“Education” in a Pro-Propaganda Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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

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America Burns While Our Schools Hold The Match

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

I have said it a thousand times.

Ideas matter.

What is taught today in our classrooms will be practiced tomorrow in our culture. Teach self-actualization rather than self-restraint in your schools, and you are going to get a bunch of self-obsessed, perpetual children throwing tantrums in your streets.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

Teach narcissism, and you get a bunch of narcissists.

Spend more time showing young boys how to use a condom than teaching them how to be men of character and don’t be surprised with Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein.

Teach lechery, and you get lechers.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.” Hitler agreed, “Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state.”

Why do you see a gaggle of arrogant adolescents strutting the halls of Washington, D.C.? We produced them. We taught them to behave this way. We created this monster. This situation is of our own making. These people are our fault. They are the product of our local schools, our colleges and our universities.

Some of you might be tempted to dismiss this. You might be inclined to say that you don’t care that much about this topic because you’re not in college any longer, or you don’t have children or grandchildren headed off to the ivory tower this fall. This is the next generation’s problem.

Well, you’re wrong.

This is your problem, and it’s your problem in spades.

Just turn on the news.

Just read the paper.

Just pick up your smartphone or open your laptop.

If the burning cars, destroyed monuments and broken windows in Minneapolis, Seattle and New York haven’t caught your attention, what will? If tearing down statues of Frederick Douglass isn’t a bridge too far, what is?

Our culture is collapsing right before our eyes, and it is clear where the responsibility lies. Our nation’s educational establishment is to blame.

If we don’t admit this and admit it now, our country and culture are lost.

John Adams once wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He knew that for any nation to survive, it must have a moral and religious glue to bind it together, or it will die for lack of definition.

It will suffer the fate of the Bolshevik, French or Cultural Revolutions. It will fall for the lies of the likes of Robespierre, Lenin or Mao.

The American experiment was and is the singular exception to the guillotine and the gulag.

Why?

Because ours was a revolution driven by the Creator rather than the created. It was a revolution grounded in self-evident truths rather than self-righteousness arrogance. It was a fight for liberty rather than license. It was a battle for freedom rather than safety, for principles rather than power.

And where do these principles, these moral and religious truths, come from? They are passed from one generation to another through our schools. Our Founding Fathers knew this. This is why they founded Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Yale — all chartered expressly in the principles of biblical Christianity.

All these colleges were created to educate a free people, a moral people, a people who could and would control themselves, a people of personal restraint, a people of private and public virtue. These schools were founded to create a nation of biblical character and individual integrity.

Remove this cornerstone from our culture, and the house crumbles. When our schools rot, the fish stinks from the head down.

Our nation stands on the very precipice of hell, and your local school district thinks fomenting victimization, anger, balkanization and division is the solution.

Your neighborhoods are burning, and your schools rush to throw the gasoline of resentment, recompense and revenge on the fire.

Your teacher unions and many of their members march in solidarity with Marxists while they malign capitalism. They defend the destruction of Antifa. They applaud the divisiveness of BLM. They wave their rainbow banners while disparaging our country’s flag. They deny the science of X and Y chromosomes while calling you a science denier. They extol socialism while condemning free enterprise. They teach the racism of critical race theory. They tout the intolerance of intersectionality. They demand the privilege of denouncing your privilege. They use your sons and daughters as pawns in their ugly game of power and politics. They proudly boast of judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

And they teach your children to do the same.

Yeah, that’ll solve the problem, won’t it?

The house is aflame, and your schools hold the match.

Dr. Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). This article was originally published at The Washington Times.

Despicable Behavior of Today’s Academicians

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.

Evidence of how stupid college ideas find their way into the public arena can be seen on our daily news. Don Lemon, a CNN anchorman, said, “We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them.” Steven Clifford, former King Broadcasting CEO, said, “I will be leading a great movement to prohibit straight white males, who I believe supported Donald Trump by about 85 percent, from exercising the franchise (to vote), and I think that will save our democracy.”

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.

This article originally posted at Creators.com.

Chicago Christian Activist Says “Get ’em Out!”

A recent broadcast on Chicago’s Morning Answer (AM 560 The Answer) featured Latasha Fields, well-known to IFI and IFA supporters as an ardent proponent of home education and parental rights. At the outset, Ms. Fields responds to Bryant Gumbel’s statement about the “Black Tax” and she calls out the hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ms. Fields also addresses the absolute importance of strong nuclear families, the possibility of a Blacks-only political party, liberal policies that encourage government dependency (modern enslavement), and the need for parents and churches to reclaim their rights and responsibility to properly educate their children.

Latasha Fields is Co-Founder and Overseer of Our Report Ministries & Publications, Director of Christian Home Educators Support System (C.H.E.S.S.), and State Coordinator of Illinois for Parental Rights.

Trump & Limbaugh Blast Public Schools for Destroying US

The President of the United States and America’s most popular talk-show host both blasted the public-school system for indoctrinating U.S. children with anti-American propaganda. The mayhem and destruction being seen in the streets right now, they explained, is a direct result of this subversive indoctrination masquerading as education.

Both leaders agreed: The deadly lies being taught to children in government schools across America must end if the nation is to be salvaged. And Trump, at least, seemed confident that the days of “far-left fascism” running rampant in America’s schools an culture were numbered. Limbaugh also said the brainwashing would have to be reversed.

By speaking out, the dynamic duo — two of the most influential men not just in America, but in the world — just gave a major boost to the American public’s understanding about the root of so many of the nation’s problems. As doctors understand well, having an accurate diagnosis is key to finding a cure.

However, even though both men have called for Americans to save their own children from government schools (or at least “failing government schools,” as Trump put it earlier this year), neither leader spent much time on actual mechanics for a solution. Still, just talking about it at the national level is a crucial start to eventually getting a solution.

Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3 in honor of America’s Independence Day, Trump put it this way: “The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.”

He was right, of course, as FreedomProject Media has been documenting for years. Trump also delved into the nature of that brainwashing. “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains,” he said, adding that the goal was to destroy America.

Responding to the fact that there are still a significant number of Americans who believe the fake-media narrative, talk-radio titan Limbaugh, who reaches an estimated 15 million listeners per day, was even bolder. He said on air after Trump’s speech that the reason for the ignorance and anti-American hatred was simple: Government-school indoctrination by radical leftists.

“We’ve lost teachers. We have lost public education, not to mention academe. We have lost higher education,” Limbaugh said. “We have a bunch of left-wing activists disguised as teachers who have literally been, for almost two generations now, poisoning with hatred and vile racism the innocent, young-skulls-full-of-mush students who show up in their classrooms — and that’s what we’re gonna have to reverse ultimately.”

Limbaugh spoke out again on July 8, saying the nation’s problems could be traced back to the indoctrination of children (and future journalists) in government schools. And last year, he declared that one of the answers to the crisis was homeschooling and removing children from public schools. Numerous other top leaders have made similar pleas.

In his 2020 State of the Union speech, Trump called for saving children from what he described as “failing government schools.” And on the campaign trail in 2016, he blasted the “indoctrination” of America’s youth by “progressive” bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Education. This is major progress in exposing the crucial problem facing America.

When some of the most powerful men in the world speak the truth clearly and passionately about the threat of government-school indoctrination to children and the nation, millions of people listen. A mass exodus from the public schools has begun. Already, the North Carolina state website to register for homeschooling has crashed due to exploding demand amid coronavirus.

Perhaps it is not too late to save America after all.

This article originally posted at FreedomProject.com

Three Recent SCOTUS Decisions Christians Should Know About

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has once again entered the cultural frays. Here are three recent decisions that will have lasting consequences for people of faith.

Louisiana Pro-Life Law Struck Down

June Medical Services LLC v. Russo

Issue: Can a state require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital?

Facts: The State of Louisiana passed a law requiring abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals. The law was intended to protect women who may have medical complications during an abortion requiring emergency medical care. However, abortion advocates decried such laws because some abortion clinics would close due to the difficulty in obtaining admitting privileges. The Louisiana law was substantially similar to a Texas law that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016 in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. The Hellerstedt case is very important to understanding the Court’s ruling and the future of pro-life litigation.

Holding: The Court ruled 5-4 in favor of striking down the Louisiana law. All four Democrat-appointed justices held that the law placed an “undue burden” on a women’s right to choose abortion, in violation of Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade. Chief Justice John Roberts also voted in favor striking down the law but did so on different grounds. The Chief Justice held that the law should be struck down because of stare decisis—the doctrine that a court should generally follow prior court precedent. Because the court already decided this issue of admitting privileges laws in the Hellerstedt case, Roberts reasoned that this similar Louisiana law should also be struck down.

Interestingly, the Chief Justice dissented on this same issue in the Hellerstedt case. Thus, it may be surmised that Chief Justice Roberts thinks these admitting privileges laws are constitutional but will disregard his beliefs in order to protect prior court precedent.

