The priority of effectively engaging local schools starts with parental rights. But what are parental rights? Parents are the fundamental leaders who shape their children’s morality, character, and, eventually, the adults they become. Parents have the most persistent influence on their children. The men and women that children become often reflect the men and women our parents are–or were.
Despite the importance of parents in their children’s lives, public schools and state governments have successfully attacked and restricted parental rights. Parents have a constitutional position as overseers of their children’s education, care, custody, and, ultimately, control of their children. Parents dictate and protect the health, welfare, and teaching their children receive. State governments and school boards undermine parental rights by introducing destructive ideological curricula, like antiracism, Critical Race Theory, and Transgender ideology– all considered indoctrination.
Schools and state governments also denounce parental rights by convincing confused children that they can change their gender. Teachers and administrators will deliberately hide this from the children’s parents. This secrecy prevents parents from playing a functional role in the lives of their disoriented children. By “affirming their chosen gender,” schoolteachers, administrators, and counselors overlook certain mental health conditions that contribute to gender dysphorias, like children with ADHD, autism, personality disorders, body image issues, or other emotional issues that increase mental discomfort in children. This kind of dishonest affirmation prevents children from accepting who they are–their biological sex–how God made them and wants them to flourish.
Some children struggle with their identity due to social media, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (due to peer influence and social media), vulnerability due to their friends’ desire to change their gender, or mind-body imbalances. Refusing to inform parents of their children’s discomfort with their biological sex–is happening everywhere. It’s one reason Alliance Defending Freedom is suing Harrisonburg Public Schools in Virginia. Here, the Harrisonburg City Public School Board rejects religious and parental rights by affirming the board’s view on transgender identity.
The school district’s policy requires staff to use opposite-sex pronouns immediately and forbids staff from sharing this information about their child’s decision with parents. The school staff is deceiving parents by not sharing this crucial information with parents.
Regarding gender dysphoria–a state of severe distress or unhappiness caused by the feeling that one’s gender identity does not match with ones sex at birth–the teachers in Harrisonburg had specific instruction last school year. They had to ask all their students for their preferred names and pronouns and always use them with the students. When communicating with parents, the teachers were required to use the children’s names from their official records, thereby keeping new names and preferred pronouns secret.
This secrecy deliberately isolates the parents from their children when these children need their parents most. Parents must be involved when it comes to their children’s identity. Teachers, rightly so, are in a secondary position to the parents. Essentially, teachers should be an extension of the parents– reinforcing their values and keeping them informed if their child makes mistakes or needs to explore gender-transition or notified if the school decides to brainwash their children. But in today’s America, many teachers reject being an extension of parents. Many teachers, though not all, are openly hostile to the morality, religion, and ethical values many parents are attempting to teach their children. More and more teachers are trying to radically indoctrinate them into LGBTQ “pride,” “transgender ideology,” and the divisive racial outlook of antiracism and “Critical Race Theory.”
When it comes to transgender-based ideology, many authors refer to this as a form of Gnosticism. This term refers to having a form of “secret knowledge” contained in one’s soul concerning how one perceives their identity. This Gnosticism, usually lends itself to a practice of heresy– involving biological sex and potential happiness when one chooses a gender that wasn’t “assigned at birth.” Those suffering from gender-dysphoria do not believe God created humans in his image. The dysphoric also does not think that human nature is understandable. Those suffering from body-image issues–believe that only a self-articulated, self-expressive meaning of who they believe themselves to be.
They don’t believe in absolute truth expressed in a God-created body. The only truth they believe is that the individual performs through transitioning–an emotional perspective. I’ll repeat this fact– this view is subjective rather than objective. The subjective vision is a central element of postmodern cultural theory. Moreover, gender is political, deriving meaning from political action (trans or non-binary activism). It professes its own “truth” and is intolerant of those opposing transitioning, in which the gender discordant seeks to silence all views contradicting gender ideology to achieve self-affirmation.
In transgender theory, Gnosticism– the mind/body discordance–is, in effect, fusionism: combining a worldview that can absorb and deploy language and ideas from diverse thought patterns. When it comes to transgender ideology, dualism is its principal focus. Transgender ideology views the body of someone suffering from gender-dysphoria as a problem to transcend. This perspective means that the person’s true identity is independent of the body and focuses on its expression of sexual difference. The person’s soul is the true bearer of identity and is trapped in a body whose sex was “assigned,” which they feel holds them back. Transitioning purports to deliver the “secret knowledge” of the soul and how this identifies the body being liberated and ultimately expressed as good. Those who disagree with this form of liberation are called ignorant. Consequently, if anyone defies these views, they are labeled “homophobic,” “transphobic,” or cultural oppressors. Thanks to traditional media, and social media, these people risk being “canceled” and suffer personally and professionally.
