Warning: Reader Discretion Advised

Leftists in Springfield are still not done using public schools to preach “woke” beliefs to Illinois school children, thereby driving more families out of Illinois—which is a bad thing for Illinoisans who can’t leave—and driving more families out of government schools—which is a good thing except for those who can’t leave.

State Representative Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) has filed a jaw-dropping bill, HB 80, that doesn’t propose merely “standards,” or “guidelines,” or even a type of curriculum. Oh no, Flowers is going for the whole enchilada. If passed, this bill would mandate the teaching of specific books on race and feminism: 20 non-fiction books and 9 fiction. Every book is written by a leftist. There is not one book in Flowers’ list by either a person of color or a colorless person who criticizes or dissents from leftist assumptions on race or feminism.

Flowers’ bill says,

Amends the School Code. Sets forth a list of nonfiction, fiction, and children’s books about racism that shall [must] be required reading for students in every public elementary and secondary school beginning with the 2021-2022 school year. Requires that the instruction in the material presented by each book be age appropriate and taught at the appropriate grade level. Effectively [sic] immediately.

Maybe I missed it, but I can’t remember ever hearing of a lawmaker commanding that every public school in Illinois teach specific books. Did Mary Flowers’ constituents elect her to select texts for their elementary, middle, and high schools?

Having worked with teachers, I can say with a fair degree of certainty, that this bill will not be popular with many of them.

This proposed bill adds to the list of bills and laws that are transforming our government schools into woke re-education camps and our children into leftists. The list now includes the re-introduced REACH Act that will require comprehensive sex ed starting in kindergarten;  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.

Here are some of the authors and texts on Flowers’ inclusive list of only leftist authors and texts:

bell hooks: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

Ta-Nehesi Coates: Between the World and Me

Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers): How to Be an Antiracist

Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Ben Crump (opportunist extraordinaire in the mold of Al Sharpton and “Rev.” Jesse Jackson): Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People

Jacquelyn Woodson (black and a lesbian, so a two-fer for intersectional identitarians): Brown Girl Dreaming

Jennifer Harvey (self-described “queer, antiracist-committed … white lesbian/dyke” and Drake University religion professor): Raising White Kids

Jennifer L. Eberhardt: Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

Mikki Kendall: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Layla F. Saad: Me and White Supremacy

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 

Ijeoma Oluo (identifies as a “a black, queer woman who has often found herself demonized at the convenience of white America): So You Want to Talk About Race

Wesley Lowery: They Can’t Kill Us All

Reni Eddo-Lodge: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Phew. Good thing Coates, Kendi, and DiAngelo are here. No “woke” list would be complete without those three Wokateers—all of whom profit handsomely from the racial division they help foment.

National Review’s Rich Lowry writes this about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, which Flowers wants to force all public schools to teach:

Coates has to reduce people to categories and actors in a pantomime of racial plunder to support his worldview. He must erase distinctions and reject complexity.

“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” he writes. What is this “white America”? Is it Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz? Is it Massachusetts, or is it Utah?

In a monstrous passage about 9/11, he writes of the police and firefighters who died trying to save people from getting obliterated into dust: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of black people without justification?

I suspect there will be many parents who object to their children being exposed to such a toxic ideology.

Here are just two quotes from the book by racist, pro-“trans,” pro-homosexual feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge titled Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race that Mary Flowers wants to force all Illinois schools to teach:

1.) “[R]acism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve.”

2.) “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist.”

We can’t overlook the list of books Flowers’ bill identifies as fiction, which includes Justin Simien’s satirical book Dear White People. One chapter in Dear White People is titled “So You’ve Decided to ‘Go Black’ and Not Come Back,” which has a section on busting the myth of “Giant Penises,” ,” that is, giant black penises:

Thanks to rap music and the tendency to exoticize people of color, the myth of the giant black d*ck has endured for some time. … the stereotype can lead to a number of awkward postcoital conversations and explanations. Though this stereotype might be helpful in wooing and courtship, there are few things less sexy than a man having to explain why his d*ck isn’t as big as his lover had hoped it would be. The truth is the average d*ck length and width is the same for men regardless of ethnic background. In spite of the sometimes helpful wide-angle lens on the iPhone used in d*ckpic-ing, most guys are packing between five and seven inches.