What does it mean for the pro-life cause? Although this case is a stinging blow for pro-life advocates, there may be reason for hope. Chief Justice Roberts appears to have voted against the Louisiana law only to protect prior court precedent on this narrow issue of admitting privileges. However, he may be more sympathetic to other types of pro-life laws that have not been previously decided by the Court. We may still possibly see the Chief Justice join Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh in upholding other types of pro-life laws in the future.

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
Discrimination Prohibited by Title VII

Bostock v. Clayton County

Issue: Does Title VII’s prohibition on “sex discrimination” include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity?

Facts: The decision involves three cases, including two gay men alleging they had been fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation. The case also addresses a transgender employee who claimed he had been fired on the basis of gender identity.

Holding: Title VII of the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sex discrimination in employment decisions. The law does not mention sexual orientation or gender identity. However, Justice Gorsuch, writing for the 6-3 majority, held that when an employer discriminates based on an employee’s sexual orientation or gender identity, the employer is inevitably discriminating on the basis of sex.

For example, imagine that there are two employees: one heterosexual man dating a woman and the other a homosexual woman dating a woman. If the homosexual woman is fired for dating another woman and the man is not, the only reason–in Justice Gorsuch’s view–the woman is fired is because of her sex. Both employees are participating in the same activity (dating a woman); the only difference is that one employee is a woman and the other is man—thus, sex discrimination. The argument goes that since Title VII bans sex discrimination, the law also necessarily bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

What does it mean for religious liberty? In Illinois, the legal landscape may not have changed because the Illinois Human Rights Act already prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. However, for roughly half the states that did not previously prohibit LGBT discrimination, employers may now face employment discrimination lawsuits based on an employee’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

This ruling is not likely to affect churches or other religious organizations. Justice Gorsuch specifically pointed out that there are statutory and constitutional protections for religious organization’s employment decisions. For example, Title VII and Illinois law specifically provides religious organizations the right to impose religious litmus tests on their employees. Nevertheless, churches and ministries who are concerned about such lawsuits should carefully evaluate their organizational documents, statements of faith, and employment practices to ensure their statuses as religious organizations.

Public Aid Programs Cannot Discriminate
Against Religious Organizations

Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue

Issue: Does the First Amendment prevent a state from getting rid of a state scholarship that allowed funds to go to religious organizations?

Facts: The state of Montana had a scholarship program that allowed families to use public funds to send their children to a school of their choosing. However, the money could not be used to attend religious schools because the Montana Constitution had a Blaine Amendment. A Blaine Amendment prohibits public funds from being used to support any type of religious organization. Blaine Amendments arose to prominence in the late 1800’s due to widespread hostility to Catholicism, fearing that the Catholic Church would attempt to obtain public funding. About thirty states currently have some variation of a Blaine Amendment.

These laws stand in stark contrast to the recent Supreme Court precedent in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer. This case holds that a state violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause when a public funding program with a secular and neutral government purpose discriminates against a religious organization. The case involved a government program to fund safer playground equipment. The Court ruled that the government fund could not exclude a church-owned playground.

With the Montana Blaine Amendment standing in contrast to the Trinity Lutheran case, the Montana court had a catch-22 on its hands. Allowing the scholarship program to be used for religious schools would violate the Montana Blaine Amendment, but discriminating against religious organizations who offer the same services as secular organizations violates the First Amendment. The Montana Supreme Court tried to avoid this predicament by striking down the entire scholarship program so that no school—religious or otherwise—could get the scholarship money.

Holding: The Court reversed the Montana Court’s decision to strike down the scholarship program. Chief Justice Roberts held that the Montana Blaine Amendment violated the First Amendment because it discriminates against religious organizations. Because the Montana court applied the unconstitutional Blaine Amendment in striking down the scholarship program, the Montana court violated the First Amendment in discriminating against religious schools. Chief Justice John Roberts held, “A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

What does it mean for religious liberty? The decision will allow for the expansion of public funding for religious education. If a state decides to allow for school vouchers for secular private schools, the vouchers must also be allowed for private religious schools.

Furthermore, this decision may have put the final nail in the Blaine Amendment’s coffin. No longer will a state be able to apply laws that discriminate against religious organizations in distributing government funds.

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

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Need Help With Homeschooling? The 2020 ICHE Conference is Virtual and Free!

One of the unfortunate side effects of the corona virus pandemic has been the cancellation of numerous conferences and other events. With the benefits of technology, many of those events have been able to take place online. The full experience may not be the same, but at least we don’t have to miss out completely!

One such event my wife and I were planning to attend this year was the annual Family Conference hosted by Illinois Christian Home Educators. Aside from fond personal memories—the two of us met each other for the first time at the conference ten years ago—it’s a great opportunity to hear solid teaching, interact with other Christian families, and peruse curriculum and other resources.

This year, the ICHE board of directors made the decision to host the conference virtually. It may not be the same as the in-person event so many families have come to love, but it certainly has its advantages: no commute, no food or lodging expenses, and—thanks to the generosity of ICHE—no registration fee! (Registration is still required, but the cost is waived.)

The conference is much more than just a homeschool event. As Kirk Smith, Executive Director of ICHE shared with me, it’s “a marriage conference, family conference, parenting conference, biblical worldview conference, economic conference, spiritual renewal conference all rolled up into one.”

A review of the event website (check it out for yourself here) reveals a broad lineup of speakers and subjects. Topics range from the practical, to the inspirational, to the philosophical. Here’s a smattering of the presentations you can enjoy:

Thoroughly Christian Education (Voddie Baucham)

Time and Home Management: Managing Life and Home While Homeschooling (Nancy Bjorkman)

When Motherhood Feels Too Hard (Kelly Crawford)

Homeschool High School with Confidence (Cheri Frame)

One Race, One Blood (Ken Ham)

How to Spot Fake News (Carl Kerby)

Homeschooling 101 (Jeff Lewis)

Three Things Every Young Christian Artist Must Know (Dan Lietha)

The 5 Flavors of Homeschooling (Sonya Shafer)

Preparing Our Children to Navigate the LGBTQ Movement in Truth and Love (Elizabeth Urbanowicz)

Motivating the Reluctant Learner (Krisa Winn)

And many, many more!

With schools closed down for the past couple of months, many moms and dads have become unexpected homeschoolers. If that describes you, and if you’re considering homeschooling long term (I highly recommend it!), this event could be a great way to learn more about how homeschooling works in a more traditional context. Of course, as Kirk Smith points out, “There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach with homeschooling. At the ICHE conference, you will be able to hear a variety of approaches and be able to tailor your school experience for what best fits your values and priorities as a family.”

The ICHE Family Conference will be taking place May 28-31. It will be hosted using the event app Whova, and you’ll have access to the conference sessions via Whova for a full year afterward.

There are at least three groups of people who should consider registering for this conference:

Homeschooling moms and dads who were planning to attend the regular, in-person event

Parents who have considered attending the event in the past but were unable to do so because of distance, budget, childcare, etc.

Anyone interested in learning more about homeschooling (parents, grandparents, pastors, etc.)

Homeschooling is really an extension of parenting. It’s the opportunity to teach and disciple our children with a degree of intention unmatched by other options. As Kirk Smith pointed out, “So many dads and moms want to do parenting right, they just lack examples and resources. The conference will give them both.”

So if you want to be a better homeschooler—or a better parent—be sure to check out the ICHE Family Conference! Check it out HERE.

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Are You a Reluctant Homeschooler?

If you have kids and weren’t homeschooling before the coronavirus lockdown, you are now.

I’m sure there has been a broad mix of experiences among the millions of unexpected (and perhaps reluctant) homeschooling parents all across our country. I’m guessing some have found it a surprising blessing, while others have undoubtedly loathed every minute of it.

If you’ve been a reluctant homeschooler these past several weeks and have come to the conclusion that you would never do this on purpose, allow me to encourage you to take a second look. After all, there are several huge reasons why your experience in the midst of this pandemic isn’t typical of the more traditional, voluntary homeschool experience thousands of families enjoy every day.

Before you decide to never try homeschooling again after the lockdown ends, I would invite you to consider how enormous some of these differences are and how they’ve impacted your experience.

You Didn’t Have Time to Prepare

Many parents would spend weeks—or months—preparing to jump into homeschooling. They might research teaching methods and learning styles, curriculum options, extracurricular activities, and the like. They would think about their schedule and routine. They would talk to homeschooling friends, think about their goals and vision, and perhaps even attend a homeschool convention to listen to homeschooling veterans share their wisdom on everything from how to teach multiple grades at the same time, to balancing homeschooling and housework.

In short, homeschooling is a huge undertaking and benefits from some advance preparation. You didn’t have that benefit.

It Was Unexpected

It’s not like we had a lot of warning that the schools were going to shut down and that every parent would suddenly be homeschooling whether they wanted to or not. Not only were you unprepared for the day-to-day responsibilities of homeschooling (see previous point), you were emotionally unprepared. It was sudden and unexpected—not exactly the best context for a major change.

It Wasn’t Your Choice

Most homeschoolers decide to teach their children at home based on a variety of factors. Among those of us who are Christians, the decision will often involve prayer, perhaps some study of what the Bible says about teaching and training our children, and so on. Making the decision is a process—sometimes one that takes a long time to fully work through.

