Public schools are the Left’s religious schools
Timothy P. Carney
Marlene Pray of Pennsylvania runs Doylestown’s “Rainbow Room,” a Planned Parenthood-funded gathering of children between the ages of 12 and 21. At an April 20 special meeting of the Central Bucks School Board, Pray was the first speaker. She was joining a chorus of voices that denounced the school board’s recent actions.
The Central Bucks School Board had in recent months voted to bar age-inappropriate books from its curricula, require teachers to inform parents if a child wants to change his or her name, require single-sex sexual education classes, and bar teachers from using classroom decorations for politicking — such as by flying pride flags and the like.
TEXAS LAWMAKERS DISCUSSING BILL TO BAN TEXTBOOKS TEACHING LGBT TOPICS TO STUDENTS BELOW NINTH GRADE
Pray attacked a school district lawyer for implying that the flags were a political statement. “He believes there are two equally valid positions when it comes to queer students: those who believe in them and support them and those who don’t,” she said. “Taking those flags down … is about cruelty.”
This was the consistent tone of the school-board minority and other critics of the board: that the board was positing a debate where there should be no debate.
But of course a transgender flag on a wall is a political statement. It’s more than that — it’s an anthropological statement. The transgender flag doesn’t merely mean “we should be kind to those who don’t conform to gender norms.” It means “a girl is any child who identifies as a girl, and all that matters in this respect is gender, which is not determined by biological sex.”
This is a view of the human being that most people don’t share. It is a belief not at all required by science or logic. It is, in fact, someone’s unprovable first principle.
Transgender teaching is basically dogma — an article of faith.
To many school teachers and activists, trans dogma is, or at least ought to be, the official dogma of every school system. Anything else, they believe, is inhumane. Removing pride flags from a public-school classroom strikes the trans-activist priesthood in the same way that removing crucifixes from a Catholic school classroom would strike the devout.
Karen Smith, a Democrat on the school board, had privately called in the federal government to investigate the school district after she was outvoted on the issues of age-inappropriate books in schools, politicized classroom decorations, and name-changes kept secret from parents. The board, in turn, conducted its own investigation. Like Pray, Smith also failed to see how there were two sides to any of these questions.
“We could have simply begun the steps suggested by the ACLU instead of going down the path of this … investigation,” she said at the meeting. The American Civil Liberties Union had recommended “mandatory training for staff, administration, and the school board on supporting LGBTQ+ youth” and the district repealing its rules on sex ed, age-inappropriate books, secret gender changes, and pride flags in the classroom. To Smith, these were noncontroversial “recommendations” because, to the Left, the ACLU is simply an expert organization and not a partisan in the culture wars.
Conservatives used to lament the moral relativism of public schools, but those days are over. These days, many public schools have become religious schools, and the cultural Left is fighting zealously to impose a religious dogma about human sex and sexuality.