Republican lawmakers in Florida have been working to pass a bill that bans discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools from kindergarten through fifth grade. The bill also encourages parents to sue school districts that promote talking about such issues.
Naturally, the entire mainstream press is freaking out, but does the bill actually do what the media says it does?
The final version of the bill that was approved by the state’s Senate and sent to Republican Governor Ron DeSantis for signing states: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Put simply, the bill does not go far enough and appears to be a mirage just like it was in Idaho and every other state conservatives have declared victory over this issue. In Idaho, around 50% of school children are taught about gender identity, and parents in Florida say they have the same battle there as well.
Many Republican legislators have labeled themselves as ‘staunchly conservative’ over the years, but have only seemed willing to defend the values that conservatives haven’t completely conceded on. For policies like gun rights and abortion, Republicans haven’t wavered much and have had major successes.
For other policies like gay marriage — and essentially what amounts to a mandatory celebration of homosexuality in public schools — Republicans are usually missing in action. Meanwhile, groups like the Gay Straight Alliance as well as several others operate fearlessly in red state schools.
Take Back Your Red State Schools
Conservative parents have many more children than liberal parents do and it’s not even close. But there are major obstacles standing in the way of their children adopting and maintaining their inherited conservative values. The educational system is one of these obstacles, but a lot of the content aimed at children is much more prevalent at home.
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, both occurring in June, ultimately changed the face of American civil society, and in turn, helped usher in the last 50 years of the culture wars. Religiosity is all but dead in schools and some conservative pundits say that today, students across America are required to convert to a new religion.
Teachers and schools should not be able to promote gender studies, LGBT rhetoric, or have LGBT groups as this is in direct violation of the religious beliefs of Christian students in those schools.
The term ‘slippery slope’ has been used frequently to describe the rise in licentiousness and decline of sexual morality in American society, but a ‘moral current’ is a more accurate description. This is a battle for the next generation, and conservatives are letting go of the rope in this game of tug-o-war.
Support for same-sex marriage in the U.S. has reached an all-time high of 70%, according to a poll released by Gallup.
The rise in support stems largely from a surge in support from Republicans, who for the first time approve of same-sex marriage at 55%, according to Gallup. This explains the complete forfeiture by the right on these issues.
According to the Gallup studies published in papers like the Guardian, the percentage of adults in the US who identify as LGBTQ+ has doubled over the past 10 years.
According to poll results, a record 7.1% of American adults identify as LGBTQ+, jumping from 3.5% in 2012.
The poll also found that 21% of Generation-Z – those born between 1997 and 2003 – identify as LGBTQ, more than double the proportion of the previous millennial generation.
What conservatives are opposed to today – trans kids, drag story hour, indoctrination on public access tv, and the in-your-face celebration of perversion every June – is a result of zero opposition from the right to the starting point of the moral current. Today, it doesn’t seem to matter what the proponents of this agenda do or how it affects the religious beliefs of other people, because the left has obtained complete control of the moral current of the country.
In elementary and high schools across the country, teachers celebrate pride month in June, force Christian students to participate in the celebration, and shun any parent or student who dares to criticize the rituals of their new religion.
According to the Washington Times, for example, Chicago public schools recently announced that they would be handing out condoms to 5th graders. Another teacher at Brookfield Central High School sent students a link to an online sex toy store and a “pronouns guide,” while another teacher was documented showing an online sex store to students during class.
While teachers boast about having their students pledge allegiance to the LGBT flag, and school counselors talk about ‘coming out’ to students, republicans have been mostly motionless aside from a few tweets about these issues.
It’s gotten bad, real bad, and this is a result of republican representation that is weak, ineffective, and afraid of the mob because they’re living within the moral framework the left has constructed for them instead of living by the morality God.
In an article by the American Mind entitled “Even in Idaho,” Anna Miller and Scott Yenor write about how School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery.
Many parents in Red states think they are immune to the nationwide trends of this sort of material in educational programs. But Coeur d’Alene is one of many examples of how these ideas have crept into Red state schools across the country.
At Lake’s Middle School in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, for example, children as young as 12-years-old were handed out flyers inviting them to LGBT groups at the school.
Like Chicago, children across Idaho are given live condom demonstrations in sex education classes, while teachers in Blaine County school district are trained in gender ideology. Idaho children are also directed by the Department of Health and Welfare to use Planned Parenthood clinics.