You didn’t have the benefit of that process. It wasn’t a voluntary choice. It was a forced reaction to a global crisis you couldn’t opt out of. Again, not the best context for such a massive undertaking.

You’ve Been Trying to Fit Someone Else’s Mold

If your kids are supposed to be keeping up with the lessons they would have been doing in school, keep in mind that those lessons were planned by someone else and for a completely different context. You’re suddenly the overseer of plans you didn’t make, expected to implement an agenda you didn’t create.

That’s radically different from more traditional, voluntary homeschooling where you have the opportunity to make plans based on the unique needs of your children and the overall dynamic of your home and family. That’s one of the blessings of homeschooling: you have flexibility to choose from many different paths. But in your current context, you’ve perhaps been forced to forego that blessing—one of the biggest that homeschooling offers—to fit someone else’s plans and agenda.

You’ve Missed Out On the Benefits of In-Person Support

The homeschooling community is large and robust. Under normal circumstances, you would be able to benefit from in-person fellowship and support from other parents on the same journey. You could get together with a more experienced homeschooling mom to get wise, seasoned counsel on how to handle the challenges. You could enjoy a field trip with other homeschooling families. All of these in-person opportunities and benefits are off-limits right now. You’re unexpectedly trying to be a homeschooling parent without the support system homeschoolers traditionally are able to enjoy. It’s a double whammy.

Homeschooling May Not Have Been the Only Massive Change in Your Life

If you’re like many families, there may have been multiple big changes happening all at once for you. Perhaps you and your spouse are both working from home and have to juggle schedules and responsibilities while everyone trips over each other competing for a quiet spot to study or have a meeting. Or maybe one (or both) of you lost your job and you’re trying to figure out what to do.

Many homeschoolers know that during times of upheaval (job loss, relocation, a new baby, major illness, etc.), it’s okay to cut yourself some slack with the daily lessons. You can always make things up later if you need to. But (and this goes back to the earlier point about fitting into someone else’s mold) you may not feel you have that flexibility. So you’re navigating multiple major changes all at once with limited ability to cut yourself some slack and focus on the overall wellbeing of your family. Not an easy place to be.

You’re Probably More Stressed than Usual

Lastly, considering everything that’s going on, you’re probably feeling more stress than usual. Even if you’re generally handling the stress well, it can make things feel harder and more challenging—including your new responsibilities as a reluctant homeschooling parent.

It’s All Different

The bottom line is, what you’ve experienced these last several weeks as a newly drafted, reluctant homeschooling parent is probably very different from what most voluntary homeschoolers experience. You’ve been laboring under some very real difficulties that aren’t typical of more “normal” homeschooling.

That’s why I would encourage you to be cautious about judging long-term homeschooling based on your experiences thus far. The truth is, there are some very solid reasons to consider long-term home education (here’s one of the biggest). There are many blessings to be enjoyed, and it would be a shame to dismiss them too quickly because of the unusual circumstances of the past several weeks.

My encouragement to you would be to prayerfully consider what God wants you to do as you move forward. Study what the Bible says about education. Talk to an experienced homeschooling parent about what they appreciate about homeschooling and how to better prepare for the experience. Make a prayerful, well-informed, God-led decision about what you should do.

As a homeschool graduate and second-generation homeschooling dad, I don’t envy you your sudden introduction to the responsibilities of home education. Just know that when you make the choice for yourself and get a vision for what God wants to do through it, the blessings can be enormous—for you and your kids.

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Coronavirus Opens Eyes to Homeschooling

Even before the coronavirus shutdown, the Smith parents were concerned about their young teenage son’s experience at the local public school. In fact, the child begged not to go back. From bullying and indoctrination that led to depression, to godlessness and false propaganda passed off as “education,” to handcuffed teachers who must obey the system amid the chaos, the family was already very worried.

Then the governor of the state shut down the schools in March due to coronavirus. The school had provided Google “Chromebooks” and Google accounts to the students with lessons, resources, and assignments to work on at home. What Samantha Smith saw, though, convinced her that the time had come to remove her son from government education and do something different.

“It was all so confusing, just a bunch of mish-mash stuff that was impossible to navigate or understand,” said the mother, whose real identity is being protected to avoid harming her relationship with school district officials. “Parents are left totally out of the loop, and this is what goes on during normal school days as well.”

The godless nature of the “education” was deeply harmful, too. The mother told The New American that she believed her son developed some depression as a result of the “false teachings” being forced on him by the school. Indeed, the child was even reprimanded and disciplined for speaking the truth, which was interpreted as defiance, she said. And her son saw that there was no biblical integration into anything, even though he knows full well that one cannot separate God’s design from education or anything else.

And so, the Smith family took the plunge and decided to homeschool and enroll their son, 14, into the FreedomProject Academy, an online K-12 school (see page 21) that is firmly grounded in biblical principles. While the Smiths will still rely on local government schools for some extracurricular activities, the child’s education will now be a combination of homeschooling and FPA. “We know this is the best option,” the mother concluded.

In the span of a few weeks, the population of homeschooling families in America exploded by some 2,000 percent or more. Thanks to panic surrounding the Chinese virus, the number of home-educated children went from just a few million to almost the entire school-age population of the United States and even the globe. Of course, many of those children are still relying on government for lessons and activities — something that must not be confused with genuine home education — but many other families have been left entirely on their own. In any case, interest in home education has never been greater.

Advocates of homeschooling began rejoicing, practically in unison, at the prospect of dramatic growth in the movement. More than a few commentators suggested that, with enough effort by home-education advocates, there is a very real chance that millions of students may never return to the public-school system after the dust settles. It would be unprecedented, but not impossible — especially as millions of parents discover for the first time what their children are being exposed to in government schools.

Not everyone is pleased at the surging interest in home education, though. The Deep State’s propaganda organs, far-left governors, the United Nations, the education establishment, and the sexual revolutionaries obsessed with sexualizing children have all been less than enthusiastic at the thought of countless millions becoming homeschoolers almost overnight. Some globalist groups such as UNESCO and the OECD are even trying to hijack the moment. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen.

Surging Interest

From the torrent of news articles across America and the globe about homeschooling, it is clear that the subject has never been this hot — not by a long shot. And while some of the media reports were hostile, many were fair, if not outright supportive, of the national move toward home education. A Wall Street Journal piece by editor and homeschool father Matthew Hennessey, for example, argued that an increase in homeschooling numbers would be a “silver lining in a very dark cloud.” Fox News ran multiple reports on the subject, too.

As government schools were shutting down in state after state, homeschoolers across America who spoke with The New American magazine confirmed that there has been unprecedented interest in the practice in recent weeks. Friends and family members whose children have been in public or traditional schools all their lives suddenly find themselves thinking seriously about home education for the first time — at least for now, if not for the long haul. As they try it, many will love it. And homeschool families everywhere are mobilizing to help ease the transition as millions consider joining the movement.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the largest and most powerful group advocating for home education in the world, has also confirmed expanded interest in homeschooling among the public. In response to the schools shutting down and the growing attention, the group even released a “quick start” guide outlining seven steps for parents to begin homeschooling their children. It has been extremely popular so far.

“I fully expect that there are going to be a lot of people who are going to point back to the coronavirus pandemic as the time when they started homeschooling and they started their homeschooling journey,” HSLDA attorney and director for global outreach Mike Donnelly was quoted as saying by Breitbart News. “We don’t know what this pandemic is going to look like. But it may end up changing people’s behavior, and as people have the opportunity to figure out education with their children, in a homeschooling context, some people, I think, are going to say, ‘You know this isn’t so bad; in fact, this is kind of good and I think we’re going to keep doing this.’”

Countless organizations, including FreedomProject Academy and the Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum, have responded to the soaring interest by making some of their resources available for free to those families suddenly homeschooling out of necessity. And the website CoronavirusHomeschooling.com, sponsored by the Texas Home School Coalition, has even made available an entire homeschool curriculum for students of all ages, along with countless other resources to help families in need. “You don’t need a PhD. Just be a parent and you’ll be fine,” the site assures parents. “We’ll send you daily lesson plans with video instructions to help you through. We’ll tell you exactly what to do each day. You’ve got this!”

Actress and nationally syndicated radio host Sam Sorbo, author of They’re Your Kids: An Inspirational Journey From Self-Doubter to Home School Advocate, is among the celebrities promoting the service. She is optimistic that many of the families being forced to homeschool amid the coronavirus panic will realize it is far better for their children than government schools. In a radio interview on her show featuring this writer, and again during a Heritage Foundation panel discussion entitled “We’re All Homeschoolers Now: Navigating the Coronavirus Challenge to K-12 Education,” the highly influential Sorbo sounded thrilled at the prospect.

