by Janet Levy
Woke schools are subverting parental authority and rights from every angle. But parents are starting to fight back.
In late June 2021, a video went viral of a father being tackled and dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia by burly cops, his t-shirt torn, his hands cuffed, his mouth apparently bleeding. Scott Smith, 48, had committed the heinous crime of protesting the board's woke policy of gender-fluid bathrooms because his daughter was sexually assaulted in one, at Stone Bridge High School, by a boy who "sometimes wears a skirt."
The sexual assault was later confirmed and the assailant arrested. He was also charged with one more sex crime at another school and is now at a juvenile detention center. But during the meeting, woke board members and some parents just wouldn't let Smith speak. Board members said they knew of no assaults in trans-friendly bathrooms and that the "predator transgender student or person simply does not exist." For losing his cool at this blatant denial, the cops, says Smith, swooped on him like a "SWAT team."
Smith now stands vindicated and is suing the school district. The media and reasonable people are hearing him out and criticizing the board's cover-up in pursuit of a political agenda. Smith's story stands out starkly, for it shows how leftist woke ideas are being quietly but relentlessly injected into schools and how those who oppose them risk being silenced, canceled, or treated like terrorists.
The global leftist agenda for the control of young minds runs deeper than patriotic Americans might suspect. After a virtual takeover of the humanities departments of our universities, the leftists have been targeting schools by implementing gender-fluid bathrooms and woke curricula without consulting parents. And then that last formidable frontier — the American family, which they hope to destroy by wresting away control of children from parents. Should that happen, American values and American society as we know it will self-destruct.
The bypassing of parents, as an expedient to the control of young minds, is a major component of the left's Great Reset of capitalism, ushered in through the CCP-tied World Economic Forum. And its instrument is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) treaty, which has an alarming omission: it does not recognize any specific parental right to make decisions for children. At the same time, it grants governments of ratifying countries broad powers over schools, children, and families, to be monitored by U.N.-approved expert committees.
The treaty endorses a child's right to privacy, a national daycare system, and control over school curricula. The first two (in the absence of parental rights) allow the state to pull children out of the family, and the third allows indoctrination with the principles of multiculturalism, green ideology, and Critical Race Theory from an early age. Clearly, the treaty is more about power over the next generation than what's in the best interest of children and families.
The biggest advocate for America to ratify the treaty is the left-leaning and funded Children's Defense Fund (CDF), a non-profit that views the entire gamut of problems of "at risk" children — poverty, abuse, drug addiction, incarceration, and academic failure — as a byproduct of capitalism and pervasive racism. Since its founding in 1973, it has supported a culture of government-dependent poverty.
Hillary Clinton — who famously said "it takes a village to raise a child" — interned with the CDF in 1970, joined it as an attorney in 1972, and chaired it from 1986 till 1992, when she became first lady. Under her leadership, the CDF pushed for the adoption of the treaty, which potentially pits children against their parents and the family. She encouraged her husband, President Bill Clinton, to sign the treaty in 1995. The signing constitutes a preliminary endorsement and does not bind a country to implement the treaty or ratify it in the future. But it does obligate the government to refrain from actions that may undermine the treaty's objective and purpose.
Leftist forces in America have made multiple unsuccessful attempts to achieve ratification, the last by Representative Ilhan Omar of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Despite the failures, the tenets of the treaty are being implemented in spirit. Cultural Marxists have managed to change the system so much that today, children can do all the following without their parents' consent: receive vaccinations, obtain birth control, have abortions, change their religion, mimic the opposite sex, be informed about sexual deviance, and be promiscuous.
Examples of these abound across the country and include cases of teachers and school staff actively subverting parental authority over students. Children are told their parents are unloving or neglectful if they don't affirm the students' new gender identity. Parents have even lost custody of their children for opposing a process that can result in sterilization and lasting damage. Concerned parents are treated as interlopers "interfering" in their children's development, "gender choices," educational path, and so on. If they object to the teaching of CRT, transgender radicalism, and inappropriate sexual material, they may be arrested, or their children may be removed from their home. They may even be labeled "domestic terrorists."
This pre-empting of parents has become so strident that Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe made a statement last year that would be unthinkable a few years ago: "I'm not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."
And Attorney General Merrick Garland implied that the actions of parents (like Scott Smith) who protest at board meetings are "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism." He even used the threat of the Department of Justice and the FBI against parents who protest school curricula defying their values or subverting their authority. He later retracted his inflammatory rhetoric, but the point was made: dissenting parents, beware.
Fortunately, parents are rising against the tyranny and the injection of woke agendas, even running for office to realign schools with the true objectives of education. In Wisconsin, parents are suing the Kettle Moraine School District to challenge the policy allowing students to change their names and pronouns at school without parental consent. One couple, whose daughter is battling depression and anxiety, found that, without their consent and over their objections, teachers were using a male name and male pronouns for their daughter.
In Iowa, the Linn-Mar School Board voted for a "parental exclusion policy" to codify five-year-old practices of not disclosing a student's transgender status to parents, asserting that gender identity decisions will be made solely by students and school administrators. Parents are suing the board over this.
Virginia, where Scott Smith stood up for his sexually assaulted daughter, seems to be a bustling battleground. Public schools there use inappropriate sexualized material, survey students about their sex lives, and allow males to use girls' bathrooms and locker rooms. It's also where brave parents and teachers are fighting back.
At the meeting at which Smith was arrested, police also arrested Jon Tigges for refusing to leave without having his opposition to the teaching of CRT heard. He says what's happening in Loudoun is a "microcosm of what's happening across the country." Loudoun County also suspended a popular gym teacher, Tanner Cross, for refusing to use preferred pronouns for his trans students on religious grounds. He has since been reinstated after suing the board.
The overreach and deceitful practices of our woke educational system constitute a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, as well as an infringement of the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, granting parents rights to their children's school records. Besides traumatizing our children, such indoctrination and the usurpation of parental rights subvert the family, the nation, and its Judeo-Christian values and ideals. But that won't happen as long as parents like Scott Smith and teachers like Tanner Cross are around. They deserve our utmost admiration and respect.
Image via Pexels.
Janet Levy
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_battle_for_our_children_and_their_minds.html
No comments:
Post a Comment