While school administrators address students by ‘preferred pronouns’ and teachers are morally corrupting your children, Even in Idaho, legislators refuse to do anything to stop this.
How to Stop It
Over the past few years – and especially during the coronavirus craze – conservatives in blue states have been fleeing for red states because of policies enforced by blue-state politicians. In 2020 alone, millions of Americans fled to states like Texas, Florida, and Idaho, many in search of a reprieve from lawlessness, demographic change, and tyranny in schools.
What many elected Republicans don’t understand, however, is that the reverse of this occurrence is not only possible as well, it’s imperative. And what those fleeing don’t understand is that if their representation in the states they’re fleeing to arent pushed further right, states like Texas and Idaho will be indistinguishable from California.
Under the ‘police powers’ of the tenth amendment, it is clearly stated that the regulation of health, wellbeing, morality and education of citizens is under the sole authority of the states. Police powers are the powers of a state government to make and enforce all laws necessary to preserve public health, safety, and the general welfare of the citizens of the country.
These powers originate from the English common law system, and when the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the states did not surrender their powers as a condition of creating the federal government. The federal government has very few actual powers, the states hold most of the power.
The regulation of morality was a big part of America’s past time up until 1965. For most of American history, we have regulated the morality of citizens in some form or another. There were laws for sodomy and even cohabitation. For a long time, even exposed breasts were banned from American tv shows. The Hays Code specifically, tried to stamp out all lust and licentiousness in American film.
Republican states have made steps in the right direction and may eventually become the true opposition to the moral decay of society we elected them to be. For example, certain Republican-controlled states have banned trans athletes in women’s sports, and some states have even banned puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transitional surgery for minors.
The trajectory appears to be moving in a positive direction, but this is not nearly far enough. While Democrats are literally burning books, training kids to be transexual, telling white children to hate themselves, and locking up their political opponents, republicans are having five-hour-long meetings to discuss the legality and morality of removing “My Two Mommies” from their local library.
More Prevalent at Home than in School
A book written in 1990 called ‘Life After the Ball’ outlined the agenda playing out today, and how America will “conquer its fear and hatred of gays.” The book suggests that the LGBTQ community must transform themselves into an ‘oppressed victim class’ in order to coerce the ‘straights’ into protecting them.
The book also talks about how the push for representation in TV, media, and academia is one of the most important steps in fulfilling their goals. The writer claimed that ‘straights’ are natural protectors and will eventually conform.
Today this plan appears to be going swimmingly.
Just a few years ago the majority of Americans opposed gay marriage and even Barack Obama publicly opposed the idea. Today, the Washington Post is arguing that ‘kink’ belongs at pride parades so children can see it, and drag queens are twerking in the faces of kindergarteners.
A recent report by Entertainment Insider outlines the massive increase in LGBTQ content in children’s programming and explains that the people behind the scenes have been trying to make this happen for years. They are not stopping any time soon.
In January, GLAAD released its annual “Where We Are on TV” report and found that things have been holding steady when it comes to the representation of LGBTQ characters on scripted series on broadcast networks. The group’s previous demands of representation have been met according to their annual report. But GLAAD is not happy with this percentage, the group demanded more recently that the TV industry more than double this number to 25% by 2025.
A tidal wave of gay representation has washed over children’s TV shows, with a 222 percent increase in LGBTQ characters and stories between 2017 and 2019 alone. When parents check shows or movies their children plan to watch, they usually just check whether or not the content is age-appropriate. The vast majority of the websites that provide information don’t outline whether this sort of content appears.
When polled, most children say they first learned about things like homosexuality, binding, and hormone therapy, on social media.
Obergefell v Hodges and Gay Marriage
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.”
Just as Republicans aim to do with gun rights and Roe v Wade, Republican state legislators should be pushing to pass laws within their states that they control, to force a new decision on the disaster that was Obergefell v Hodges.
You cannot be a conservative and be in favor of the decision in Obergefell v Hodges. The fact that conservatives do not even understand why this is, is why we are here in the first place. Why what some call the ‘slippery slope’ of deviant has become more and more slippery. Republicans should not label themselves “conservative” if they’re just living within the left’s moral framing of the world, and unwilling to understand conservatism or conserve anything of value at all.
