Speak the truth, and be fired. Hurt someone’s feelings with that truth, and be banned altogether from your profession.
That’s what has happened to a teacher in Great Britain, a public school teacher who happens to be Christian, after having mistakenly “misgendered” (can there even be such a thing in a sane world?) a secondary school student and then compounding his sin by speaking honestly about his thoughts on gay marriage when a student asked.
DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona (D) wants to enact a rule that would expand Title IX (illegally, but that’s a separate problem) to require State education systems to include transgender athletes in all heretofore women’s sports programs and all on heretofore women’s sports teams. Half of the governors of our States object.
If it comes down to it, Cardona’s move is very likely to fail in the courts. That will be an expensive and time consuming enterprise.
I propose another solution to be pushed in parallel with the lawsuit effort. It also would be expensive and time consuming to put into effect, but I think it would have a more permanent, and more beneficial, outcome.
In response to a collection of education-related laws recently enacted in Florida, Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar said in his news release,
This new law grossly oversteps in trying to silence teachers, staff, professors, and most other public employees. We will not go quietly….
Here’s some of what those silencing laws do:
New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor, Phil Murphy, has decided to intervene, nakedly, on the side of unions in a labor dispute between Rutgers faculty and Rutgers administrators.
Rutgers faculty walked off the job Monday after three employee unions launched a strike. The move has left classrooms empty….
Under New Jersey law, university administrators can go into State court and get an injunction forcing an end to the strike and a resumption/continuation of negotiations. Murphy has stepped in, though, and told the administrators “don’t you dare.” Murphy’s diktat isn’t, strictly speaking, enforceable, but Murphy does control 20% of Rutgers’ state funding, and he appoints the majority of its board.
President Joe Biden (D) and his DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona are trying to rewrite the Title IX statute to bar States from categorically ban[ning] transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.
Never mind that the actual statute, enacted those decades ago, is explicitly designed to give women a fair and reasonably equal opportunity to play sports: if a State school or a local school district has a men’s program, that school or district must fund and provide for a substantially similar program for women.
A woman, a mother of five children already, and a devout Christian, living in Oregon, tried to adopt two more children. Tried, and was denied by the State.
According to Oregon’s Department of Human Services, the state’s adoption application requires that potential parents “respect, accept, and support…the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of children.
The woman, already well into Oregon’s adoption process, then was required to attend explicit training to ensure she effected ODHS’ requirement. She advised them she could not attend; it violated her Christian beliefs, especially concerning the number of sexes extant in humans.
A highly qualified educator was offered a position as Superintendent of Easthampton Schools, in Massachusetts. Then he committed the unpardonable and heinous crime of addressing, in an email, the school board’s Chairwoman Cynthia Kwiecinski and Executive Assistant Suzanne Colby as “Ladies.”
Those ladies promptly rescinded the board’s offer as a result of that courtesy. It seems that simple, courteous salutations of respect are now microaggressions in those…persons’…fetid imaginations.
[The unhired educator Vito] Perrone said Kwiecinski told him that using “ladies” as a greeting was hostile and derogatory and that “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem,'” he told the [Daily Hampshire] Gazette, adding that she also reprimanded him for using “ladies” as a microaggression.
SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD section, the Department of Defense Education Activity, appears to be disbanding DoDEA’s own section focused on pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion claptrap onto our military members’ children in DoD schools. That subordinate organization, the DEI unit, was founded on explicitly racist tenets. These are from the originally selected head of that organization:
So exhausted at the White folks in these PD sessions. This lady actually had the caudacity to say Black people can be racist, too. I had to stop the session and give the Karen the business. We are not the majority. We don’t have power.
…every book we make available in our libraries…. This is the claim—and he’s actually serious—by Andrew Cluley, Ann Arbor School District spokesperson, in response to queries concerning why his K-12 libraries are blithely adding gender- and “white supremacy”-oriented books to their stacks. The librarians do, supposedly, read the reviews and descriptions carefully.
It’s possibly true—remotely so—that librarians are unable to read, beforehand, all of their book selections to high school libraries. Maybe, though, the school district’s high school librarians should slow down their library additions so they can read their additions, and not simply rely on reviews and descriptions written by others. Firsthand knowledge instead of secondhand claims.
In an op-ed centered on the question of who owns institutions of higher education like universities, Richard Vedder, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, identified seven categories of people who claim ownership of these institutions: