The Plague of Morally Toxic Public Schools
What happens in public schools really matters, to each student, to each family and to our nation. Because, as Abraham Lincoln said: “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next.”
What would happen if a child were to spend most of his waking hours, during most of his formative years, in an institution bent on persuading him to adopt certain fundamental beliefs?
There is no mystery here. Children are easy to manipulate. They are eager to please, especially in a school setting where their grades and future careers depend on it. The child would eventually yield to the days and years of pressure and embrace the beliefs thrust upon him.
But what if those fundamental beliefs were at war with his family’s?
We should be speaking in the present tense, for this is what happens today—every day—to Christian children in America. While their parents sleep.
Many of America’s public school systems have become morally toxic, especially for the hearts and minds of children from religious families. So say authors Mary Hasson and Theresa Farnan in their bracing and deeply researched new book, “Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late.” The threat does not come from the dedicated teachers who are just trying to do their jobs but from progressive ideologues who have become our nation’s education elites.
If you wonder why your fourth grader comes home sounding like a “social justice warrior,” you can thank the National Network of State Teachers of the Year for pushing a book list for elementary students with the themes of classism, racism, xenophobia, sexism and transgenderism.
Even while schools are becoming successful instruments for leftist social reform, they are failing at their core mission to educate children in basic academic subjects. The latest national assessment is “devastating,” says Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Two-thirds of American students can’t read at grade level, and reading scores have worsened in 31 states. “This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” DeVos says.
Sex education is the most obvious area for indoctrination. Well-funded international pressure groups have been extraordinarily successful at pushing “Comprehensive Sexuality Education” into American public schools, both in politically liberal and conservative regions. CSE promotes risky sexual behavior to vulnerable teens disguised as sexual “rights” and focuses on LGBTQ sexuality (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) as a victim class.
Lessons are carefully designed to encourage children to approve homosexual behavior and to reject the beliefs and the authority of their parents.
Examples are almost too graphic to print. Elementary children are taught that some people are born in the wrong body. Young teens are encouraged to experiment with anal and oral sex. High schoolers learn how to get secret abortions.
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Don’t Say “They”
No one should be required to express fidelity to academic queer theory. Those of us who care about actual pluralism should resist this form of narcissism-fueled political theater. If unconventional pronouns have any room in our society, they must be uttered in the context of civic friendship based on trust, self-restraint, and mutual respect. Above all, nonbinary pronouns must be strictly voluntary, and there should be no penalties—social or legal—for those who dissent from their underlying ideology.
The Biden administration has announced a series of policy initiatives in support of “transgender, nonbinary, and other gender expansive” Americans. Among these is that Americans will now be able to have “X” as the gender listed on their passports—a benefit for those who self-identify as neither male nor female.
Nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia have already implemented similar measures for state-issued documents. In 2019, the New York City Commission on Human Rights issued a legal guidance that requires employers, landlords, and providers of public accommodations to use a person’s preferred name and pronouns, irrespective of the sex “assigned” to that person at birth. This includes not only “she” for men who identify as women and “he” for women who identify as men, but also honorific titles such as “Mx” and individual pronouns such as “they/them” and “ze/hir.”
According to the Williams Institute, 1.2 million adults in the United States self-identify as nonbinary. For Americans under 18 that figure is likely much higher, given recent data showing that over 20 percent of Generation Z (born after 1997) identify as LGBT, compared with 10 percent of millennials and 4 percent of Generation X.
Progressives tend to believe that this sudden rise in numbers reflects a society more welcoming to people “born that way,” but a more plausible explanation is that young people are responding to new social cues and incentives. Teenagers are now regularly told that being “cisgender” (identifying as male or female according to reproductive traits) means conforming to social expectations, while identifying as anything else reflects nonconformity, authenticity, and courage. Given this messaging—and the fact that, unlike homosexuality, which entails sexual feelings and behaviors, one need only to declare oneself nonbinary to be nonbinary—it is a wonder that merely 20 percent of youth regard themselves as part of the alphabet coalition. In any case, the Biden administration’s actions add further confusion to a conversation already characterized by shallow thinking and badly misunderstood research.
Start with the fact that what makes most transgender people transgender is precisely the fact that they conform to gender conventions—albeit those of the opposite sex. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists conformity to “stereotypes” as a relevant criterion for diagnosing childhood gender dysphoria. Federal courts have ruled that transgender boys really are boys, and thus deserve to use the boys’ restrooms at school because they look and behave like typical boys. If gender is an “identity” wholly independent of reproductive traits (of which there can be only two complementary sets), then there is no logical reason that there should be only two gender identities. Indeed, there would have to be as many gender identities as there are people, since each person’s way of expressing gender is unique and irreplaceable. As one federal judge conceded in a rare moment of candor, restrooms separated by male and female “gender identity” rely no less on stereotypes than does the conventional practice.
