The woke army is really coming for our kids. But its generals, lieutenants, and foot soldiers in the “rainbow mafia,” as it’s called, have started a war they will not win.
Last week, in Ottawa, Canada, a boy stomped on the pride flag, while Muslim parents chanted, “Leave our kids alone!” This week, outside the offices of the Ottawa Carleton School Board, Muslim parents, community members, and children held signs that read, “Leave the Kids Alone,” with the interfaith crowd chanting, “The people united will never be defeated.”
Every time activists and educrats assure parents that the LGBT movement is about “tolerance,” we find evidence that the movement and its fellow travelers have transformed it into something menacing and intolerant. With little warning and a lot of obtuseness meant to keep parents in the dark, gay and trans propaganda has made its way into the classrooms of children as young as 3 years old, and teachers, educrats, activists, and politicians — from the United States to Canada — are attempting to enforce allegiance to extremism with bullying, intimidation, and character assassination.
Last week, Wassim Fayed, the planning commissioner of Sammamish, Washington, and a local Lebanese American restaurant owner, had to resign after he said at a June 1 meeting, marking the first day of pride month, that “as a Muslim person,” he rejected discriminating against anyone who is gay but he also believed that LGBT ideologues were promoting “infestation in the minds of our children in our schools.”
Let’s be clear: The goal of the rainbow mafia isn’t to teach tolerance. The goal is to indoctrinate our children into accepting a “gender-fluid” world — a world that demands you deny the reality of biological sex; that presumes schools and activists are better placed to make life-changing decisions about a child’s identity than are parents; a world where, before kids can even read, they are often groomed to question their sex under the premise that their parents have been lying to them all this time.
If you are skeptical this is happening, here are some recent headlines from the culture wars.
Parents Revolt Nationwide
At a Wednesday school board meeting in Granby, Connecticut, parents expressed alarm that teachers showed local elementary school students an NBC “Universal Kids” video with really young, squeaky-voiced children of about 5 discussing gender identity. The school system also sent children home with a “puberty kit.” The video showed “she/her” next to a girl’s name, a boy discussing how he identifies outside the so-called gender binary, and kids waving pride flags. Parents are understandably furious.
All over the nation, from Fairfax County, Virginia, to Seattle, Washington, school districts have adopted policies that purposely hide the gender musings of children from parents under the guise of providing “safe spaces.” Indeed, in Fargo Public Schools in North Dakota, where the practice of keeping parents in the dark was outlawed, Superintendent Rupak Gandhi recently declared he would disobey the law because telling parents about their kids’ trans longings would mean administrators would “openly out” children. The creepy presumptuousness of this is breathtaking. Lawsuits have followed, including one by the parent of a student in Manchester, New Hampshire, who says the policy violates her inalienable right to make such decisions for her children.
In Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, parents objecting to gender instruction of their elementary school kids seemed to have won a reprieve with a choice to opt their kids out of gender and sexuality curriculum they considered age-inappropriate. But in late March, the school district abruptly changed its mind, sending parents an email that it was ending the opt-out program and enraging many parents, large numbers of them Muslim. In a lawsuit, they say such instruction conflicts with their religious values and usurps their rights as parents.
The parents, mostly nonwhite immigrants, showed up in large numbers at a noisy protest organized last week by a new parent group, Coalition of Virtue, rallying outside the school district’s offices in Rockville, Maryland, and outnumbering the people who favor this nonsense by 25 to 1. Who was on the other side of Hungerford Drive, waving rainbow flags and calling the parents haters? Mostly privileged, woke white women, one of them ironically carrying a bullhorn with a sticker on it that read, “Fight for those without your privilege.”
‘AuntyFa’ and Pride Month Narcissism
If the woke white women — whom I call “AuntyFa” — were looking for the actual haters and bigots, well, they only had to check the mirror. The wheels are coming off the woke bus because it is built on lies and deceit.
Here’s the bottom line: Pride month, which began as a legitimate outpouring of a group that certainly was once marginalized, has become an exercise in narcissistic overload with consequences for our children. I support same-sex marriage, fight for Muslim countries to expunge anti-gay crime laws, and seek equality for all. However, “pride” is now about enforced approbation — you will bow down or you will be excoriated, canceled, and shamed. There’s a bully here — and it’s not us.
Just listen to how a teacher at Londonderry Junior High School in Edmonton, Canada, scolded Muslim children as young as 12 who didn’t go to school for pride celebrations on June 1, as the rainbow flag flew over schools for pride month. If they didn’t agree with pro-LGBT policies, she said: “You can’t be Canadian. You don’t belong here. And I mean it. I really mean it. … It just makes me angry.”
Check out almost any kindergarten class in any blue state and a surprising number of red ones, and it’s a good bet you’ll find pride flags in the classrooms. The argument is that no reasonable person could object. The lessons around the flags are, again, merely about teaching “tolerance and inclusion.”
We might believe that if we hadn’t unearthed so many examples of activist teachers and school districts acting in stealth to impose their one-side views of the sexes and sexuality on our kids.
A Better Approach
Parents aren’t making a mountain out of a molehill over these issues. At heart, this is an existentialist argument between leftists with a collectivist view that they absolutely know what’s best for kids and have a right to impose their “best” upon them. On the other side are parents who recoil at this very notion and refuse to surrender their parental authority and responsibility to the collectivist state.
Sure, there’s a middle ground. The vast majority of parents have no objections to age-appropriate discussions of sex so long as the discussions stick to science and offer balance and perspective. Sex ed has been taught in U.S. public schools for generations with very little controversy, but that’s because sex ed stuck to basic sexual biology and the prudence of safe sex to prevent diseases and pregnancy.
If a fictional student named Mary thinks she is Bob, what Mary needs first of all is counseling. And if Mary is first expressing her longings to her teacher, her teacher’s obligation is to rope in the parents, period. Imagine a slightly different scenario: Mary is having trouble with math, but the teacher — not wishing to “out” her and embarrass her — withholds that knowledge from the parents. That would amount to educational malfeasance. When it comes to sex, hiding the issue from parents makes malfeasance exponential.
Here’s another possible solution. How about the adult members of the LGBT crowd help us in this fight and stand with parents on the age-appropriate and balance issues? Surely it can’t be lost on gay folks that the trans movement is at its heart anti-gay. That is, a vast number of kids being herded toward changing their bodies through surgery and drugs would simply turn out to be gay if the journey led through counseling and approbation of their natural selves. An unavoidable conclusion is that the trans movement sees something intrinsically wrong with that — that being gay is bad.
Why, parents ask, would gay people go along with that?
The backlash to the woke army is real, and woke activists and educrats would be well-served by listening to parents. As the parents in Ottawa chanted: “Leave our kids alone.”
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