Gender-ideology is ultimately a form of narcissism. It suggests that those who suffer from gender-dysphoria will have material happiness through a new individualism. This new individualism means that the dysphoric will liberate themselves from the constraints of biological oppression and socially-constructed human binaries (men and women).
When effectively engaging schools, the school boards, teachers, and administrators, and the value as parents, are in your right to know what’s going on with your children during the 7 to 8 hours a day they’re in school and specific teachers’ classrooms. Teachers insinuate that it’s in the child’s best interest for them to hide things from you. However, it could be too late if/when you discover what’s happening.
Suppose they refuse to give you pertinent information about your child. In that case, it may be enough to consider sending your children to different schools–schools that respect parental rights and the need for parents to know what their children are experiencing so you can decide what’s in the best interest of your children or grandchildren. Therefore, respectfully calling school boards, teachers, and administrators out is how to get your point across.
This gets me every time I hear about schools sabotaging parents’ rights to be informed about their children. My wife and I are adopting children. Once a family court judge signs off the adoption, we’re leaving California for another state. Our governor, Gavin Newsom, signed SB 107–legislation to provide refuge for trans-kids and their families, which will protect transitioning children and their families if they flee to California from any state criminalizing the parents of trans kids for allowing them to receive gender-affirming care.
Not only that, but the California Family Council also supported legislation AB1314, which mandated schools to inform parents if children decided to change their pronouns or change gender. California’s Assembly Education Committee chair, Al Muratsuchi, refused even to grant a hearing on AB 1314. Al Muratsuchi suggested he didn’t bring it for a hearing because he didn’t want “parents outing children who weren’t ready to come out yet.” However, he didn’t bring this up for a hearing because more than 75% of parents surveyed don’t want schools keeping secrets from parents. Now, we are targeting schools and school boards for the adoption of this policy.
Regarding “gender affirmation” to transition children– it’s an evil, deceptive game that schools and states play. In one genuine sense, one cannot change their gender. One is born with either XX Chromosomes, meaning they’re girls who become women, or they’re born with XY chromosomes, meaning they’re boys who become men.
In March, I went to a detransitioner rally in California. Hearing what happened to young girls and boys, resulting from the so-called adults in their lives, was evil under the transgender cult-based ideology. These young people, many of whom were thirteen or fourteen years old, were given cross-sex hormones, hormone therapy treatment used to help people with gender dysphoria transition from their biological gender to their desired gender. By taking hormones associated with their preferred gender (testosterone for trans men, antiandrogens [test blockers], and estrogen for (trans women), patients can develop some of their desired secondary sex characteristics. Though doctors claim this treatment is reversible, there’s not enough data to determine if that’s true or the psychological effects on those who embrace their biological gender (I heard about the psychological effects at this rally). These people often end up sterile, meaning they can’t produce children.
Also given to young children who are “gender affirmed” are puberty blockers, which are puberty-suppressing hormone therapy at the onset of puberty. These puberty blockers temporarily shut down the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Gonadal (HPG) Axis, which is responsible for the production of hormones (estrogen, testosterone) that cause the development of secondary sexual characteristics in puberty.
Teachers then begin using preferred pronouns associated with the child’s desired gender. Teachers and staff also start using the chosen names that differ from their biological gender. Authority figures, such as teachers, doctors, and counselors, purposefully misinform children. These authority figures encourage the children’s chosen gender without questioning why or taking the time to see if mental or emotional issues are contributing factors that can be overcome. Influenced by their peers, adults, and social media, they promote the transgender lifestyle as popular, desirable, and the solution to all of their problems, without mentioning that some people, after they transition, still are not happy. The suicidality rate for those who transition is about 19 percent.
It bares reaffirming– parents need to know this information–and they need to confront school boards for this information. Rather than teachers and state governments pledging support for transitioning children, parents are better suited to deliberate these issues with their children. Parents are better able to find therapists that can determine what emotional issues are contributing factors to gender dysphoria, which, when overcome, may allow the child to embrace his natural gender.
