The uprising: Families clash with schools over LGBTQ propaganda
In a June like none other, where the LGBTQ agenda has been crammed at increasing velocity down the throats of unwitting Americans, everyday folks are reaching their limits.
With two more weeks to go in “Pride Month,” this is bad news for the rainbow mafia. But it’s a sign of character and courage that the rest of us can take hope in — especially when demonstrated by families in the direct line of propagandistic fire.
In response to the Left’s “sex-and-gender-everything” policies, parents and kids are both flexing their muscles in opposition to schools that are all in on “Pride.”
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Earlier this month, a group of students at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, Massachusetts, reportedly protested a “Pride Month” event by tearing down LGBTQ “Pride” signs and banners and chanting, “USA are my pronouns.”
This prompted the Equity Coalition, an LGBTQ advocacy group, to demand that the Burlington school district discipline students involved in the protest and fill the district’s vacant position of director of diversity, inclusion, and equity, or DEI.
In Huntington Beach, California, students at Edison High School revolted against a “Pride” video shown in math class. For their outbursts, their teacher threatened: “if you’re going to be inappropriate, I will have supervision down and give all of you a Saturday school for next year.”
And a few miles up the California coast, in ultra-Left Hollywood, parents kept their children home from North Hollywood’s Saticoy Elementary School in protest of a planned “Pride Day.”
The frustration extends beyond LGBTQ school events to curriculum and policies, too.
Parents at an elementary school in Connecticut were infuriated after their 8, 9, and 10-year-olds were shown a video celebrating gender identity without the parents’ knowledge, and then given “puberty kits” to take home.
One parent, Kyle Reyes, the father of four kids under age 9, decided to pull them all out of the Granby School District as a result of policies on sexual orientation and gender identity, saying: “These are conversations that, if anyone is going to have with their kids, it should be the parents having with their kids.”
North of the border, at a large protest in front of an Ottawa school board led by Muslim Canadians but also attended by Christians and Jews, parents and kids voiced their opposition to radical gender ideology in the classroom.
Much of their ire was directed at the school board’s recent mandate on gender-neutral pronouns, prompting chants of “Let the parents decide.”
The divide between propaganda and common sense is no more readily apparent than in the context of scholastic sports — where Gallup now reports massive increases in the number of Americans who say biological sex — and not gender identity — should dictate participation in organized sports.
A larger majority of Americans now (69%) than in 2021 (62%) say transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender. Likewise, fewer endorse transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26%, down from 34%.
This finding tracks with a recent study indicating that 65% of Americans say they believe there are only two genders — an increase of six percentage points from 2021.
Now, if school districts had been paying attention to such numbers and operated according to federal law and not the will of cultural elites and LGBTQ evangelists in the federal government, situations like those in Wisconsin and Vermont high schools might have been avoided.
At East High School, in Wisconsin’s Sun Prairie Area School District, an 18-year-old biological male who identified as “trans” entered the girls’ locker room and showered naked in front of a group of terrified 14-year-old freshman girls. In a manifestation of what’s become a troubling trend of parental disenfranchisement, the school district chose not to contact the girls’ parents.
Now, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty is urging the U.S. Department of Education to investigate whether the high school violated federal civil rights law.
A few weeks ago, a Vermont school district that punished a father and daughter for speaking out about a biological male using a girls’ locker room was ordered to cough up $125,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. Considering this, the Wisconsin school district might want to get its legal house in order.
LGBTQ talking points once focused on “equality” and wanting to “live and let live.” Now, yearlong “Pride” initiatives look more like a hostile takeover of government school systems.
What with school libraries shelved with gay porn, LGBTQ curriculum, gender-neutral bathrooms, preferred pronoun policies, and gaslighting parents on the gender identities of their own minor children (frequently facilitated by school administrators), families finally have had enough.
For once, the alphabet mob is back on its heels. But only because taxpaying parents and their brave kids are speaking up.
As noted by Kyle Reyes, the Connecticut dad: “Parents are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it’s time to start fighting back.”
And fight back they will.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Sarah Parshall Perry is a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
