20th Century Bigotry Updated

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined on the fraud that’s rampant—and hard to root out—in Federal programs intended to give a special leg up on project awards to “Disadvantaged Business Enterprises.” They closed their piece with this bit of truism on the…foolishness…of singling out government-favored groups of Americans for special treatment.

Trying to do social engineering via civil engineering makes federal projects opaque, inefficient and—far too often—dishonest.

To which I add, it’s also just another way for the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party to repeat—updated for the 21st century—the segregationist bigotry of the middle of the last century.

Defenseless

Wisconsin State Congressman Scott Allen is proposing a state law that would give local school boards the ability to decide for themselves whether to allow firearms in their districts rather than being hamstrung (in several senses) by a Statewide ban on firearms in all schools. Allen, on the origin of his bill:

This bill came about at the request of the Germantown School Board who wrote that the “gun free school zone” signs do nothing but notify a criminal that there will be few, if any, people in the building that can defend themselves. Schools provide soft targets for those looking to do harm, and this bill gives school boards the option to change that.

That’s a pretty sensible step toward Wisconsin’s citizens being able to defend themselves and their children until the second responders, the police, arrive on the scene just a very few minutes later. Those very few minutes are when the shooter’s butchery occurs unless the first responders, the citizens already present, can defend.

Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor, Tony Evers, says otherwise.

This bill shouldn’t make it to my desk—but if it does, I’ll veto it. Plain and simple. I already vetoed Republicans’ bill to allow loaded guns on school grounds because increasing firearms on school grounds won’t make our schools or our kids safer. So, let me be clear: I’ll veto any bill that weakens Wisconsin’s gun-free school zone law. Period.

Evers doesn’t take Germantown’s school board seriously; he wants that Gun-Free Zone sign posted and that exposure proclaimed. Evers is showing that he doesn’t want common sense firearm laws, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Evers is insisting, instead, that he wants Wisconsin’s schools to be target zones for shooters.

Evers plainly wants Wisconsin’s school children, teachers, and school staff to be as defenseless in those critical minutes as is his gun control ideology.

Rogue Judge

A couple of teachers had the impudence to demur from compulsory “antiracism training” imposed by their Springfield Public Schools district managers.

In response, US District Judge Douglas Harpool, of the Western District of Missouri, not only ruled against the teachers, he ordered them to pay $313,000 in legal costs for bothering the district, and he did this cavalierly disregarding their arguments and issuing his ruling via summary judgment—which means the court—Harpool—never really took the case up, or took it seriously. He wrote in pertinent part, as summarized by Just the News:

They have not provided evidence they were compelled to “speak favorably” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.

Never mind that the very parts that Harpool cited demonstrates the compulsory nature of the requirement not to speak unfavorably about the district’s “message” and not to remain unaffiliated or unassociated with the district’s “message.” That pressure to not be unaligned or to not speak unfavorably is exactly the compulsion to speak favorably and to align. The fact that the beratement went unchallenged by the program’s instructors or the district’s managers further emphasizes the compulsory nature of the district’s “message.”

This is a Federal judge who needs to be removed from the bench forthwith. He has shown himself not just incapable of, but openly refusing to, adjudicating a case objectively and on the basis of the facts and statute(s) presented. Instead, Harpool reigns over his court on the basis of his personal agenda.

Harpool’s ruling can be read here.

A String’s Attached

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.

Now the Biden/Cardona DoEd is proposing a rule that would ignore the sex-based Title IX statute and require biological men be allowed to compete in women’s sports in those schools that get Federal funding.

The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are[.]

Never mind that a transgender woman is a man by his biology, by his genes, by his XY chromosome pair.

Never mind that a transgender man is a woman by her biology, by her genes, by her XX chromosome pair.

This is the Biden administration’s open war on women.

My advice to the States: don’t take the Federal funds. The strings attached are more like chains.

Grooming

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.

It gets worse. According to the lawsuit the woman filed last Monday,

Oregon’s Resource and Adoptive Family (RAFT) training [the woman was required to] attend[] urged potential parents to “use a child’s preferred pronouns, take a child to affirming events like Pride parades, or sign the child up for dangerous pharmaceutical interventions like puberty blockers and hormone shots.”

Assuming the lawsuit’s claim is even remotely accurate, how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?

Nor is Oregon alone. There’s the Broward County (Florida) Public Schools board. Board member Brenda Fam at a recent board meeting put some questions to her fellow board members that her constituent parents had asked her regarding the board’s proposed sex education curriculum.

They want to know what the definition of a woman is for sexual education curriculum in Broward County. They want to know what individuals can get pregnant and what individuals can give birth.

The district’s Superintendent, Earlean Smiley:

They want to know what the definition of what a woman is in the sexual education curriculum for Broward County. That question is more than a question. It is a thought process, it’s an examination, a lot of laws based on a lot of things.
I guess I’m procrastinating and hesitating because there is no clear-cut answer I can give you at this point[.]

Fellow board member Sarah Leonardi:

This curriculum, the policy, the support guide, the goal of all of us being here is to support children and to educate children. And not to engage in a political line of questioning that distracts from that mission. I just think it’s very important that we stick to the purpose of, again, the curriculum, the policy, the support guide, which is to support children and not get distracted by other agendas.

No, the questions are quite simple and straightforward, and the biology underlying the questions is just as straightforward. It isn’t “a thought process,” it isn’t an “examination;” the biology of the matter perfectly straightforward. Nor is it “other agendas;” the other agendas, “the politics,” center on this board’s efforts to blur physiology, to disguise the ideological nature of the board’s—and the Superintendent’s—intended “teachings” and to hide all of that from the parents.

Here, too, I ask:  how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?