Please don’t send any email messages to IFI expressing anger that we have reported this. If you’re upset, contact Mary Flowers. She’s the person who wants to make this book required reading in Illinois schools.

Flowers also wants to force Illinois schools to teach bisexual Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, which includes lesbian sex and many references to various characters “f*cking.”

And here’s an excerpt from the novel An American Marriage by Tayari Jones that Flowers wants to force Illinois schools to teach:

Looking down at her outline in the dark, I felt myself wanting to explain again. But I could never tell her that I didn’t want to f*ck her like a man who just got out of jail. I wanted to do it like a man who was home visiting his family. I wanted to do it like a local boy made good. I wanted to f*ck like I had money still, like I had a nice office, Italian shoes, and a steel watch. How can you explain to a woman that you want to f*ck her like a human being?

The married black man in this scene has just been released from spending five years in prison for the crime of raping a white woman—a crime he did not commit. The woman with whom he has sex is a friend—not his wife.

Just curious, who decided graphic lesbian sex was “age-appropriate” for any minor children, and what criteria was used to make such a determination? Who will decide which grade level is appropriate for graphic lesbian sex, language about “f*cking” friends, or about the myth of giant black penises?

While Flowers, evidently a devotee of Critical Race Theory, identity politics, and feminism, includes a few token colorless authors, she includes no ideological diversity, demonstrating that the only kind of diversity that matters to leftists pertains to skin color, biological sex, and disordered sexual predilections. What doesn’t matter is ideological diversity and intellectual exploration on these controversial topics.

In the service of inculcating Illinois minors with “progressive” beliefs about race, feminism, and sexual activities, leftists are fully committed to viewpoint discrimination. They have no interest in teaching children how to think critically via distinguishing sound, coherent arguments buttressed with relevant evidence from fallacious arguments deficient in logic, evidence, and coherence. Instead, they want to teach other people’s children what to think uncritically. Kinda, sorta, maybe sounds more like propaganda than pedagogy.

No one disputes the historical reality of the evil of the slave trade, the institution of slavery, and subsequent Jim Crow laws. Nor does anyone dispute the critical importance of ensuring that history is taught accurately.

The dispute broadly speaking is over how the history of racism should be taught. Many—including blacks—believe the way Critical Race Theory (and BLM and the 1619 Project) addresses slavery in America and its legacy is both imbalanced and inaccurate.

Further, the imbalanced and inaccurate coverage of American history promotes a false picture of an evil and systemically racist America, foments racial division, and robs persons of color of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives.

In the racialist—or some would say racist—theories of those whose writing Mary Flowers wants to force into Illinois schools, there’s a difference between being an “antiracist” and being not racist. Being antiracist essentially means embracing all the beliefs of Critical Race Theory, including forced confession and public repentance by whites, and becoming a community organizer. According to the ubiquitous Ibram X. Kendi,

Being antiracist is different for white people than it is for people of color. For white people, being antiracist evolves with their racial identity development. They must acknowledge and understand their privilege, work to change their internalized racism, and interrupt racism when they see it.

Many believe those dogmatic beliefs are divisive and destructive and will accomplish nothing but feed the greedy Intersectional Industrial Complex. And many non-racist parents do not want their children taught the lie that those who harbor no racist views or engage in any racist acts are still racist by virtue of their skin color or lack thereof.

If Flowers and other leftists are genuinely invested in sound education—which necessarily entails the full and free exchange of ideas on race, race relations, feminism, and sexuality—they could and should revise both this bill and existing curricula on these subjects. They could and should remove half of the non-fiction selections to make room for books and essays by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Carol Swain, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Jason Riley, Anne Wortham, and Heather MacDonald.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to ask him/her vote against this outrageous proposal that usurps the jurisdiction of local school boards and administrators by mandating specific left-wing reading assignments.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Springfield-STILL-Isnt-Done-Indoctrinating-Children.mp3

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Written by Walter E. Williams

The Michigan State University administration pressured professor Stephen Hsu to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation because he touted research that found police are not more likely to shoot black Americans. The study found: “The race of a police officer did not predict the race of the citizen shot. In other words, black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were.” For political reasons, the authors of the study sought its retraction.