“I’m optimistic that families will discover the joys of home education,” she said about this time period, adding that parents were likely to become suspicious of government schools as those institutions hesitate to make their materials and curriculum available to families online. “My whole message to parents is, ‘You don’t feel capable of educating your children at home because you’ve been taught that you’re incapable.’ In fact, that seems to be an overarching message of our education bureaucracy — to make you aware of how inadequate you are, to make you uncertain of how well you can do.” Now is the perfect time to try, she said.

To help bring that about and encourage parents, Sorbo joined forces with The Old Schoolhouse magazine and other leaders in the movement to host a webinar for families that find themselves in “accidental homeschooling.” According to the publisher of the magazine, new homeschoolers from all over the world — even from nations where it is illegal — are signing up for their programs every day. Sorbo, who along with her husband homeschooled her own children, also launched a YouTube program called The Accidental Home Schooler aimed at those who are just getting started with home education.

Sorbo is also urging all newly established homeschool families to take advantage of the free resources at CoronavirusHomeschooling.com. “We mobilized our entire team and have worked around-the-clock to produce excellent daily lesson plans beginning with grades K through 5,” she told The New American magazine, celebrating the empowerment of parents to “take the reins” of their children’s education in the months ahead. “Using our website, every parent has immediate access to this free resource, as well as support from our team of education professionals. We are rolling out new resources every week, for children of all ages, so that parents have the vibrant, comprehensive, necessary resources to teach at home.”

Government-education Critics

In an exclusive interview with The New American, former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas said parents should view the current pandemic as the “greatest opportunity of their lives” to take control over what their children are learning. Douglas originally ran for the top education post in her state, hoping to reform the system and bring back traditional education, including phonics and real history. By the end of her four-year term, though, she realized reform was futile, and that the only hope was for parents to remove their children from the system in huge numbers, she explained.

“This is part of a 100-year or 150-year battle for the souls of our children,” continued Douglas, warning that collectivists and anti-Christian forces were using government schools to dumb down and indoctrinate America’s children. “John Dewey [founding father of America’s so-called progressive public-school system] was very clear, his intent was to change our society and make sure our children were un- or under-educated…. Understand the battle we’re fighting. I wish I had had the courage to homeschool my daughter, but I was chicken at the time.”

Aside from choosing homeschooling or a good private school, when asked what Americans could do in this battle, Douglas urged everyone to get a copy of The New American magazine’s Special Report “Rescuing Our Children.” Originally published in February of 2019, the expanded second edition was just released. “They can get the Reader’s Digest version and understand what we are facing, and how far it goes back,” said Douglas.

Numerous critics of public schools suggested that this Wuhan virus shutdown may be just the medicine needed to finally break the government’s practical monopoly over the minds of children. “Despite it being a national health crisis, there could be a positive outcome from Coronavirus,” said education expert Carole Hornsby Haynes, who has a Ph.D. in professional education, in a newsletter. “It just could be the catalyst for breaking the stranglehold of government schools as parents decide to ‘unschool’ their children and make American education the greatest in the world again.”

At the forefront of the movement to rescue children from government schools for over two decades has been Exodus Mandate founder Lieutenant Colonel E. Ray Moore. He explained to The New American magazine that, despite the enormity of the health and economic tragedy, the shutdown of government schools is actually an incredible opportunity to grow homeschooling and Christian schools as never before. For more than 20 years he has been calling for an “exodus” of Christian children from government schools. Now, it has happened — at least temporarily. The challenge will be to capitalize on it, he said.

“This is a unique moment in American history,” said Moore, whose ministry fights to expose what he calls the “pagan, godless” government schools. Thanks to coronavirus and government orders surrounding it, America could be on the verge of “a sea change” in how the nation does K-12 education. “In all my years in this movement, I’ve never seen an opportunity like this,” he said. “This is an incredible chance to rescue millions of American children from the anti-Christian indoctrination they are getting in public schools. We must act now.”

Moore, himself a veteran homeschooler, has teamed up to help lead two new, broader initiatives on the education front. First, he now serves as chairman of the Christian Education Initiative, a coalition of dozens of non-profit organizations and ministries dedicated to expanding Christian education. The other, Public School Exit, with help from this writer and Dr. Duke Pesta of FreedomProject, among others, is aiming to take that message beyond just the evangelical community, while facilitating the exodus that Moore has been working toward for so long. “This is the time to strike,” said Moore about the growing national movement.

Public School Exit co-founder Dran Reese, president of the Salt & Light Council and its various ministries, echoed Moore’s call for pastors to seize this opportunity. “Pastors and church leaders have a huge role to play in equipping congregations with a biblical understanding of citizenship, and that includes education of children,” said Reese, who also promotes biblical citizenship through her highly influential ministry work. “This pandemic is a perfect time for pastors on the sidelines to get involved.” But be aware that many self-styled religious schools are often far too similar to government schools for comfort.

Moore echoed those remarks, calling on pastors to once again serve as “true shepherds” and lead the families they pastor to the “green pastures and still waters” of non-governmental education. Among other things, that means churches should work to wean their congregations off the secular, anti-Christian education offered by government, and encourage them to use good programs such as those offered by FreedomProject Academy, the Foundation for American Christian Education, Alpha and Omega, A Beka, Classical Conversations, and many more. While not depending on government will obviously require a financial sacrifice, critics of government schooling say the well-being of their children ought to be parents’ top priority. Churches ought to help, too.

“Suddenly hundreds of thousands of churches and pastors have nothing but homeschool children to care for,” Moore exclaimed, clearly thrilled at the prospect. “What conservative and Christian leaders could not do — that is, persuade, encourage, warn and urge millions of families to leave public schools — the coronavirus has done in several weeks, backed by orders of state governors, President Trump and the federal government…. Is this the ‘tipping point’ that we all have worked and prayed for?”

Whether this will be a tipping point remains to be seen. But what is clear is that the timing could not have been better. If something like the current coronavirus pandemic had hit in 1980, the infrastructure would not have been in place to facilitate an enormous exodus from the government schools into home education and Christian schools, Moore said. But in 2020, there are now countless state organizations, ministries, non-profit groups, media operations, and publications, and millions of homeschooling families, chomping at the bit to assist in guiding friends and family into making the right educational choices. “Carpe diem,” said Moore.

Enemies of Homeschooling Strike Back

Writing in the anti-Trump Washington Post, former Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman claimed children would be damaged by all this home education. Under the headline “Homeschooling during the coronavirus will set back a generation of children,” Huffman said America was “embarking on a massive, months-long virtual-pedagogy experiment, and it is not likely to end well.” Pointing to the fact that children sometimes forget what they have learned over the summer, Huffman warned of impending disaster.

Critics, though, could barely contain their disgust at the far-left paper. “Really, now you attack homeschooling? I’d wager the average homeschooled kid in America fares better in virtually any metric than the average public/leftist indoctrination school kid,” Donald Trump, Jr. responded on Twitter to the Post’s piece. “You should do a story on it… but you won’t because you would never expose the racket.” Trump, Jr. was one of countless critics lambasting the increasingly discredited newspaper owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

Of course, the Post was hardly alone. Harvard Law School recently announced that it would be hosting a summit this summer to consider ways of regulating or crushing the supposedly “controversial” practice of homeschooling. One of the law professors behind the scheme, Elizabeth Bartholet, recently called for a “presumptive ban on homeschooling.” The other organizer, law professor James Dwyer, claimed that “the reason that parent-child relationship exists is because the state confers legal parenthood on people through its paternity and maternity laws.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom even argued that homeschooling was inherently deficient. “There is a big distance between a parent teaching their child and a teacher teaching their child,” he claimed. “It’s not that our kids don’t respect their parents, they just don’t seem to respect them when it comes to educating them, as much as they do their teachers.” He also boasted that Google was donating big bucks to ensure that the state’s children could continue receiving government “education” while at home.

Radical sex-education group SIECUS, founded with help from a sex fiend known as Alfred Kinsey who was responsible for the rape and sexual torture of numerous children, developed homeschool “sex-ed resources” for parents amid coronavirus. “While parents work to ensure that their children stay on track with their English, math, and science lessons, they should also be prioritizing their kids’ sex education,” the group said.

“Let’s be real: Not too many children grow up to use algebra in their daily adult lives. But they will certainly apply the knowledge and skills they (should) learn through sex ed,” said SIECUS, which proceeds to link to sexualization videos targeting children as young as four. “Thanks to the variety of credible, online sex education resources, parents are better suited to serve as substitute sex educators than they might think.”

Other perverts are also jumping on the bandwagon in an effort to continue grooming and sexualizing children even when they are at home. With the nationwide “drag queen story hour” shows at school on pause amid coronavirus, a “veteran drag queen” known as “Nina West” is hosting “Homeschool With Nina.” This supposedly “family friendly” show includes the cross-dressing man singing songs directed at children, such as “Drag Is Magic.”

