson, as keynote speakers.

But sure, let’s use Critical Race Theory—an ideology that is hostile to Christianity in countless ways—as a means by which Christians should see the world. CRT activists claim to fight for justice but regularly reject truth and morality. Psalm 89:14 says: “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne. Mercy and truth go before Your face.” You cannot have justice without mercy (the compassion or forgiveness toward an offender) and truth. To ignore this is to welcome a cancer instead of the cure.

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This article was originally published at TheRadianceFoundation.org.

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Join us in Collinsville on Saturday, May 22nd for an IFI Worldview Conference about CRT!