The U.S. Department of Education warned UCLA that it may impose fines for improperly and abusively targeting white professor Lt. Col. W. Ajax Peris for disciplinary action over his use of the n-word while reading to his class Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that contained the expressions “when your first name becomes “n——r,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are). Referring to white civil rights activists King wrote, “They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as ‘dirty n——r-lovers.'”

Boston University is considering changing the name of its mascot Rhett because of his link to “Gone with the Wind.” Almost 4,000 Rutgers University students signed a petition to rename campus buildings Hardenbergh Hall, Frelinghuysen Hall and Milledoler Hall because these men were slave owners. University of Arkansas students petitioned to remove a statue of J. William Fulbright because he was a segregationist who opposed the Brown v. Board of Education that ruled against school segregation.

The suppression of free speech and ideas by the elite is nothing new. It has a long ugly history. Galileo Galilei was a 17th-century Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes called “father of modern physics.” The Catholic Church and other scientists of his day believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo offered evidence that the Earth traveled around the sun — heliocentrism. That made him “vehemently suspect of heresy” and was forced to recant and sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition and was later commuted to house arrest for the rest of his life.

Much of today’s totalitarianism, promotion of hate and not to mention outright stupidity, has its roots on college campuses. Sources that report on some of the more egregious forms of the abandonment of free inquiry, hate and stupidity at our colleges are: College Reform and College Fix.

Prof. William S. Penn, who was a Distinguished Faculty Award recipient at Michigan State University in 2003, and a two-time winner of the prestigious Stephen Crane Prize for Fiction, explained to his students, “This country still is full of closet racists.” He said: “Republicans are not a majority in this country anymore. They are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people.”

The public has recently been treated to the term — white privilege. Colleges have long held courses and seminars on “whiteness.” One college even has a course titled “Abolition of Whiteness.” According to some academic intellectuals, whites enjoy advantages that nonwhites do not. They earn higher income and reside in better housing, and their children go to better schools and achieve more. Based on that idea, Asian Americans have more white privilege than white people. And, on a personal note, my daughter has more white privilege than probably 95% of white Americans.

As George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” If the stupid ideas of academic intellectuals remained on college campuses and did not infect the rest of society, they might be a source of entertainment — much like a circus.

Written by Carlos D. Flores

We should make public policy and encourage social norms that reflect the truth about the human person and sexuality, not obfuscate the truth about such matters and sow the seeds of sexual confusion in future generations for years to come.

By now we are all undoubtedly familiar with the tragic suicide of Joshua Alcorn, the transgender teenage boy who, in late December, walked onto a freeway with the intention of ending his life. In an apparent suicide note, Joshua cites a host of reasons for why he was led to end his life, most prominent of which were his parents’ attempts to discourage his identifying as a girl and his being sent to therapists in an attempt to relieve these feelings. All of the problems that ultimately culminated in his suicide, writes Joshua, stem from the fact that, from the time he was a small child, he felt like a “girl trapped in a boy’s body.”

No sooner had Joshua’s heart stopped beating than the story of his suicide was seized by LGBT activists and pruned to advance a familiar narrative of a sexual minority fighting cultural oppression. Joshua’s parents immediately began to be chided as “repressive” and “bigoted” and even began to receive various threats from LGBT internet crusader-activists.

Transgenderism and Gender Identity

I have not referred to Joshua by using female pronouns or by using his self-invented female name of “Leelah.” The reason I am not doing this is simple: Joshua was not a girl—he was a boy—and to address males with female pronouns or females with male pronouns is to contribute to our culture’s confusion about sexuality and the nature of the human person, which is literally leaving casualties in its wake. No amount of surgical mutilation of body parts, effeminate behaviors, or artificial female appearances can make a man a woman.

LGBT activists will respond in various ways to this. They might first respond by saying: “Okay, true enough: Joshua was biologically a male. But you have misunderstood our claim: we contend that his sex was male, yes, but his gender was female because he ‘identified’ as female.” The idea here is that people have a sex, which is either female or male and which one cannot choose. In addition to this, however, there is “gender,” or what sex one is more comfortable “identifying” as. The response to this is simple: Why think that what one “identifies as” is significant at all, especially to the extent that others should actively recognize or cater to such an identity, and especially when the identity one adopts is contrary to reality?