Finally, Deep State globalists, realizing that they may lose their grip on the minds of millions of children, are scrambling to keep those victims locked into the system. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, for instance, boasted of leading a “collective” (read: UN) response in education as over 1.5 billion children are home from school. As part of that, the global outfit is working with national governments to keep the students involved in government school through technology while peddling dangerous “social-emotional learning” to manipulate children.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) are also hoping to enable a seamless shift from government indoctrination at school to government indoctrination at home, with help from Big Tech companies such as Google and Microsoft. “It is particularly inspiring to see entirely new ways of working emerging, ones that go beyond simply replacing physical schools with digital analogues,” Tracey Burns, with the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, was quoted as saying on the WEF website, emphasizing that the major focus must be on preventing “inequality.”

The Future

The global shutdown of schools comes as the move to rescue children from government miseducation and indoctrination goes mainstream. Even before the crisis, a late 2019 survey by EdChoice found that interest in homeschooling was at an all-time high. In all, a staggering 15 percent of parents preferred homeschooling over any other form of schooling, including private, public, and charter schools. That figure was five percent in 2012. Less than a third of parents chose government schools as the best option for their children.

In just the last year, talk of getting children out has gone from the fringes to center stage. Talk-show titan Rush Limbaugh, the most popular radio host in America, urged parents to remove their children from public school in favor of home education. Responding to New Jersey’s new LGBT indoctrination mandate for public schools, top evangelical leader Franklin Graham also urged parents to get their kids out. Even President Trump, who in 2016 blasted “progressives” at the Department of Education who “indoctrinate” children, used his 2020 State of the Union address to decry the fact that so many children are “trapped” in “failing government schools.”

With some 40 million American children home from government school this week amid the virus outbreak, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rescue America’s embattled youth from the threat of government schools. And you can help make that happen. To get started, consider ordering a copy (or 100 to share) of the second edition of The New American magazine’s popular Special Report “Rescuing Our Children.” It outlines the problem, and more importantly, the solution. There has never been a better time to rescue millions of children — and the future of America!

This article originally appeared in the May 4, 2020 print edition of The New American. The New American publishes a print magazine twice a month, covering issues such as politics, money, foreign policy, environment, culture, and technology. To subscribe, click here.

Amid Coronavirus, Movement for Public School Exit Grows

With coronavirus keeping children home from public schools around the world, a growing coalition of Christians and conservatives is working to make sure that once the crisis is over, millions of children never go back. Instead, the coalition, known as Public School Exit (PSE), hopes to facilitate a massive exodus into the safe sanctuary of homeschooling and high-quality private schools.

Founded by a team of Christian and conservative leaders including this writer, PSE is working on two fronts during this crisis. On the one hand, the group is encouraging parents to try out true homeschooling — not government school at home — during the coronavirus shutdown. At the same time, the group is urging parents to closely examine the material public schools are using. Most parents would be appalled.

There are many compelling reasons for parents to protect their children from government schools, according to PSE and its leadership. That is especially true in Illinois. Consider that state law now mandates LGBT indoctrination of all children in government school. Radical “sex education” with roots in absolute evil, meanwhile, begins in Kindergarten. And that is just the start.

As this writer reported in February for the Illinois Family Institute, the government itself admits that government schools are failing children academically — with devastating results. College professors in the state, for instance, expressed shock that many of their students lack even basic literacy skills. Over two thirds of new students in Chicago community colleges needed remedial education even on basics.

Standardized tests, meanwhile, reveal a disaster of unprecedented proportions across the Prairie State. In Illinois, 2018-2019 test scores showed that just 38 percent of students met or exceeded basic proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA). In math, less than a third were proficient or better. And keep in mind, these standards are hardly difficult or advanced.

Former Superintendent of Public Instruction for Arizona Diane Douglas, one of the experts who serves on the advisory board of Public School Exit, highlighted the irony of Illinois requiring homeschoolers to provide adequate instruction in a broad range of subjects, even as the state is incapable of providing anything close to “adequate instruction” in even the two most basic subjects.

“God gave children to parents, not to government bureaucracies, no matter how well-intended the bureaucracy professes to be,” Douglas told the Illinois Family Institute, adding that the system cannot be reformed. “The government education system does not and cannot have the best interests of an individual child first and foremost. Only a parent can.”

Government schools, by contrast, are more concerned with “social change on the left” and making children into “human capital” for industry, she explained. Unfortunately, government schools do not care “about education for the acquisition of knowledge and the discernment of truth,” added Douglas, whose term as education chief for the state of Arizona ended last year.

Another key reason for Christians, at least, to consider removing their children from public schools, is what the Bible says on these issues. According to Lt. Col. E. Ray Moore, a pastor and retired military chaplain, God in the Bible assigns the education of children to the family primarily, with assistance from the church — not government.

Among other key verses, Moore pointed to Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Psalm 78:4-7, Proverbs 22:6, and Matthew 19:14, to name a few.

He also blasted the idea that Christian children should be put in government school to serve as “salt and light” there. “This is not a command to put children in the pagan and godless public school system,” he said. “To use Matthew 5:13-14 in this way is an abuse of Scripture.”

While some parents and pastors try to argue that children could serve as missionaries in government schools, Moore says that is absurd. “While there are some exceptions, the greatest missionary work is being practiced on Christian children in public schools by the secularists, evolutionists and humanists,” he said, adding that Christians should not be unequally yoked with an anti-Christian system. “They are winning over Christian children to humanism in most cases.”

Another founding director of PSE, Dr. Duke Pesta, is a tenured university professor and academic director at FreedomProject Academy, an online K-12 school rooted in biblical values and truth. All day every day, the prominent academic and educator with a powerful media presence sees firsthand the fruit of government schools and the damage it does to children.

Consider that in surveys of his incoming college students, he found that the majority believe America invented slavery. This despite the fact that slavery was ubiquitous throughout the world all across human history — at least until America’s Founding Fathers laid the foundation for it to be abolished not just in America, but worldwide. This misconception is a direct result of indoctrination at school.

Salt & Light Council President Dran Reese, also a founding director of PSE, is working with a national network of churches and pastors across a wide range of issues. But like other PSE leaders, Reese realized that if Christian parents continue sending their children to public schools — where God cannot even be mentioned, much less worshiped or glorified — the future is bleak for the church in America.

Indeed, one of PSE’s advisory board members, Dan Smithwick of the Nehemiah Institute, has studied worldview for decades. What he found through his research is that the overwhelming majority of Christian children from Christian homes who attend public school will end up leaving the church. The numbers are getting worse, too.

As this writer has documented extensively in a series on the history of public schools for The Epoch Times, that was the plan all along by the architects of the government takeover of education. Men such as Robert Owen, Horace Mann, and John Dewey — each of whom played a key role in the establishment of government control over education in America — hoped the system would crush Christianity. It is doing a good job on that front, data show.

In addition to encouraging and helping parents to ditch government schools for good, PSE is working to break down barriers that prevent families from making the right choice. One service offered by the group, for instance, is a list of vetted and recommended private schools across the nation, including several in Illinois. That list is growing quickly.

Of course, PSE leaders recognize that choosing homeschooling or private schools can require a significant financial sacrifice. But it is worth it, and with enough effort, most families in America can find a way to do it. In the months ahead, PSE will also be establishing a scholarship fund to help truly needy families protect their children, too.

The shutdown brought about by coronavirus has created millions of new temporary homeschool families around the world. Now is the time to strike. If you think children deserve better than the godless and poor quality “education” offered by government schools, PSE leaders hope you will help spread the word. Visit Public School Exit online here to learn more.

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Harvard Law Professor Wants to Ban Homeschooling

An article written by freelance writer Erin O’Donnell and published in Harvard Magazine has justifiably gone viral among the diverse homeschooling communities operating in the United States—for the moment the freest nation in the world. The article, titled “The Risks of Homeschooling,” is accompanied by a cartoon illustration of half a dozen children romping joyfully outside while one child locked behind the prison bars of her own home looks forlornly and longingly out at them. One of the exterior walls of her home depicts books with the words “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Bible” to ensure readers know that the prison guards are Christians.

O’Donnell’s article is far less important than the work of the woman about whom O’Donnell is writing: Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, a long-time opponent of home-schooling and proponent of feminism, abortion, and the near-absolute autonomy of children. Too few people, it seems, are reading Bartholet’s deeply troubling Arizona Law Review article “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection” on which O’Donnell’s article is based and in which Bartholet lays bare her subversive plan to radically refashion American society according to the philosophical, political, and moral fever dreams of leftists everywhere. Bartholet issues an explicit call for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling. While Bartholet claims to be concerned about homeschooling in general, it’s clear from her article that she has a particular antipathy for Christian homeschoolers.

While Bartholet belches out some gaseous but tactically useful words of concern about potential abuse of children by fringy parents and cites some fringy anecdotes to becloud the issue, her real goal is not to end physical abuse but, rather, to undermine parental authority, increase the power of the state, and remake the Constitution into a living, breathing leftist phantasm.

Bartholet argues that “Appropriate education. … makes children aware of important cultural values. … [H]omeschooling parents … are not likely to be capable of satisfying the democratic function.”