The other ideological issue concerning parental rights is the racialized perspective of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
During the George Floyd riots in 2020, CRT was reintroduced to American society. CRT propagandizes children into a racialized worldview, which includes age-related or class-related CRT and antiracism. These racial perspectives see everyone and everything through the lens of race. Rather than focusing on seeking practical justice and interpersonal reconciliation that leads to interracial unity, CRT and antiracism ideologies foster racial division, stereotyping, and resentment–specifically against white people. These racial dogmas deliberately treat students differently based on race. First, it assigns immorality to white children based only on their skin color and attributes a noble victim status to blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, and transgender people.
This divisive ideology classifies all individuals into racial groups and identifies them as either perpetually privileged oppressors or constantly victimized members of the oppressed. Specifically, it attributes white children the titles of “victimizer” or “oppressor” only because they are white. For Black children, they ascribe the titles “victimized” or “the oppressed” because defenders of CRT feel that blacks will never be able to transcend “systemic racism” or “institutionalized racism” (terminology used by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael during the Black Power Movement). Critical Race Theory assumes that racism incurably infects classical liberalism and social institutions, requiring their dismantling. It imputes racism not only to those who consciously discriminate based on race but also to white boys and men, in particular, who do not actively participate in the prescribed dismantling of these social institutions, which CRT defenders claim fosters more racial discrimination. The result is that it denies personal agency to white children and adults and black children and adults.
Critical Race Theory has redefined racism. It’s not that anyone can be racist or that it’s an evil or sin that affects the hearts of many people. From the perspective of CRT, racism now affects all institutions and dominant or elite people groups. CRT claims that racism subjugates “people of color” based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy based on white privilege, which ignores the moral progress the country has made since the Civil Rights Movement. “White privilege” was coined by Peggy McIntosh in 1989 in her article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” McIntosh describes white privilege as an “invisible package of unearned assets” and consists of “a matrix of privilege… an asset for any move [she] was educated to make.”
I’m not so sure about that– in 1989 or now, to be honest.
Critical Race Theory disadvantages white students by attributing a specific privilege level based on being white. Proponents of CRT claim that these students have “white privilege.” Defenders also argue that white people are part of the white-dominant culture, which automatically oppresses or victimizes “people of color” systemically and institutionally based on “white supremacy.” This ideology separates people who would otherwise be friends.
Labeling white children as oppressors or victimizers encourages them to avoid Black and Hispanic children and LGBTQ and transgender kids. Who wants to hear that they’re oppressors only because they’re white? That’s punishment, and that kind of designation is just as racist for them as it was for blacks during segregation: blacks then and white children now are considered unequal. For Black and Hispanic children, it creates a sense of nihilism, which rejects moral values and society’s valuation of people, objects, and life. Nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless) demonstrates extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns their existence. A nihilist would have no loyalties and purpose other than an impulse to destroy through self-destructive behavior, given that life is ultimately meaningless. Black and Hispanic children internalize a sense of nihilism resulting from CRT’s suggestion that whites will always oppress blacks.
What is Critical Race Theory?
Critical Race Theory rests upon the foundation of a central point of Critical Theory: cultural ideology and language are principal obstacles to human liberation. The cultural ideology, values, and language were based on the middle class and projected onto the working classes. Consequently, the working class internalized these values. The original theorists thought that internalizing these values was the means of the oppression of the working class. As such, both Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory seek to emancipate those theorists see as “oppressed.” In other words, both are invariably considered social justice.
CRT was born by legal scholars, lawyers, and activists. These scholars thought that many of the advances of the civil rights era had stopped and were being reversed. Derrick Bell, the intellectual leader of this movement, developed Critical Race Theory in the 1970s. In 1971, Derrick Bell became the first Black professor tenured at Harvard University.
Critical Race Theory proponents and scholars promote race as a social construct created to maintain white racial supremacy. They inevitably see power hierarchies everywhere, with white people on top and everyone else at the bottom. The evils of this so-called theory are in the details. Defenders of CRT also rejected the Civil Rights Movement because it took too long for blacks to achieve the rights and protections expressed in the U.S. Constitution. It was an ideological conflict between the public ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the one hand, and Malcolm X, and the Black Power Movement, on the other. Essentially, CRT disapproves of the gradual nature of civil rights.
King used classical liberalism and appealed to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bible–all of which gave both blacks and whites agency to help secure Civil Rights and changed the nation’s moral conscience. However, since the 1970s, classical liberalism has devolved into political leftism, based on Marxism, which adamantly seeks redistribution from the “rich” to those with intersectional identities guided by “equity.” Let me define what intersectionality is. The concept of intersectionality describes systems of inequality– based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class, and other forms of discrimination, which “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects. This multiplicity of oppression means having multiple victimized identities, meaning CRT race critics blend differing layers of marginalized identity. As a result of victimization and numerous oppressed identities, CRT scholars reject agency. They see white people and cultural elites having to make amends for the “oppression” they caused to marginalized minorities.