Consider the following analogies. Suppose that a Caucasian man from Finland—call him Gunther—suddenly decided that he identifies as being of Sub-Saharan African descent. Suppose further that, in light of this, Gunther undergoes unusual procedures to have his skin darkened and his skull’s bone structure re-shaped so as to resemble that of individuals of Sub-Saharan descent. Would we think that such a person has suddenly become of Sub-Saharan descent through such procedures? Of course not, and his identifying as such does nothing to change this. His appearance as someone of Sub-Saharan descent might be very convincing. But, again, this doesn’t change the fact that he is not of Sub-Saharan descent.

Similarly, suppose that a seventy-year-old man—call him Bob—comes to identify as a sixteen-year-old. Wouldn’t we think it absurd if people considered it “rude” or “bigoted” to tell the man: “You are not sixteen years old. Your identifying as such doesn’t change this fact, and we will not indulge you in your strange delusions by not calling attention to your old age and by pretending that you really are sixteen years old”?

The cases of Gunther and Bob and the situations of individuals who believe themselves to be transgender are perfectly analogous. In the case of the transgender individual, he identifies as something he is not—someone of the opposite sex—and seeks to undergo harmful surgeries and hormonal treatments in order to have his physical state match his identity of himself as someone of the opposite sex.

Our mental faculties, like our physical ones, are ordered toward various ends. Among these ends is the attainment of truth. To this extent, it is perfective of our mental faculties to recognize how we truly are (and thus apprehend a truth). It is for this reason that we can make sense of mental disorders such as anorexia nervosa as disorders: they involve persons’ having persistent, false beliefs about their identity or how they really are. In the case of the anorexic, someone who is dangerously underweight believes falsely (but tenaciously) that he is really overweight. It would be a proper procedure of medicine, then, for a therapist to help an anorexic individual to do away with his anorexia, restoring the individual’s mental faculties to their properly functioning state.

Gender Reassignment Surgery Is Not Medicine

Those in favor of transgenderism also (naturally) support gender-reassignment surgery as a perfectly legitimate medical procedure for individuals (including children) with gender dysphoria. Now, put to one side the fact that 70-80 percent of children who report having transgender feelings come to lose such feelings. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that individuals who undergo gender reassignment surgery are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Instead consider the following question: Can we reasonably categorize gender reassignment surgery as a medical procedure in the first place?

Before we answer this question, we might venture to ask: what is medicine? Here is a plausible answer: medicine is the enterprise of restoring bodily faculties to their proper function. Our bodily faculties are ordered toward certain ends. This seems impossible to deny. Eyes, for example, are ordered toward (i.e., their function is) seeing, the stomach is ordered toward breaking down food, the heart is ordered toward pumping blood, etc. So if, say, someone’s eyes were not able to achieve their end of sight well, it would be rightly considered a medicalprocedure to seek to restore this individual’s eyes to their proper function. Similarly, it would be a medical endeavor to seek to restore an individual’s defective heart (one that has arrhythmia, say) to its proper function. All well and good.

But what are we to make of this “gender reassignment” surgery? Insofar as such a surgical procedure involves the intentional damaging and mutilating of otherwise perfectly functioning bodily faculties by twisting them to an end toward which they are not ordered, such a thing cannot, in principle, possibly be considered a medical procedure. And because love compels us to seek the good for another, it is thus a grave evil to condone such surgical procedures.

On Gender Identity Disorder Therapy

A similar point can be made about gender identity disorder therapy. Transgenderism activists are seizing Joshua’s tragic death to insist that such therapy ought to be criminalized. A petition is floating around the internet to ban so-called “transgender conversion therapy,” a procedure that involves, presumably, an attempt by a professional to help a person who is experiencing a gender identity disorder (also known as gender dysphoria). If the progress of the homosexual movement is a guide to what will come next, we can expect that laws will soon be passed criminalizing individuals’ receiving therapy to help them do away with transgender identities or desires—even for those who want to relieve themselves of such identities and desires.

Recall our earlier discussion of anorexia. Like the anorexic, the transgendered individual tenaciously holds to false beliefs about his identity or how or what he truly is: he believes that he is a sex that he is not. Dr. Paul McHugh’s words here are particularly incisive:

The transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.