Homeschooling parents will likely be not only taken aback by that claim but also confused by it. What, they may wonder, are those “important cultural values” and what renders homeschooling parents incapable of satisfying the democratic function. While Bartholet doesn’t specifically identify the “important cultural values” on which the democratic function relies, it’s not difficult to infer what they are from oblique statements like this:

[T]he current homeschooling regime is based on a dangerous idea about parent rights. … [t]hat parents who are committed to beliefs and values counter to those of the larger society are entitled to bring their children up in isolation. … This legal claim is inconsistent with the child’s right to what has been called an “open future”—the right to exposure to alternative views and experiences essential for children to grow up to exercise meaningful choices about their own future views, religions, lifestyles, and work. … [E]xposure to the values of tolerance … has been seen as a primary goal of public education from its origins.

Since tolerance has been redefined by leftists to mean “affirming leftist sexuality dogma,” has “tolerance” really been the primary goal of public education from its origins?

To be clear that she wants the nation’s children to be indoctrinated with leftist sexuality dogma, Bartholet also criticizes families who want to teach their children “that people with nontraditional sexual orientations or gender identities should be ‘cured’ or condemned.”

Interestingly, here is what one of the studies Bartholet cites—the Cardus Education Survey—says about religious homeschoolers and the value of tolerance in the “democratic function”:

We might expect that the private and familial approach of education would fail to prepare students for effective participation in a democracy. But we don’t find any evidence for this. … [H]omeschoolers are more willing than public schoolers to extend freedom of speech to those who want to speak out against religion. And we don’t find any difference in the extent that homeschoolers favor greater tolerance for non-Christian religions in American society. Relatedly, some might expect that religious homeschoolers would socialize students into more authoritarian orientations to public life. However, on one of the measures often used to capture authoritarian orientations, respect for authority, we don’t find that homeschoolers are any more supportive than public schoolers are of the notion that one of the main problems in the US today is the lack of respect for authority. It seems that one of the strengths of homeschooling, which may be related to the counter-cultural minority status of homeschooling, is robust support for democratic principles of individual freedom and freedom of expression.

When she likes Cardus findings, Bartholet calls them “good social science.” When she dislikes them, Bartholet dismisses them as “advocacy.”

Repeatedly and ironically, Bartholet frets that,

homeschooled children miss out on exposure to others with different experiences and values. … A very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.

Never once does she mention the ideological monopoly on sexuality that perverts public education and results in pervasive censorship of resources that express dissenting views. Nor does she critically examine her assumption that the role of education is to affirm the views and values of “majority culture.” Did she hold that position in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s?

In her section on the “Child Maltreatment Piece of the Homeschooling Picture,” Bartholet writes that the “very isolation of so many homeschooling families puts children at risk. Child maltreatment takes place disproportionately in families cut off from the larger community.” First, Bartholet provides no evidence of the percentage of all homeschooling families or of religious homeschooling families that are “cut off from the larger community.” And then, as evidence for her implicit claim that homeschooling poses a danger to children, she cites in a footnote her own book written over two decades ago on systemic problems with the child welfare system.

While discussing her alleged fears regarding socialization, Bartholet says nothing about the serious socialization problems in public schools that range from drug and alcohol use; sexting; and social contagions related to eating disorders, suicide, cutting, and gender dysphoria.

Bartholet cites a study by the pro-regulation organization Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, which is an affiliate of pro-regulation organization Coalition for Responsible Home Education, as evidence that homeschooled children are at greater risk of death, but the study itself concludes that “This finding does not yet reach the threshold for statistical significance, so at this point we cannot say conclusively that homeschooled students die from child abuse and neglect at a higher rate as other students.”

Would increased regulation increase safety for children? Does regulation and oversight by Big Brother guarantee child safety? How does Bartholet account for the abuse of children in highly regulated government schools by school staff? As a result of that abuse, is she calling for a presumptive ban on public schools?

Bartholet has a game plan that she defends in part by employing the bandwagon fallacy, arguing that “Many countries ban homeschooling altogether, others fail to legally recognize it, and many impose significant requirements, often including required home visits and annual testing.”

Get with the European program, you philistines!

Bartholet believes that,

The homeschooling movement’s claim that the current regime is justified by absolute parent rights is morally wrong and inconsistent with growing recognition worldwide that child human rights have equal status with adult human rights. … The movement relies on adult freedom of religion rights to oppose regulation affecting religious homeschoolers. But such rights should not trump child rights to exposure to alternative views, enabling them to exercise meaningful future choice about their religion.

So, while Bartholet wants to prevent Christian parents from inculcating their own children with their religious worldview, she wants to ensure that government schools are allowed to inculcate other people’s children with only leftist sexual views and, in so doing, prevent those children from being able “to exercise meaningful future choice” about sexual matters.

Bartholet’s proposes a “new regime” for homeschooling that would require permission to homeschool, which would be granted under only very narrow circumstances, and would require that homeschooled students still attend government schools part-time:

The new regime should deny the right to homeschool, subject to carefully delineated exceptions for situations in which homeschooling is needed and appropriate. Parents should have a significant burden of justification for a requested exception. There is no other way to ensure that children receive an education or protection against maltreatment at all comparable to that provided to public school children. … When exceptions are granted, children should still be required to attend some courses and other programs at school.

Bartholet’s fervor for mandating that Christians teach leftist views to their own children extends to Christian private schools as well:

Some private schools pose problems of the same nature as homeschooling. Religious and other groups with views and values far outside the mainstream operate private schools with very little regulation ensuring that children receive … exposure to alternative perspectives.

Bartholet points to three obstacles to her plan to achieve absolute autonomy for children and destroy the family: The Homeschool Legal Defense Association, organized parents, and the U.S. Constitution. She attacks all three and offers a plan for circumventing the U.S. Constitution until such time as it can be changed.

She argues that “state constitutional provisions on education provide a strong basis for challenges to the homeschooling regime,” and that “State court decisions based on state constitutions can eventually provide evidence of the kind of national consensus that often helps the Supreme Court find new meaning in the Federal Constitution.”

In an email to this writer, constitutional attorney Joseph A. Morris, who served as assistant attorney general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan, writes that Bartholet’s screed is “one of [the left’s] most important and most powerful attacks, against the family. … Bartholet’s article is a call to arms to the left to attack parental authority by means of a frontal attack on home-schooling.”

Mr. Morris offered too the larger context from which Bartholet’s “call to arms” emerges and summarizes her dangerous strategic plan:

Since the time Marx published The Communist Manifesto, the left has understood that to prevail against the civilization of the West—made strong by the organic relationships we generally describe under the rubrics of faith and family—it must seize control of the minds of children at the earliest possible time. Parental control of schooling, either by supervising how others educate their children or by doing it themselves, is a major obstacle to this prime tyrannical goal.

Bartholet marshals every argument, including (1) the asserted inferiority of home-schooling against the governmental product; (2) the asserted roots of the modern home-schooling movement in racism and religious benightedness; (3) home-schooling as a mask for child abuse, including child sexual abuse; and similar horribles.

She seeks to awaken and mobilize every constituency that would join the battle against parental authority and home-schooling, including public sector (teachers’) unions, which have direct financial stakes in forcing children into government schools; child-protection advocates; opponents of racism, religion, particularity of every stripe, and binary sexual worldviews; and progressives in every category.

She is not content to argue that, in protecting parental authority and the rights of home-schoolers, American courts have lately misinterpreted and misapplied the provisions of the United States Constitution. Her enterprise is far more ambitious than that. She proposes to take on the evil United States Constitution itself, and to use home-schooling as a good battleground on which to launch that war.

The heart of her legal argument will be found on page 59: “The U.S. Constitution with its negative rights structure is an anomaly, outdated and inadequate by the standards of the rest of the world.” In two or three rather clear paragraphs on that page she makes her case against the American constitutional tradition and sets her gunsights squarely on the Constitution itself, hoping to overturn it by using the case for “affirmative rights” of children to education free of parental domination (and thus, of course, open to domination by someone else!). To this end, then, she marches off to praise foreign constitutional traditions, even of other democracies, that Americans have rejected since founding modern constitutionalism in the 18th century.

This article was meant to be a clarion call to arms, seeking to mobilize her radical confreres in all Marxist domains and the progressive left in general. The article is being widely touted throughout the legal and academic communities. It is already on the nightstands of teachers’ union presidents, leftist community organizers, mainstream media editorial writers, and crafty plaintiffs’ lawyers from coast to coast. Once the pandemic ends, the 2020 elections are held, and State legislatures convene for their 2021 sessions, leftist think tanks will spoon-feed cookie-cutter legislation to “progressive” State senators and representatives to begin the long project of abolishing home schooling, by overburdening it with regulation to the point that parents collapse of exhaustion, or by outright prohibition, if necessary.

The publication of Bartholet’s article in a law journal, even an obscure one, gives it a veneer of “mainstream” legal scholarship. I have no doubt that she will soon have a publisher for a full-length, less technical version of the article as a book meant for a wide general readership.

The drumbeat of anti-home-schooling editorials will begin in the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post within months, and certainly in time to attempt to set agendas across the land in the 2021 State legislative season.

