I feel like I missed something big over the last few years.
It seems like, at some point, the education establishment sent out a memo saying, “Okay, everybody. Starting next semester, we will begin teaching every young elementary student about sexuality and gender identity. Everybody good with that? Great, carry on.”
Or maybe a law passed late on a Friday night when no one was paying attention that authorized and funded the sexualizing of our youngest children in public schools. If either of these happened, there are millions of parents out there, myself included, that did not get the memo or hear about the change in law.
Usually, the big changes that affect our civilization go through the “sausage making” of a deliberative, legislative process that includes policy debates, public input, and votes publicly cast in legislative chambers. Yet, I recall none of this taking place before radical sexual ideologies and Critical Race Theory were smuggled into classrooms.
The truth is, there really was no debate about any of the things we are seeing in our schools right now — not over Critical Race Theory, and certainly not about gender-reassignment and pronoun switches.
Things have radically changed since my youngest completed elementary school in 2012, and it’s finally becoming clear how it happened. Through a calculated and intentional process that bypassed broad community debate, left-wing ideologues began indoctrinating students in the “colleges of education” at our state universities. These are the programs where college students take required courses to become teachers. And like a virus, some of these teachers now bring the infection they receive from their college curriculums to K-5 classrooms. This process has been mostly undetected, until recently.
Because of pressure applied by concerned parents, however, legislatures are taking action all across the nation, including in North Carolina, and the education establishment is not happy.
Exhibit A: The obscene faculty-led protest at UNC Wilmington
Case in point: This past week, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s Watson College of Education announced that Sen. Michael Lee, R-New Hanover, was receiving an award at its yearly banquet for his bi-partisan work on the Hunt-Lee Commission, the Excellence in Schools Act, and his work procuring funding for the Isaac Baer Early College.
But because Sen. Lee also supports the “N.C. Parents Bill of Rights,” part of which limits classroom instruction on sexuality in the youngest elementary grades, a protest was organized by Caitlin Ryan, a UNCW associate professor who spends her career pushing LGBTQ subject matter into K-5th grades by authoring articles such as “Navigating Parental Resistance.” She has even co-authored a book on the subject, titled “Reading the Rainbow” — described as an “LGBTQ Inclusive Literacy Instruction in the Elementary Classroom.”
Together, with a few of her colleagues, the professor tried having the award rescinded. When that effort failed, they attempted to embarrass Sen. Lee by staging a “walk-out” when he was invited to the stage. The night concluded with Lee and his family walking to their car as a profanity-laced gauntlet of dozens of angry people surrounded them.
Michael Lee and his wife both attended UNCW. Sen. Lee once taught there as an adjunct professor, and one of their children is about to graduate from the university. They have supported UNCW for decades, and the school, rightly, chose to recognize him Tuesday evening.
But what should have been a nice event that celebrated advances in regional education, devolved into a disgraceful spectacle. It left no doubt over the corollary between the curriculum in our colleges of education and what we see happening in our elementary school classrooms.
The seeds planted by left-wing radicals over the last decade are now in full bloom and have become the “inclusive” policies decimating girls sports and locker rooms and causing exponential rise in kids identifying as “trans.”
If you are one of those scratching your head wondering how we got here, now you know.
NOTE: I purchased the book listed above — “Reading the Rainbow,” co-authored by Caitlin Ryan of UNCW’s Watson School of Education, who helped organize the protest — and read it over the weekend. If you want to know exactly what is being taught, pick up a copy.