In the various American cities and towns nearing school board elections, it is easy to discern the urgency of the battles at hand. As parents and other citizens rally against the various ideological toxins that seek to hijack education, the forces who have mixed that dangerous brew are on high alert.
You could see it when the Attorney General of the United States maligned caring parents as domestic terrorists. Now you can see it as the left and its operatives in the education establishment gear up to make sure school boards are not infiltrated by successful candidacies looking to derail their progress.
That progress, by their measure, has seen the successful injection of poisonous race-baiting and radical sexual content.
On race, the insistence that Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools has become comical. While there may not be ubiquitous manuals titled, “How to Spread CRT in the Elementary Grades,” its tentacles are everywhere, from classroom programs directing white kids to lament their “privilege” to materials informing kids of color that their country will cripple them from the starting blocks with cruel systemic racism.
On sexual matters, hardly a day goes by that someone does not find examples of graphic content, often in books, no minor should read. And even more urgently, the current twisted fetish seeking broad acceptance of gender dysphoria is seeping into curricula featuring young children told that they may choose their gender from a list of ever-growing shades of concocted statuses.
Again, those seeking to quell the uprising will say that such courses of study are not pervasive. Not yet, they’re not, and nor will they be if school board elections elevate the people who will stop it.
In normal times, a slate of school board candidates should be sifted for evidence of good character, fluency in educational issues and a worthy résumé. Those remain important, but the evaluation of school board candidates must now contain a vital element: a clear, unapologetic willingness to block the racial and sexual fanaticism that threatens education at every level.
Candidates reveal their priorities on their websites. Local newspapers often ask them about their agendas. Forums and debates are a chance to learn what makes candidates tick. If they reel off a facile grasp of issues from teacher salaries to bond elections to student test scores, that’s great. But if there is no alarm sounded about the consuming fires lapping at the foundations of education, keep looking.
Hesitation is understandable. It is a far safer path to parrot the usual talking points about generic school board areas of concern. Stepping forward to sound these necessary alarms will attract plenty of negative attention. But as the old military adage goes, if you are attracting flak, that’s how you know you are over the target.
Candidates seeking to battle Critical Race Theory will be maligned as racists, even though they are the ones seeking to dismantle a harmful philosophy that makes kids hate each other and hate America. Those seeking to guard against stark sexual content in works of fiction will be mocked as book-burners, even though no one disputes the right of such works to exist; it is simply a matter of what is appropriate for children and older teens, and there are legions of school officials who have no problem with books with tales, and even illustrations, of all manners of sex acts.
But it is the school board candidates fighting gender radicalization who need our most urgent and immediate support. Activists are seeking to obliterate not just the meaning of the two genders defined by science; they will gladly cheer on the actual dismantling of the sexual identity of children.
The attack on gender features a slew of deceptions that have not attracted sufficient opposition. How else to explain actual clinics filled with actual doctors willing to destroy the boyhoods and girlhoods of confused children? Obviously, this marketplace would not exist without parents willing to indulge in this insanity, and school boards are not the place where states determine broad policy on whether puberty blockers and chemical castration and the like will be permitted by law.
But they are the place where schools determine what is taught about this current societal fixation. We have teachers indoctrinating elementary schoolers into believing that they may choose their genders from a vast menu of debauched choices hatched in the minds of militants. School board candidates stepping forward to block these malevolent forces will be savaged for thwarting what is perversely called “gender-affirming” care, a blight of a term that has horned its way into newsroom style guides.
So as today’s editorial boards assess school board candidates, ambivalence about these crises will be praised as wise and tolerant while attention to them will often erase any likelihood of endorsement. A new generation of candidates needs to know that saving children is more important than fostering praise from the media. They need to be willing to take on fire from multiple sources as they fight for schoolrooms free of racial and sexual poisons.
And upon displaying such courage, they need to be rewarded with success in school districts of every size.
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