Angry Parents Aren't Terrorists—They're Just Terrors to Public School Boards
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Angry Parents Aren’t Terrorists—They’re Just Terrors to Public School Boards

Photo credit: Ryan Snaadt

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Dear school boards: When you poke mama and papa bear, don’t be surprised when they growl and bare their teeth. And writing a letter to the president asking him to sic the FBI on parents rather than treating them as partners in education seems more political than needful.

To understand the gulf between parents and educators, just watch a school board meeting on youtube (if you still can). You’ll see concerned parents voicing their concerns at microphones. They look like defendants standing before judges in a tribunal. What happened to PTAs?

In school board meetings across the nation, parents are treated as opponents rather than partners. They’re frustrated and angry with imperious school boards who seem to insist that they know what’s best for their children.

At times their anger causes them to raise their voices in passionate speeches. They love their children and seek to protect them from what they view as indoctrination, not education. Parental love drives their passion and triggers their protective instincts. This doesn’t make them domestic terrorists.

If school board members and teachers feel threatened by genuine threats in public meetings or on social media, they should be investigated—by local authorities, not by the federal government.

Yet last week the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to direct the Justice Department to investigate angry parents for hate crimes and domestic terrorism. Domestic terrorism.

Why are parents so angry? Three issues come to mind: mask mandates, sex education that includes transgenderism, and Critical Race Theory.

Mask mandates

Masks can and do help prevent the transmission of the coronavirus. But they’re not necessarily a good option for children simply because, by and large, the virus is not deadly to kids.

In fact, 98-99 percent of children who get COVID fully recover. With this in mind, by doing a simple risk assessment of masking schoolchildren versus not masking them, we’d conclude that it’s better to let them learn without masks.

Additionally, we simply don’t know the longterm adverse effects forced masking has on learning. Most kids are visual learners and take cues from facial expressions. Their socialization may also suffer as a result.

Clearly, because educators are more at risk of death from COVID-19, they should continue masking. Thoughtful parents know their children who do not have preexisting conditions are generally safe to attend school without masks.

Why do school boards and teachers unions continue to push unnecessary and likely harmful mask mandates on children? For whom are they most concerned with protecting? If they believe in masking, they should mask up and suck it up. If they’re still afraid, perhaps they’re not cut out to be educators.

Sex re-education

Teaching children about the birds and the bees is a parent’s job, not a teacher’s. Sex ed is a family issue, not the state’s. Can’t it wait until just before puberty, rather than being taught to kids K-5?

Many traditional parents share this opinion. So is the self-evident truth that binary genders exist in human biology—and in reality. Parents who embrace this truth and passionately speak up about it are now at risk of being accused of hate speech.

We are born male or female. No amount of surgery or hormone treatment changes this reality. Parents know this and also know that confusing kids with fantasy genders and damaging gender reassignment harms them.

Public school educators have more than enough on their plates with teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. They should leave sex education to parents and resist pressure to push gender nonsense on impressionable children.

Parents are also concerned with the prospect of hormonally-altered boys competing against their girls in sports. This obviously gives males unfair physically advantages and presents a danger to the health of welfare of overmatched females.

The Journal of Medical Ethics affirmed this reality in a recent study in which the researchers concluded that “the advantage to transwomen afforded by the IOC guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”

Bad theory

What is Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory (CRT), as defined in a video by the Heritage Foundation, is a philosophy founded on Marxist analysis that claims America is “systemically racist.”

CRT proponents, active in colleges and universities for years, now seek to impact public policy in public schools. As a result, CRT is beginning to gain a foothold in K-12. This makes parents angry.

Most parents and some educators and school board members reject CRT’s racial discrimination for equity in favor of equality and opportunity for all— regardless of skin color.

The vast majority of thoughtful and caring parents believe that CRT teaches children to feel guilty for their “whiteness” while accepting the lie that America’s systems are inherently racist.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act dealt a mortal blow to systemic racism in America. Critical Race Theory ignores this landmark legislation and the fact that racism resides in people, not systems.

Obviously, there a differing definitions of systemic racism held by those on both sides of the issue. Just as there are differing definitions of “hate speech.” Perhaps it would be helpful to rely on definitions that are based in logic and common sense rather than emotion and agenda.

In the minds of many parents, Critical Race Theory is nothing more than partisan propaganda. CRT is harmful because it produces unmerited guilt, divides us and denies the attainability of the American Dream for people of color.

This is not borne out by our nation’s history. Rather, it’s debunked by generations of immigrants and people of color who came to America legally and made better and more prosperous lives for themselves and their families.

Terrorists or terrors?

To justify their appeal to the president for federal law enforcement support, the National School Boards Association is misapplying words and phrases to vilify angry and frustrated parents. Why? They’re either seeking to clear obstacles to their agenda and/or they mistake parental passion for peril to themselves.

Have some angry parents (or those who side with them) gone too far with social media attacks and threats? Probably. Does any of this have to do with genuine hate speech or domestic terrorism? Unlikely.

What’s more likely is that words like hate and terror are being misused to trigger more government interference in the lives of parents and their children.

Branding angry parents domestic terrorists is absurd hyperbole at best and political weaponization at worst. Parents who are merely resisting ideological intrusion into their public schools—and their children’s lives—deserve better.

What we need is an overhaul of a failing public school system and vouchers for charter schools and alternative educational systems like home schooling.

Why should we continue funding increasingly political public schools? Why should we believe school boards who claim parents are engaging in hate speech, threats of violence, and terrorism when most seek merely to protect their children by exercising their freedom of speech with passion and conviction?