We should thank Erin O’Donnell for bringing to wider attention the insidious efforts of Ivory Tower leftist Bartholet to exploit the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions to ban homeschooling or regulate it into submission to leftist assumptions.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Harvard-Law-Professor-Wants-to-Ban-Homeschooling.mp3

American Students Are Failing: You Can Thank Public Schools

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Schooling at Home: Educational Resources for Parents

Written by Meg Kilgannon

With much of the nation under “shelter in place” or “stay at home” advisories, most school buildings have closed, some for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year. There is a wide disparity among school districts in terms of how individual schools will help parents facilitate learning. American parents find themselves in an unprecedented situation: working from home (if they are so fortunate) while simultaneously serving as school teacher, administrator, and child wrangler.

Like many of you, many of us here at FRC are working from home during this crisis. Like you, we are managing family needs and school while working to protect and promote family values in our nation’s capital and across the country.

Some of our staff has always homeschooled. These families are challenged by canceled co-ops, classes, therapies, sports, and playgroups—just like traditional school families. Others on staff have children in Christian schools or public schools. And with all schools closed, these parents are navigating a variety of situations. Some schools have moved seamlessly to online studies; others are still figuring things out. But all of us are struggling with the same less-than-ideal situation and are challenged to make the best of it for ourselves, our families, and our country.

In this post, we will share some resources we have found useful, and would love to hear from you about what you are doing to manage your children’s education during this time. This is a very real way we can support each other and do our part to help keep America safe and healthy.

The U.S. Department of Education’s coronavirus page is jam packed with information for both schools and parents. Scroll down for the “At Home Activities” section which includes links to federal agencies with worksheets and virtual tours that can keep children both entertained and informed about our beautiful country’s natural resources, wildlife, space programs, geography, and the arts. There are also reminders and links about staying healthy and preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

Some of our favorite general advice has come from parents who are also leaders or educational advocates.

One mom’s plan
One dad’s plan

The videos on this website are fun, informative, and reassuring. Just a few minutes on this website will convince you that you really can do it—you really can work and school your children at home during this crisis (and maybe even anytime). The enthusiasm of these Texas moms is contagious and just what we need.

If your school district is on hold or you are taking the rest of the year off from school, these activities will keep children and teens busy while parents are working from home. As FRC is unable to vet each item on every website, we encourage you to trust your judgement in finding materials that are appropriate for your family and reflect your values.

Resources for Parents Who Find Themselves Schooling at Home, by Subject

In Virginia, for example, parents in some districts are still waiting for resources and lessons from schools. Other districts and states have moved nimbly to online learning. In case you’re waiting for school resources, want to supplement lessons provided, or just need additional help, we offer the following list of resources. FRC believes in the primacy of parental rights, and works to protect parents’ role as the primary educators of their children. We expect that parents will maintain vigilance in reviewing materials for use by children who are schooling at home.

For Math:

These websites have everything from math fact worksheets to projects and lectures that support higher level mathematics.

For Language Arts:

Take this time to read. Perhaps have a read aloud book for the whole family. Encourage each family member to keep a journal during this time. It will be a record of an important period in American and world history—the Pandemic of 2019-2020. Write letters to friends and loved ones who may feel isolated during this time.

If your school, library, or any organization recommends a reading list, carefully monitor those recommendations. As our friends at Parent and Child Loudoun can attest, there is problematic and even pornographic content lurking in children’s and young adult literature these days.

For Autistic/Sensory Integration Issue Children:

This resource from the UK is interesting and helpful for autism and sensory issues.

The University of Virginia has helps for parents of children on the autism spectrum, including webinars, zoom conferences, and scheduling ideas, just to name a few. Their most recent newsletter has helps and links.

Science and Nature:

Easy science projects can involve cooking and baking. What makes bread rise? What happens when you prepare a recipe but leave out an ingredient? Spring is a great time to start a small herb garden or take on a bigger project. Victory Gardens are back in style, which link American history to natural science and conservation. Take pictures of plants and trees on your walks and identify them from books or online resources. Teach children practical skills, like figuring out ordinal directions through clues from nature.

From the founders of ABCmouse is Adventure Academy, a resource suitable for 8 to 12-year-olds. While not free, it offers animated and interactive games, projects, and lessons geared toward elementary-aged students.

As with all subjects, science topics can be overly politicized or include concepts like Darwinism and “mindfulness.” Math word problems can include scenarios which subtly undermine Christian teaching on marriage, such as a same-sex couple planning a wedding, or reference to a student’s two dads or two moms. We remind you to be on guard for these types of messages in your children’s assignments.

Physical Education:

Getting fresh air and sunshine is important for everyone’s physical and mental health. Please maintain social distancing while on walks or runs. Jumping rope (sanitized ropes only please), skipping races, and scavenger hunts are all options for getting your heart rate up and burning off some energy. Here are a few links we liked:

Active For Life – “School’s cancelled—what now? Here are 200+ activities you can do with kids at home”
American Heart Association – 25 Ways to Get Moving at Home Infographic
Log It – If you have a pedometer, log your steps on a virtual map and walk with friends virtually.

Art Therapy:

How about coloring pages and connect-the-dots using characters from the Bible?

History:

Suitable for high school students and more advanced middle school students, WallBuilders—an organization dedicated to the accurate teaching and representation of American history—offers helpful links and resources on everything from Creationism, to Black History, to the Founding Fathers. While this site is recommended for older students, it does include links to YouTube, so parental supervision is recommended.

Virtual Tours – These websites host their own tours, making it a little safer than YouTube tours which also can come with objectionable advertising, suggested content you might not prefer, or an automatic continuation to a site you don’t approve. You can find tours of museums in Washington, D.C., Buckingham Palace, Musee D’Orsay in Paris, churches from around the world, and many more. But we remind parents to monitor children’s activities anytime they are online.

More Resources

Finally, with the disclaimer that we have not reviewed each and every item here, these links include resources for every school subject with multiple links for each. This is for parents to review themselves and decide if individual links are helpful to your family. For example, PBS has some problematic content, but that doesn’t mean everything on the website is dangerous. It’s important for parents to select materials from this list and direct children to your approved resources, not just let kids log on and click around.

Bored Teachers – Resources
We Are Teachers – 200+ Amazing Online Learning Resources

Share Your Resources and Ideas With Us!

Please share your resources and ideas with us by going to the Contact FRC page and entering “Schooling at Home Resources” in the subject line, and we will post a follow-up blog with what everybody shared. We’d love to hear from you! We are all in this together, working, praying, and staying healthy. Americans will do what we must to defeat this virus and keep our families strong, safe, and free for generations to come.

This article was originally published at FRCblog.com. Meg Kilgannon is an Education Research Associate at Family Research Council.

Ideologically Grooming Kids Through Storytelling

Still don’t believe sexual anarchists are coming for the hearts and minds of the nation’s children? Well, check out this just-released book published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin books, and geared toward children 10 and older: Middle School’s a Drag, You Better Werk Harder!, a book the publishers describe as a “hilarious, heartfelt story,” “full of laughs, sass, and hijinks” that “shows that with a little effort and a lot of love, anything is possible.”

Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?

Well, if you caught the allusion to “twerking” in the title, you may be a little less sanguine about children reading this hilarious, heartfelt story about love and possibility. For those who don’t know, “twerking”—as defined by the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary—is “sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting.”

Here’s more from the publisher:

In this heartfelt and hilarious new novel from Greg Howard, an enterprising boy starts his own junior talent agency and signs a thirteen-year-old aspiring drag queen as his first client.

Twelve-year-old Mikey Pruitt—president, founder, and CEO of Anything, Inc.–has always been an entrepreneur at heart. … Unfortunately, most of his ideas so far have failed. … But Mikey is determined to keep at it.

It isn’t until kid drag queen Coco Caliente, Mistress of Madness and Mayhem (aka eighth grader Julian Vasquez) walks into his office … looking for an agent that Mikey thinks he’s finally found his million-dollar idea, and the Anything Talent and Pizzazz Agency is born!

Soon, Mikey has a whole roster of kid clients looking to hit it big or at least win the middle school talent show’s hundred-dollar prize. As newly out Mikey prepares Julian for the gig of a lifetime, he realizes there’s no rulebook for being gay—and if Julian can be openly gay at school, maybe Mikey can, too, and tell his crush, dreamy Colton Sanford, how he feels.

The author of this gut-busting novel about middle-school drag queens, Greg Howard, is a homosexual man in a pretend “marriage” to a third-grade teacher, who was inspired by the real-life child drag queen, the exploited “Desmond is Amazing” about whom I wrote over a year ago. Middle School’s a Drag, You Better Werk Harder! is being adapted for television by David Heyman, producer of all the Harry Potter films and Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.

Howard’s first Young Adult (YA) novel for teens, titled Social Intercourse (available free online), is a pornographic story about two 17-year-old boys, one of whom was adopted by two lesbians after his father abused him and his drug-addicted mother. The other boy’s mother left him and his father after having an affair with the mayor. The adopted boy, Jax, is the handsome football star with a girlfriend with whom he regularly has sex, and the other, Beckett, is an out and proud homosexual. The book concludes with Jax and Beckett in a homoerotic relationship with the approval of all parents and most of the high school football team. The story also includes Beckett’s father having a sexual relationship with one of Jax’s lesbian moms; a hate-filled Christian pastor who engages in homoerotic acts with his music minister; egregiously obscene language; a description of a teen boy having his anus bleached; and references to masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, and a teen girl’s vibrator.

