The editors at National Public Radio made a decision to mislead their readers about a current Supreme Court Case. “Supreme Court weighs who should decide public school curriculum: Judges or school boards?”
Of course, the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor was about nothing of the sort. So it’s worth inquiring what was so important in this case that NPR decided to tell such a blatantly obvious lie.
The opposing interests were not the court and the school board. They were parents and the school board. The Left’s official cultural warriors decided to write parents out of the story. This is telling.
The matter at hand was, contra NPR, not who would set the school curriculum. No, Montgomery County Public Schools was uncontested in its right to line its bookshelves with pornographic material, and to fill their curricula, from kindergarten through 12th grade, with material that pushes the district’s ideology and worldview, which includes transgenderism, critical race theory, and rejection of the major religions.
The question was whether religious parents have the right to opt their children out of this public school system’s religious programming.
Despite the culture warriors’ objections, it is religious programming, not merely in Montgomery County, Maryland, but in large urban and suburban districts all over the country.
Montgomery County’s attorney tried to argue that the mandatory books about gender identity and homosexuality for first graders were simply intended “to influence them towards civility,” but that’s not all the school districts do when they preach these books from the classroom, when they fly the 11- or 12-colored pride flags on the walls, and when they post the gender unicorn in the hallways.
These school districts are making claims about human nature. Among those claims: a girl becomes a boy if she identifies as a boy, and rather than two sexes, humans should be thought of as having any of infinite genders that lie along a multidimensional spectrum.
These claims, which are held not as opinion but as dogma by the public schools, are not required by science. No, they are required only by the worldview, the anthropology, the spirituality held by a small, powerful slice of elites.
An American Civil Liberties Union attorney had the most revealing comment on the case: “If the court rules that religious parents can micromanage the education of their children in public school even where the effect is to undermine the school’s ability to do the job it needs to do for all of its students, that will seriously undermine the ability of public schools to do the work they need to do.”
“The work” the public schools “need to do,” in this view, is to ply children with sexual content to which their parents object.
Now consider that many of the liberal school districts teaching these girls that they may really be boys, or vice versa, have policies that teachers may not tell parents that their child has been convinced he or she is a she or a he or something in between.
Then consider that Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) signed a law that prohibited school boards from giving parents any say in library collection — and that he trumpeted this antiparent policy under the banner “mind your own damn business.”
SHOULD DAY CARE BE LIKE PRESCHOOL OR LIKE AUNT SUSIE’S PLAYROOM?
Separate from some of the constitutional questions in Mahmoud, these are the true battle lines: Left-wing culture warriors, including those who run school systems, believe that the purpose of a public school is to counterprogram the parents. They see parents not as the primary educators of children, nor as chief partners, but as forces of repression from which children need liberation.
You can see why they wouldn’t want to admit that.