OPINION:
Two years after it became law, the left-leaning Tennessee Education Association — the state’s largest teachers union, known as TEA — filed a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s “prohibited concepts in education” law, dubbed the critical race theory ban.
The basis? The law is vague.
“The Ban is unconstitutionally vague on its face … because it fails to provide fair notice of what Tennessee public school educators, including the Plaintiffs, can and cannot say, and what materials they can and cannot use.”
The lawsuit continues that the ban allows “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement, up to and including termination and then loss of teaching licenses.”
Hogwash. This law is so clear that fifth graders in the Volunteer State would likely be able to follow it.
Assuming, however, the TEA is not smarter than a fifth grader, we must ask: What has the TEA so dazed and confused?
It is wrong to teach one race or gender is superior, one race is privileged, education decisions should be based upon a student’s protected status, the United States is fundamentally racist, and so on. Not rocket science.
But the fact is, the TEA does get these concepts; it just doesn’t like them. To understand why the TEA wants this law scrapped, one must know history.
In 1922, when Mussolini took Rome, a young Italian Marxist fled to the only place that he might feel welcome: Soviet Russia. One would think that Antonio Gramsci, now in Lenin’s paradise, would be happier than a pig in a poke. But he was not even close.
Gramsci saw that the Bolshevik Revolution had won the obedience of the Russian people, but not their hearts. He recognized that while many publicly converted, their hearts remained with the faith of their fathers, Orthodox Christianity.
This led Gramsci to conclude that the West could never be dethroned if Christianity remained strong and influential.
“The civilized world has been roughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years,” Gramsci said, and he made it clear that the only way Marx would win the day was if the roots of Christianity were pulled.
But how do you erase 2,000 years of history and tradition? To be rid of Christianity was not like deposing a king or queen; it was literally changing a civilization’s DNA.
So how would one Italian Marxist in exile crack the shield of the West? Slowly.
In his book “The Death of the West,” Patrick J. Buchanan, this author’s former boss, asserted, “Rather than seize power first and impose a cultural revolution from above, Gramsci argued, Marxists in the West must first change the culture.”
Mr. Buchanan continued: “To change the culture would require a ‘long march through the institutions’ — the arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium, radio. … Then the people could be slowly educated to understand and even welcome the revolution.”
Is this not where we are today? Drag queens provide story time to elementary school students, while the public is bitterly divided as to whether children should be prescribed puberty blockers and undergo sexual reassignment surgery.
Merit is viewed not as a sign of success but as a relic of systemic racism. And California is marching forward with an equity-driven math curriculum that holds that requiring a correct answer is racist.
All the while, Columbus is viewed as a genocidal manic and the Founding Fathers, by virtue of slavery, have forever tainted the nation.
Should we be surprised that a record low number of Americans aged 18 to 34 — 18% — are proud to be American? For the last half a century, those writing and implementing education policy have taught them little to be proud of.
In Tennessee, lawmakers led by state Rep. John Ragan saw that the long march had arrived in the Volunteer State and immediately took steps to repel the invasion. Tennessee’s prohibited concepts law had a simple message to Tennessee schools and teachers: Teach, don’t preach.
The TEA quips back: The law is vague! We don’t understand! The union further claims that public schools are so scared of this law that one school district scratched a trip to the National Civil Rights Museum.
But scratching such a great trip is not evidence that the law is vague; it is evidence that a school made an incorrect decision, or needs better in-house counsel.
Nothing in the law would force a reasonable school district to conclude that a trip to the place where Martin Luther King Jr. took his last breath was an unlawful act. This is a red herring.
As this case makes its way through the courts, we will soon see that the lawsuit is not about helping teachers or protecting students; it is about ideology. It is about the long march and halting Tennessee’s counteroffensive.
We can’t say that we weren’t warned, and we can’t say the Tennessee Education Association is putting pupils before politics.
• Joseph R. Murray II is a middle school educator and civil rights attorney, and a former speechwriter for Patrick J. Buchanan. He is the author of “Take Back Education.” He may be reached at jrm@joemurrayenterprises.com.
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