If this book isn’t obscene, then the word “obscene” is now meaningless.

The publisher of Social Intercourse, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers recommends this porn for kids ages 14+. Publishers Weekly, a publishing trade magazine that reviews books recommends Social Intercourse as a “funny and satisfying love story.” And Booklist, a book review publication of the leftist American Library Association, says this about Social Intercourse:

The language is raunchy, the innuendo is frequent, and the energy is irrepressible. Hand this debut to readers tired of problem novels who are looking for a hilarious romp.

We now have adults recommending a hilarious pornographic romp for teens that depicts evil as good. And on the basis of these recommendations schools and public libraries make purchasing decisions with public money. Social Intercourse is available at public libraries across Illinois, including in Algonquin, Arlington Heights, Batavia, Berwyn, Chicago, Decatur, Deerfield, Des Plaines, Dolton, Downers Grove, Ela, Elgin, Elmhurst, Evanston, Frankfort, Geneva, Glencoe, Grande Prairie, Green Hills, Indian Prairie, Kewanee, La Grange, Libertyville, Marion, Mattoon, McHenry, Naperville, North Aurora, Oak Lawn, Oak Park, Orland Park, Palos Heights, Pekin, Prairie Trails, Rockford, Skokie, St. Charles, Tinley Park, Waukegan, Westchester, Winnetka, and Woodridge. (This list is not exhaustive.)

Illinoisans, librarians whose salaries you subsidize have used your hard-earned money to purchase porn that your children can now access and read without your knowledge or permission. And don’t be naïve. This is not the only ugly, deviance-espousing material your taxes have purchased to ideologically groom your children.

Author Greg Howard’s main characters are less like pitiable heroes who conquer evil and more like Mr. Hyde—the wicked side of Dr. Jekyll whose freely chosen actions resulted in his usurpation by Hyde:

I became, in my own person a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind … a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. …

The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. … Jekyll … thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born.

If we are going to allow homoeroticism to be depicted to children, then let the depiction reflect truth. If we love children—all children—then we will fight for truth.

In How to Read a Book, former University of Chicago professor, philosopher, author, and co-founder of the Great Books Foundation, Mortimer Adler warns,

The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.

Do not underestimate the effect of stories on the hearts and minds of all humans, but especially impressionable children. Cultural regressives are fully aware that storytelling captures imaginations and through imaginations captures hearts and minds.

In describing biblically Christian art, Calvin Seerveld offers a lens through which we should view all art, including literature that we serve to children on a faux-gilded plate:

Art is Biblically Christian when the Devil cannot stand it. If the Devil can stand it or would hand out reproductions, then there is no Biblical Christian character to it. … The Devil cannot stand exposure of sin as sin, dirty, devastating misery for me; it unmasks him.

Greg Howard produces anti-art for children—anti-art that the Devil loves.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ideologically-Grooming-Kids-Through-Storytelling.mp3

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Don’t Enroll Illinois Students Into The Gender Wars

The Illinois General Assembly is considering SB 2762, commonly called the “REACH Act.” It requires that public schools provide a “medically accurate” sex education, including “health-positive instruction on diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.”^[1]

This article concentrates on one aspect of this, the concept that gender is mutable, and not tied to a person’s biological sex. Once you see how that small thing is so medically inaccurate, you can imagine how the rest of the bill is similarly self-defeating.

Defining “gender”

Until recently, what did Americans mean when we used the word “gender?” Here is a clue from an online dictionary that deals with the meaning and usage of words (etymology):

gender (n.)

c. 1300, “kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits,” from Old French gendre, genre “kind, species; character; gender” …

The “male-or-female sex” sense is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for “sex of a human being,” in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous.^[2]

That is, gender is another word for describing male and female behavior, clothing, roles, etc. There is a 1:1 correspondence between sex and gender.

There is a recent push to redefine what gender means. You see this in modern dictionaries, which now add clauses about how gender has meanings “based on the individual’s personal awareness or identity.”^[3] But do these dictionary changes reflect our actual use of the word? Or is this just another way to force us into accepting an expanded meaning, along with the behaviors that it implies?

Separating gender from sex is a recent invention

In practical use, “gender” helps describe the differences between men and women.

A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their biological or perceived sex.^[4]

That is, “gender role” and “sex role” are equivalent, are linguistically matched. So how did we go from “gender corresponds to sex” to “gender has no association with sex?” This appears to have been caused by the writings of the researcher John Money.^[5]

According to Money’s theory, all children are born essentially psychosexually neutral at birth, and thus surgeons can make any child any gender as long as the sexual anatomy can be made reasonably believable. For this reason, it did not matter how the genitalia looked originally, according to Money, because you could always teach gender or sex roles.^[6]

He claimed that a person’s sexual identity and beliefs can be taught, and can be chosen. In other words, someone can effectively be a man or woman – the gender role – without biologically being so. This assertion provides scientific cover for later advocates, who push the concept of “gender fluidity” we’re asking students to learn and believe.

But was Money being honest with his research and results? Or did it merely support ideas he already held? Consider his works:

He browbeat the parents of twin boys to raise one of them as a girl, and to even get surgeries to enhance that boy’s female appearance. Money told everyone that this “John/Joan” experiment was a great success, and it brought him fame. In fact, the experiment was a great failure for all involved.^[7]

He endorsed incest^[8] and pedophilia ^[9] as normal and acceptable behaviors.

He claimed that heterosexuality is a societal thing, a superficial, ideological concept.^[10]

With so much advocacy in his writings and sayings, it is hard to believe that his work is scientific. Those who build upon it also lack scientific rigor, for they build upon a foundation of sand. The research cannot be taken at face value.

How many genders are there?

To provide medically accurate lessons on sex education, we need to be able to say how many genders there actually are, and how to tell them apart. For each gender, we need to know what behaviors to look for, what might offend someone of that gender, and so on. There is no sense to being ignorant of those genders we expect our students to study and respect.

Gareth Icke writes that, according to Tumbler, there are 112 genders – so far!^[11] For example:

Abimegender: a gender that is profound, deep, and infinite; meant to resemble when one mirror is reflecting into another mirror creating an infinite paradox.

Adamasgender: a gender which refuses to be categorized.

Anongender: a gender that is unknown to both yourself and others.

Glimragender: a faintly shining, wavering gender.

Are there really 112 distinct genders? For example, maybe “Abimegender” is merely a trivial variant of Admasgender? But in reality, none of this has been researched. It’s all just fad terms, with more being invented daily.

A Canadian teen advice site says:

Gender identity is how a person feels and who they know them self to be when it comes to their gender. … Gender can be complex and people are defining themselves in new and different ways as we gain a deeper understanding of identities. Some terms may mean different things to different people.^[12]

So not only are genders being continually created, their advocates don’t even agree what they mean. The traditional use of gender describes the differences between men and women. The expanded use of gender describes nothing. It has as much substance as a name tag.

How many genders are there really? Here is a hint. When someone sees a doctor for gender reassignment surgery, how many choices of gender can they choose from?

Many genders? That’s not medically accurate

There is no solid science in “gender has no association with sex.” Yet we are asked to accept this as truth, and to require our school students to learn it as though it were medically accurate.

This is enough cause to oppose the REACH Act (SB 2762). Call your state senator and give him or her the what for.

Endnotes

Full text of SB2762, 101^st General Assembly, http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10100SB2762sam001&GA=101&SessionId=108&DocTypeId=SB&LegID=123756&DocNum=2762&GAID=15&Session= ↑
Gender, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender ↑
Gender, Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gender ↑
Gender Role, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_role ↑
John Money, Gender Wiki, https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/John_Money ↑
John Money, Sexuality, Gender, and the Body, September 21, 2010, https://genderbodyreligion.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/john-money/ ↑
The True Story of John / Joan, HealthyPlace, https://www.healthyplace.com/gender/inside-intersexuality/the-true-story-of-john-joanCopied from Colapinto, John, John / Joan, Rolling Stone, December 11, 1997 ↑
Ibid.“A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.” ↑
Ibid.“If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who’s intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.” ↑
John Money, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_MoneyThe exact quote comes from the now off-line PAIDIKA: The Journal of Paedophilia, Spring 1991, vol. 2, no. 3, p. 5. ↑
Icke, Gareth, How Many Genders Are There In 2019?, David Icke (blog), August 11, 2019, https://www.davidicke.com/article/549278/many-genders-2019 ↑
Gender Identity, Teen Talk, https://teentalk.ca/learn-about/gender-identity/ ↑

This article was originally published at FixThisCulture.com.

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Endnotes

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
Discrimination Prohibited by Title VII

Public Aid Programs Cannot Discriminate
Against Religious Organizations