Left’s gender and sexuality agenda sparks pushback from religious minority communities
Timothy P. Carney
Montgomery County, Maryland, is a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., and some still hold an image of it as a white enclave. Local Democratic politicians, however, will tell you how diverse Montgomery County actually is and how it’s becoming more diverse every year.
It’s true: MoCo, as the locals sometimes call it, is less and less white, more and more immigrant, and even more Muslim every year. Here’s the twist: This diversity is causing a major headache for the county’s liberal establishment.
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As the 160,000-student Montgomery County Public School system rapidly adopts radical new sex-ed curricula, the chief resistance is coming from Ethiopian Orthodox immigrants, Muslim parents, and South American Catholics.
This rainbow coalition of religious conservatives is already causing short-circuits in the minds of race-baiting, identity politics-peddling Democrats and liberal commentators. It is also exposing the extent to which the Left in parts of America has turned supposedly secular institutions, such as local governments and public schools, into dogmatic enforcers of a new quasi-religion.
Finally, if some Muslims and nonwhite Christian immigrants continue to align with the more stereotypical “Religious Right,” it could help build up a new conservative coalition.
Coalition of Virtue
Montgomery County Public Schools have been changing the sex-ed curriculum and adding books about homosexuality and gender identity to other parts of the curriculum. One required book is titled Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope. The central message of this book is that a girl can become a boy by identifying as a boy. The premise here is that each person has a gender, which is interior and known only to that person, and that this gender is undetermined by, and more important than, biological sex.
Again, this isn’t merely a book left on a bookshelf in a public library. Opponents of this curriculum aren’t book banners. This is a book peddling a brand-new anthropology and sexual morality that is not based in science. The teachings can only be accepted on faith, and it is a faith that directly contradicts not only Catholic teaching and evangelical preaching but the tenets of all Abrahamic faiths.
The pre-K material for the current sex-ed curriculum comes from the Human Rights Campaign, a far-left gay and transgender group. Pre-K teachers read Pride Puppy! to the class. The “Search and Find Word List” in the back of the book includes “intersex,” “drag queen,” “underwear,” and “leather.”
The school system had originally indicated that some parents would be able to opt out of some of these lessons but then backtracked. Thus, the Coalition of Virtue entered the scene. The nonprofit group describes itself as an “organization of American Muslims, strategically partnered with members of other faith communities, working together with the intention of reviving the universally held virtues and morals of our country’s great faith traditions.”
The coalition wrote that MCPS “recently introduced a new curriculum to indoctrinate students from pre k-eighth grade on a specific and highly opinionated view of sexual morality and gender ideology.” MCPS isn’t preaching “acceptance” of various lifestyles or beliefs but is instead preaching one specific set of beliefs as dogma, the coalition explained.
“It is a curriculum that teaches a specific sexual morality/values and gender ideology that is completely unnatural and unacceptable,” it added. “The goal isn’t inclusion or education of another view, its indoctrination into that view.”
Tamer Mahmoud, along with a few other county parents, responded in May by filing suit, demanding a right for parents to opt their children out of such programming. The county didn’t take kindly to this suit or to the flood of angry parents who came to testify against such proselytizing in the name of “inclusivity.”
“Religious freedom, raise your voice”
The tension built until many hundreds, maybe a thousand, people showed up at the June 28 board meeting, which the county closed to the public, and protested outside. The crowd was mostly Muslims, Ethiopian Christians, and other immigrant or nonwhite parents or activists.
An Ethiopian Orthodox cleric named Like Seyouman Getahun spoke at length to reporter Asra Nomani of the Federalist. He painted the new curriculum as undermining parents’ right to raise children according to their culture. “Our culture is knowing God, respecting God, and fulfilling God’s instruction,” the cleric said.
One Peruvian American mother carried a sign reading, “Respetemos el derecho de las familias a compartir su cultura y religión con sus hijos e hijas!” which translates roughly as “Respect the right of families to share their culture and religion with their sons and daughters!”
This whole situation fries the circuit boards of the Left. “Progressive” school boards across the country advance their gender and sexual ideology in the name of diversity and inclusion, but the Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox protesters have at least as good a claim to “diversity and inclusion” in their demand for an opt-out.
This tension causes embarrassing and revealing reactions from the Left. The June 28 meeting gained so much attention and became a protest because of the demeaning and belittling reaction liberal school board members had to Muslim parents and students who spoke up at earlier meetings. In the spring, one liberal school board member insulted the “Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots.” Another liberal board member belittled a Muslim student who objected to the sexual content, dismissing her arguments as “parroting dogma.” The premise here is that Muslim “dogma” deserves no respect, but anyone who questions the dogma behind Pride Puppy! and Born Ready is a bigot.
Jen Psaki, the Democratic spokeswoman-turned-cable news host, treated the Muslim- and Ethiopian Orthodox-led protests as “a right-wing strategy.” “The GOP is trying to recruit Muslim Americans, a community that makes up less than 2% of the U.S. population, against another tiny, marginalized group of Americans: transgender people,” Psaki said. Her clear implication is that Muslims and Ethiopian Christians do not have agency and that they protest left-wing indoctrination only because they are manipulated by wily right-wingers.
Psaki and school board members cast about for conspiracy theories and novel explanations because it offends their self-image, and undermines their political tactics, when minority groups oppose them. In most fights over policy, liberals are simply able to shout “racists!” instead of rebutting a conservative’s point. But it takes no secret strategy by the Right to win over Muslims or nonwhite Christians. The Left’s behavior is driving this shift.
What’s new?
You may ask, why now? Immigrants and nonwhites have long been more religious and more conservative than the Democratic Party as a whole, and yet they have generally remained on the Left side of the aisle. What would cause them to take to the streets and tack away from their party now?
The answer starts with a not-too-distant history that Psaki might never have known: Before 9/11, Muslims voted overwhelmingly Republican. The best estimates of the 2000 election show George W. Bush carrying about 70% to 90% of the Muslim vote. That suggests that the era of Muslims as Democrats is the aberration, not the norm.
Most important, though, is the hard-left tack of Democratic culture warriors and the recent takeover of public schools by gender ideologues. When former President Barack Obama dominated the Muslim vote in 2012, the Democratic Party wasn’t yet insisting that men who identify as women are, therefore, women. Certainly, it was rare to find this preached as dogma in public schools.
In recent years, public schools in cities and large left-leaning counties have gone from liberal secular institutions to dogmatic religious left-wing institutions. A place such as Montgomery County, while very secular and liberal, has plenty of conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and Jews. Those families are likely to have their own private schools that reinforce the values and beliefs of the parents.
Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox families, on the other hand, are smaller minorities and poorer. They, along with immigrants from South America who are likely to be Catholic or evangelical, are more likely to rely on public schools.
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These public schools are no longer secular schools, though. Transgender ideology is effectively a religion. Its precepts clash with those of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, along with those of Catholicism, Christianity, and Judaism. The Montgomery County School Board is not the only liberal-dominated entity in the country that is trying to convert children to this new religion, away from their parents’ religious beliefs.
Throw in the condescending talk from Psaki and crew — you only hold on to your own faith because you’ve been duped by white conservatives — and Democrats are the ones building a new political coalition on the Right.