This is what Shelby Steele has called redemptive liberalism.
Redemptive liberalism was, in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a new activist liberalism that gave itself a redemptive profile by focusing on social engineering regarding blacks rather than individual freedom–liberalism’s classic emphasis. Activism is the moral authority in redemptive liberalism, meaning it strives for the more ambitious goal of an ideal society, concerning itself above all with the wounded souls of the victims and the inner moral intentions of their champions. Redemptive Liberalism is evident within Critical Race Theory. In this liberalism, whites can support racial preference programs, diversity programs, and equity initiatives not because they work but because they are social dispensations–meaning the exemption from a rule or basic requirements for others–to former victims of racism and segregation, thereby being redemptive mainly for progressives. Redemptive Liberalism also has policies about race that are pursued less for what they accomplish than for what they represent: recovering lost innocence (racism), the expiation of shame (racism and segregation), and the feeling of a sense of redemption.
My issue with CRT’s worldview is that it’s not all that thoughtful. Defenders of CRT want it both ways. They want to rely heavily on “white privilege.” CRT proponents attack color-blind policies because they suggest that color-blind policies only attack the most prominent forms of racial discrimination while leaving others unaddressed. For advocates of CRT, colorblindness underlines the point that all disparities between blacks and whites are caused by discrimination. This idea of racial disparities is incorrect, based on several issues. CRT supporters never look at marriage rates between blacks and whites, or blacks and black immigrants– and how marriage emotionally affects children, their education, family stability, academic excellence, hard work, sacrifice, and discipline that leads to a merit-based system of social mobility and economic increase.
In 2020, the marriage rate for black immigrants was 61 percent, the Asian marriage rate was 58 percent, the white marriage rate was 52 percent, and the black marriage rate was 30 percent compared to the national marriage rate of 48 percent. Fifty-two percent of black men and 48 percent of black women have never been married. The number of black children that lived in single-parent households in 2021 was 64 percent, compared to 42 percent for Latinos, 24 percent for whites, and 16 percent for Asians.
However, CRT advocates don’t think about the multiple racial preference programs or the diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs that exist for the advantage of those who are overlooked, based not on equality but on equity. The entire idea of the Civil Rights Movement was providing the same means to all and the right of different groups to have similar social positions and receive the same treatment under the law. Equality also means equal worth and dignity.
Equity refers to fairness and justice of outcome, which is different from equality. According to CRT advocates, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place. Therefore, society must admit and make social adjustments or grant social privileges to improve the socioeconomic imbalances of the “marginalized.” The ongoing process requires us to identify and overcome intentional and unintentional barriers arising from “bias” or “systemic structures” that cause injustice.
In my opinion, classical liberalism–a political philosophy committed to limited government, the rule of law, individual liberties, free markets, and laissez-faire economics (a doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary to maintain peace and property rights). It also includes civil liberties under the rule of law, emphasizing individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech. Classical liberalism is preferable to creating and maintaining a hierarchy that demonizes white Americans only for being white and not morally or culturally examining why others don’t succeed and calling them oppressed.
In Deuteronomy chapter 6:4-8, Moses says this: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Then Moses says in verses 13-19, “Fear the Lord your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. 14 Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; for the Lord your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land. Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah. Be sure to keep the commands of the Lord your God and the stipulations and decrees he has given you. Do what is right and good in the Lord’s sight, so that it may go well with you, and you may go in and take over the good land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors, thrusting out all your enemies before you, as the Lord said.”
Here would have been a good idea for Christians to read Deuteronomy chapter 6 and impress upon Christian children what it meant for God to be “one.” Despite Christianity and Judaism are different, Christians could have impressed this upon their children to know that God was the creator, and that Jesus was his Son, who came and gave his life that we might have redemption and salvation. I think Christian children would have known why God sent his Son to die and be resurrected, that we embrace Jesus, so that when he comes back, we will be allowed into heaven. Paul claimed that Christians were grafted into the Olive Tree, in which Christians now share the nourishing root. This was due to God’s covenant with Abram (exalted father)–in which God renamed him Abraham (father of. Multitudes)– in Genesis 12:1-3. In Genesis 17:5, God changed Abram’s name to Abraham. This means the Jews came first, and Christians are now grafted into the Olive Tree, where we should be.