OPINION:
Last week in the news:
In New York City, at Trinity School on the Upper West Side, where parents pay $60,000 per year for their sons and daughters to get “a balanced educational program for body and soul,” Jennifer Norris, Director of Student Activities, proudly boasts, to an undercover reporter, that she works at “a real fancy school … I can’t pretend I’m promoting an agenda even though I clearly am with all the stuff I’m doing… I feel like I’m a double agent… Unfortunately, it’s the white boys who feel very entitled to express their opposite opinions… There is a huge contingent of them that are just horrible… [They] are so protected by capitalism that it makes me sad…We just need someone like Dexter (a fictional vigilante serial killer) to ’take them out.’”
In El Paso, Texas, an English teacher at Franklin High School brags that she takes “pride” in instructing students not to judge someone “just because they want to have sex with a 5-year-old.” She then tells her impressional young class they should call pedophiles “minor-attracted persons” instead.
In Chicago, four public school districts declare they have partnered with Lurie Children’s Hospital to provide materials that promote gender theory, trans activism, critical race theory, and the condemnation of “western society’s white values.” In case you miss their clear intent, the goal of the curriculum, says Jennifer Leininger, associate director of Lurie’s Community Programs, is to “communicate a non-binary understanding of gender” and to disrupt the “entrenched gender norms in western society” while encouraging children to transition to a more “gender creative world.” “White” western ideas, according to Leininger, are “oppressive, gender binary, and falsely divide the world into to categories of man and woman that result in racial discrimination.. cissexism and systemic discrimination.”
In Rapid City, South Dakota, the local public schools, seeking not to be outdone by their big city progressive exemplars, now include suggested readings from a graphic novel called “Fun Home.” This book depicts nudity and various sex acts, including, but not limited to, oral sex and images of masturbation. Rapid City educators also promote “Girl, Woman, Other,” which celebrates the journey of women of various sexual and gender identities.
And then, you have two examples from Oklahoma. The first is from Bixby Public Schools near Tulsa, where the book “Push,” which contains graphic descriptions of incest and bisexuality, is now on the 9th graders’ reading list. And the second comes from Norman, Oklahoma, where a teacher named Summer Boisemier has made national news for defiantly encouraging her students to read “Gender Queer,” which includes pictures of adult men engaged in oral sex with minor age boys.
And lest you think none of this academic dispute affects you, consider Bartlesville, Oklahoma (thought by many to be the conservative bastion of the reddest of red states), where Phillips 66, along with the local State Farm Insurance agency and a children’s dental clinic called Safari Smiles are all sponsoring an event called “Pride Lives Here.” This “family-friendly” celebration comes complete with drag queens, bouncy toys, and fake money, presumably for parents to teach their children how to place dollar bills in the G-strings of “ladies” such as Nicki Savage, and Sky Hye Kye.
Sidebar: What could possibly be more misogynistic? This is the moral equivalent of the old minstrel shows where racist whites dressed up in exaggerated makeup and garb and mocked African Americans. This is literally “black-facing” women. It is the height of hypocrisy. It is cultural appropriation at its worst. It is the quintessential denial of feminism. You can’t be a feminist if you deny a female is a biological fact and cede her every legal and ontological right over to men who promote such insulting caricatures of real women. When will today’s women rise up, as did courageous Black civil rights leaders of the 60s, and demand this stop? When will all of us, who still have a modicum of common sense, start refusing to do business with any vendors, restaurants, dentists, or insurance companies who support this degradation of other human beings? Decent people should no more support this than they would a local company that mocks Blacks, Native Americans, or Asians. Until good people who respect women and care about children take our dollars and patronage elsewhere, this grand insult of misogyny and sexual grooming will not stop.
And why, pray tell, do you and I have to ask these questions? It all starts in our schools. What is taught today in the classroom today will be practiced tomorrow in our culture. Garbage in - Garbage out. The chickens always come home to roost, and these chickens are very dirty birds.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper) is a columnist for The Washington Times, former university president and radio host.
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