It would thus be a perfectly proper procedure of medicine for the transgendered individual to visit a therapist to seek his professional help to relieve himself of his disordered transgender identity insofar as this would amount to a restoring of the transgendered individual’s mental faculties to their properly functioning state. The suggestion, then, that gender identity disorder therapy should be criminalized is as absurd as the suggestion that therapy to eliminate anorexia should be criminalized.

Some Common Objections

Now, an apologist for transgenderism might retort in the following way: “You’re missing a key point: the brains of, say, men who ‘identify’ as women have been shown to resemble those of women. This shows that there is a biological basis to their identifying as such.” In response, we might begin by asking for empirical evidence that this dubious claim really is true. But even if this were the case, this doesn’t show that men whose brains “resemble that of a woman’s” (whatever that means) are truly women after all. If we are to say that the person simply is the brain, as the one who espouses this objection seems to suggest, then, because presumably even males who identify as women have brains with male DNA, it follows that they are men after all.

But we don’t even need to grant that the presence of such-and-such brain states is relevant at all. For example, we may suppose that, through habitually behaving as a sixteen- year-old, the brain activity of the seventy-year-old mentioned above “resembles” that of a sixteen-year-old’s. Does it follow, then, that the seventy-year-old really is sixteen years old? Or that he is really a sixteen-year-old trapped inside a seventy-year-old’s body? Of course not. The most rational conclusion is that such an individual has some sort of cognitive or psychological defect associated with identity and self-perception. The same can be said for the transgender individual.

Indeed, it should not come as a surprise to find out that our daily activities shape our brain-states or alter the way our brains behave. After all, it is more or less common knowledge that, say, the process of learning to play an instrument has the effect of establishing new neural pathways, thus causing a change in brain-states. Thus Dr. Norman Doidge comments: “Now we know the brain is ‘neuroplastic,’ and not only can it change, but that it works by changing its structure in response to repeated mental experience.”

On the topic of sexuality more specifically, consider the fact that habitual porn use seems to result in (or correlate with) decreased gray matter in the brain, and that habitual porn use changes the sexual tastes of men. If habitually watching pornography can change a man’s brain so significantly, then it should hardly be surprising that through intentionally and habitually behaving like a woman a man’s brain would too change to some extent. But again, this does not thereby show that such a man is a woman after all; all it shows is that through habituated action of some sort, the man’s brain behavior has changed.

Another response might be to ask rhetorically: “Well, what about intersex individuals?” The implication is that the existence of intersex individuals somehow shows that the nature of sex is up for grabs for everyone, intersex or not. But this doesn’t follow at all. In the genuine case of intersex individuals, it may very well be appropriate to express puzzlement or ignorance as to what to make of such an attribute, metaphysically speaking, and perhaps leave it as an open question whether such individuals are either male or female or whether they should be encouraged to undergo surgical procedures in the interest of their health. Cases in which an individual is intersex, however, are exceedingly rare. Indeed, even granting the point, it would not be unfair to say that in 99.99 percent of cases (and even this might be too low a percentage), a person is either male or female. And unsurprisingly, most of the individuals who believe themselves to be transgender have perfectly functioning male or female reproductive systems. This question is both irrelevant and fruitless.

Finally, the LGBT activist might retort by asking: “but how will a man identifying as a woman affect you?” If these were simply private issues, this might be a valid point (though a concern for the physical and mental well-being of individuals struggling with their gender might obligate us to reach out to them in such a case). But, alas, LGBT activists are actively working to make it the case that the state and private businesses cover “gender-reassignment” surgeries, that men who identify as women be able to use women’s restrooms, that girls who identify as boys be able to play on male sports teams, that we consider it immoral to refer to infants as male or female lest we insidiously impose upon them a “gender” they might not identify with, that we ban therapy to treat gender dysphoria, and that we generally co-opt language and social norms to reflect pernicious falsehoods about the human body.

How a man’s identifying as a woman will personally affect me, you, or John Doe is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether we will make public policy and encourage social norms that reflect the truth about the human person and sexuality, or whether we will obfuscate the truth about such matters and sow the seeds of sexual confusion in future generations for years to come.

Carlos D. Flores studies philosophy at UC Santa Barbara. He is the president of the UC Santa Barbara Anscombe Society and has written for Ethika Politika. Originally published at ThePublicDiscourse.com.

 The Truth Project

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featuring Dr. Del Tackett
April 10-11, 2015

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