A video that has gone viral on social media shows a southern California school teacher boasting about having her students pledge allegiance to the LGBT flag every morning, after she removed the American flag because it made her uncomfortable.
The teacher, reportedly identified as Kristin Pitzen of Newport Mesa School District in California, recorded a video where she recounted taking down the American flag, while laughing about having the kids in her class pledge to the gay pride flag instead.
“Okay, so during third period, we have announcements and they do the pledge of allegiance,” the teacher, identified as Kristin Pitzen of Newport Mesa School District in Orange County, said in a video posted to social media. “I always tell my class, stand if you feel like it, don’t stand if you feel like it, say the words if you want, you don’t have to say the words.”
“So, my class decided to stand but not say the words. Totally fine,” she continued in the now-viral video.
“Except for the fact that my room does not have a flag,” she said, explaining that she removed the flag during the pandemic and then whispered to the camera, “because it made me uncomfortable.”
“In the meantime, I tell this kid, ‘We do have a flag in the class that you can pledge your allegiance to. And he like, looks around and goes, ‘Oh, that one?'” and points to the pride flag.
Prayer in schools was just as common as the pledge of allegiance before the 1960s. Following the 1960’s sexual revolution, this all changed and continues to change each passing year.
In June of 1962, the United States Supreme Court decided in Engel v. Vitale that a prayer approved for use in schools was in violation of the First Amendment by constituting schools an ‘establishment of religion.’
The following year, in June of 1963, the Court disallowed Bible readings in public schools for similar reasons, in Abington School District v. Schempp.
These two landmark decisions ultimately changed the face of American civil society, and in turn, helped usher in the last 50 years of the culture wars.
Popular pundits in conservative media say that now students across America are required to participate and even celebrate a new June religion.
Kimberly Davis was a former county clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky, who gained international attention in August 2015 when she defied a U.S. federal court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Davis was elected Rowan County Clerk in 2014. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, and all county clerks in Kentucky were ordered to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Citing personal religious objections to same-sex marriage, Davis began denying marriage licenses to all couples to avoid issuing them to same-sex couples. A lawsuit, Miller v. Davis, was filed, and Davis was ordered by the U.S. District Court to start issuing marriage licenses. She appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the application to appeal was denied.
Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito recently blasted the high court’s 2015 same-sex marriage decision, when the court declined to hear a case brought by the former Kentucky county clerk. Alito and Thomas agreed with the decision not to hear the case but used the occasion to take a legal baseball bat to the court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision.
Thomas said that the court’s decision “enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss.”
“Davis may have been one of the first victims of this court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision,” Thomas and Alito wrote. But they agreed that the court properly decided not to take up Davis’ case because, they said, it does not “cleanly” present the issues in the court’s 5-4 decision five years ago. Nevertheless, they said, the case “provides a stark reminder” of the consequences of the same-sex marriage decision. By choosing to endorse “a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix,” they said. “Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty.”
Many conservatives argue that issues like trans kids, drag story hour, the surge in LGBT content in children’s entertainment, and the in-your-face celebration of pride month every June is a result of a slippery slope since the Obergefell decision.