This presents a problem for the notion of gender identity used by diversity trainers, academic bureaucrats, federal judges, mainstream progressive and LGBT advocacy groups, and Democratic Party leaders: that gender is a core, immutable, and socially valuable aspect of the human person. According to superstar academic and godmother of queer theory Judith Butler, gender is not an innate property but a system of social oppression that gains legibility through repetitious “performance.” “Gender identity” is a “regulatory fiction,” Butler writes. A girl who seeks hormones and surgeries to make her body conform to social expectations regarding the male sex is not being a brave nonconformist but “submitting to the norm of the knife.” She is perhaps even more conformist than her “cisgender” peers considering the pain she is willing to endure to “pass” within the traditional “gender binary.” Feminists and gay rights advocates have echoed this line of argument.
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The Order of Salvation: Adoption
Adoption is an accomplishment of redemption. It is not an accomplishment of creation. The very act of adoption assumes we were previously in a state of alienation. Being born did not somehow put us in better standing with God. The scripture says: “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5); and, “we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3).
Justification is not the gospel in its entirety. It was not enough for God to only justify us in Christ. He has also insisted on adopting us in Christ: “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ,…” (Eph. 1:5). The final purpose of divine election has always been relational not merely judicial.
Think of it this way. In justification God comes to us as Judge. He removes our criminal status before Him by declaring us not guilty in Christ. But in adoption God comes to us not as Judge but as Father.
What then is adoption? “Adoption is an act of the free grace of God, in and for his only Son Jesus Christ, whereby all those that are justified are received into the number of his children, have his name put upon them, the Spirit of his Son given to them, are under his fatherly care and dispensations, admitted to all the liberties and privileges of the sons of God, made heirs of all the promises, and fellow-heirs with Christ in glory.” (Q. 74, Westminster Larger Catechism)
If justification is the act of God’s free grace which removes our condemnation, then adoption is the act of God’s free grace which removes our alienation.
In justification we receive the donation of righteousness. In adoption we receive the donation of family love: “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1).
As David Garner wisely said, a not guilty verdict by the Almighty Judge does not make a criminal a son. But adoption does. Adoption legally puts us in the bonds of the family where God obligates himself to be our forever Father. He will pity us, protect us, provide for us, even chasten us, indulge us, and keep a glorious inheritance for us, bringing us to it without fail.
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Do You Know What Your Child Is Being Taught about Sex?
This isn’t simply about teaching your students to have a healthy view of their bodies and sex. It’s about teaching your students to view the world in a specific way. This is a worldview issue. Teen Talk plainly says the curriculum’s foundational operating principles include core values “like pro-choice, feminist, sex positive, 2STLGBQ+ positive and using an anti-oppression, decolonizing lens.”
“The future of sex ed has arrived,” declared the headline of an article I recently read. The author went on to discuss changes that have been made to public school curriculums affecting students as young as eleven. The article is four years old.
Fast forward to today. The future is here, and it’s not good. My local board of education adopted a comprehensive sex ed curriculum, Teen Talk. It was touted as a big step forward in educating our public school children. Upon review, I learned the curriculum normalizes questionable sexual ethics, including teen abortion, same-sex intercourse, gender fluidity, and more. This issue isn’t limited to my neck of the woods either. Thirty-nine states mandate sex education. Nine of them mandate that “discussion of LGBTQ identities and relationships be inclusive and affirming.”
There are two main issues here. The first has to do with what’s being taught. The second is the role government schools play in raising your children. Let’s first look at what these new sex ed curriculums teach.
There is some helpful information taught—for instance, discussions about mental health, teen suicide, and self-harm are profitable. However, anything beneficial is undone almost immediately. For example, some teach masturbation and sex as two activities to help distract your student from things like stress and anxiety. This kind of teaching doesn’t help your student deal with the pressures of life. Sex is not a drug or a solution to problems. It is not therapy, and in many cases it only complicates life. Even worse, when we view sex this way, people become a commodity, a means to an end, a temporary relief from pain, objects to be used for a quick fix. Not human beings. Not persons of infinite value and worth.
There’s more. This isn’t simply about teaching your students to have a healthy view of their bodies and sex. It’s about teaching your students to view the world in a specific way. This is a worldview issue. Teen Talk plainly says the curriculum’s foundational operating principles include core values “like pro-choice, feminist, sex positive, 2STLGBQ+ positive and using an anti-oppression, decolonizing lens.”
This shouldn’t surprise us.
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