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Patrick is a journalist and writer with degrees in English and journalism. He served six years in the Navy where his life was changed forever by the Lord Jesus Christ. He lives in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California with his wife, dog and two cats. He enjoys hiking and cycling, taking pictures and blogging at https://luscri.com/



 
 
 

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Education

Learning About My State’s History

In school, everyone should be taught the complete history of their state

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I grew up in Connecticut and all of my schooling was there. Were we told about any of the innovations and inventions, below, in school? Yes, for the cotton gin, helicopter, and maybe a few others, but for the most part, no mention. Everyone should be taught the complete history of their state.

Not Told About So Much

Little did I know that through 1954 Connecticut had the most historical firsts:

First constitution adopted, establishing representative government (1639)
First newspaper (1764)
First submarine (1775)
First American law school (1784)

First insurance company (1795)
First cotton gin (1799)
First dictionary (1807)
First movable parts mass production in use, making clocks (1808)

First revolver (1836)
First public art museum (1842)
First portable typewriter (1843)
First use of anesthesia (1844)

First sewing machine (1846)
First ice-making machine (1853)
First can opener (1858)
First tape measure (1868)

First pay phone (1877)
First collapsible toothpaste tube (1892)
First hamburger (1895)
First submarine (1900)

First lollipop (1908)
First Frisbee (1920)
First vacuum cleaner (1933)
First Polaroid camera (1934)

First helicopter (1939)
First color television (1948)
First atomic powered submarine (1954)

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Education

My Woke Local Library in Woke America

At the rate of new woke holidays, the whole year will eventually fill up

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American Thinker:  I took time out during a weekday, two weeks ago, to visit my local library for the first time in many months. I know they’ve already changed the name. It used to be called the “Cameron Village Regional Library,” but apparently Cameron was a very bad man, a long time ago.

The name change, however, came because owners of the shopping center, which was built on land owned by people who had held slaves, chose to drop its connection to the contemporary Cameron family. Hmmm, I wonder how many properties, owned by people who had held once slaves, the shopping center owners have lived on.

Ultimately, the Wake County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to rename the library to the “Oberlin Regional Library.” Is that not a heartwarming move?

Change Happens

As I stroll around the library, I notice numerous changes. There are many more large-print books. The youth section is larger as well and offers a variety of woke titles which, in some instances, would alarm even the most liberal of parents. Every other book is about “brown girl” or “the boy who feels like a girl inside.”

In perusing the audiobook shelves, I see that it is a fraction of what it used to be. Most everyone has switched to downloads. The physical CDs, the kind I like to pop into my car player, are becoming rare, but isn’t it safer to insert one into the CD player than to fiddle with one’s cellphone to air a podcast?

At the librarian’s desk, I see all manner of flyers and announcements. One flyer stands out in particular. It is a page which lists all library activities for the coming month. This list interests me because one never knows — there might be a visiting author or some type of how-to program that is worthwhile to me.

Closed in Observation

The middle of this sheet says: “The library will be closed on June 19 in observance of Juneteenth.” Juneteenth, bad grammar and all, is a federal holiday since 2021, commemorating “the emancipation of enslaved African Americans.” Wait a second, the Emancipation Proclamation occurred on January 1, 1863. Did I miss something? The library will be partially open on July 4. Is that now a lesser holiday?

Juneteenth is acknowledged on the anniversary of the order by a Major General Gordon Granger proclaiming freedom for enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1865.  So, now we ignore the Emancipation Proclamation?  One keen social observer commented that the left still thinks of minorities, especially black people, as their pets who they like to spoil with little baubles like Juneteenth.

Real equality is out of the question. To let people rise of fall on their own merits? Well those poor folks would never find their way without the largess of tax payers. And that’s the ploy to keep them “in their place.” Simply vote Democrat and eventually you’ll be just fine. In the meantime, enjoy all the great gifts. And don’t forget to vote.

Perpetual Baubles

What about Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, celebrated on the third Monday in January? It is now a federal holiday. Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays in mid-February used to be known by every school-aged kid as I was growing up. These birthdays have now been homogenized and combined, and called Presidents Day, with not even 1 in 10 Americans knowing what that relates to.

Malcolm X said: “The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man who runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.”

“I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Dedicated Months

We have a whole month devoted to black history, each and every day in February. Depending on where you turn, you’ll gain news and information about black authors, politicians, poets, cooks, freedom fighters, soldiers, actors, inventors, and pioneers of industry.

The consequence of note of all these holidays is that government employees receive yet another paid day off without having to bargain for it. Nearly everybody else, who actually work for a living, still go to work on those days. Few people care about the holiday except for those seeking to conjure up the next one.

Still, perhaps we ought to have Black History Month for a few more years but, eventually, it needs to fade and simply be part of American history. Otherwise, are we also going to have a Hispanic history month, Jewish month, Asian month, Muslim month, and so on? Are not all the historical experiences, and contributions, by all these groups simply a part of American history?

Years ago, when I lived in D.C., one of the morning radio shock jocks made an inexcusable joke for which he should have been fired but he was not. This was long before the wokesters took over the media and he knew what the boundaries were. In observation of Martin Luther King’s birthday, he said, it’s too bad four more civil rights leaders weren’t slain so that we could have a whole week off. A terrible statement by any means, but he thought it was funny.

Fill Up the Year!

The odd thing is, at the rate of new woke holidays, it wouldn’t be surprising if the whole year was eventually filled up. Every group that has ever been aggrieved in one way or another, at any time, gets a holiday or a week, or why not a month?

So let’s have a short people’s day, a stutterer’s  day, a nearsighted people’s day, and on and on, until every single person in America is covered (except, of course, white males, Christians, and Jews). Let’s devote a whole month to those who have a different sexual outlook, inclination, or orientation than everyone else. Let’s hold it in, say, June. Let’s call it “Pride Month.” What do you think of that?

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