Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Good morning.
One aspect of writing O’Bservations each month that I really enjoy is you go where the news takes you. It’s like lying on an inflatable raft in the ocean on your summer vacation. You don’t need to steer or control the direction – the waves simply carry you back to shore.
And once you hit the shoreline, you reach down and scoop up the news gems like shiny objects lying on the beach.
It’s been a big month for observing those shiny objects. One of the biggest yet, in fact, in the two-plus years I have prepared this report.
Locally and nationally, instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic has taken a back seat to the public outburst over instructing students on how to change their gender. Many parents who haven’t yet withdrawn their children from the public schools are not happy about this ruinous trend.
In Massachusetts, parents in the Ludlow Public School district filed a lawsuit in federal court. It claims teachers in Ludlow’s Baird Middle School encouraged children to change their names and pronouns without parental consent.
At Bethel Park High School, the presence of two outside instructors teaching gender identity to students has parents puzzled. Below is one of the graphics they used, “The Genderbread Person.”
In Mt. Lebanon, the disturbance brought on by one first-grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School intensified. If you recall, the teacher (Mrs. Williams) had provoked parents by reading two books on the subject of changing one’s gender to her first graders without parental notification or consent. More than a dozen parents voiced their displeasure in person to the school board in April, to no avail.
The situation escalated when Mrs. Williams brought her first-grade boy (dressed as the girl he is becoming) to Jefferson Elementary for Take Your Child to Work Day. She decided on her own to participate in the event and sent an email the day before to parents notifying them of her decision. The district did not know, nor the Jefferson administration or staff. Ten parents (half of the class) responded by keeping their children home from school that day.
“There has been no discipline and no follow up to any parent concerns from administrators or the board,” resident Kimberly Mauro, a parent rights advocate and herself a teacher, wrote me in an email. “I also already know of many parents who are requesting that their children do not have Mrs. Williams in class next year. That will be a fun staffing crisis.”
Gender dysphoria in children is obviously a very complicated and painful subject for everyone involved. But a few common-sense questions over this situation occur to me:
- Aren’t teachers supposed to be subject to rules? When I was a teacher, I surely was.
- Aren’t administrators supposed to enforce uniform policy set by the school board?
- Why does Mrs. Williams’ personal ideology vacate parental rights?
- And, perhaps the most disturbing question of all: how in good conscience can members of the Mt. Lebanon School Board excuse this rogue behavior?
I don’t believe every member of the School Board condones Mrs. Williams’ rogue behavior. But because they’re fearful of being called out as bigots, they presumably feel they must support her beliefs, even if they judge her behavior as inappropriate. They end up doing nothing, hoping the situation will blow over and go away, which is the worst possible outcome. It’s a sad situation – a good school district is being wrecked because they lack courage. The same could be said about the entire country.
As a former teacher and journalist, I am old enough to recall the time when both professions adhered to a simple rule: that bias should be kept out of your classroom or reporting. Let me give you an example of this, which illustrates how much times have changed, and how quickly.
Not that long ago, back in 2004, when Phil Bronstein was editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, he cordially asked two reporters on his staff – both lesbians, both actively covering the subject of gay marriage for the paper – to recuse themselves from future coverage after they married. They complied. There was no fuss. All parties accepted the standard employed then in journalism: it was an obvious conflict of interest to cover something you had a personal stake in, especially one as controversial as gay marriage was then. In fact, it was such accepted convention that the rival Los Angeles Times endorsed the decision in this column.
Now, when the New York Times decides to do a hit job on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, which it did recently – devoting 20,000 words to denounce it as “the most racist show in the history of cable news” – editors assign the task to a reporter with known bias who also guests as an MSNBC political analyst (“no conflict there!” as pointed out in the link).
The educational equivalent is seen in the situation with Mrs. Williams. Gender ideology has been so thoroughly normalized that not even the School Board reins her in. When I was a first grader in New Jersey, I didn’t even know my teacher’s first name, for heaven’s sake! That was a long time ago, admittedly (1962 to be exact), but it seems incontrovertible that parents should have the right to decide how their children are “educated” on subjects of such extreme sensitivity. The 10 parents who kept their children home on Take Your Child to Work Day would surely agree.
I suppose what we are dealing with in Mt. Lebanon could be worse. Consider what this Colorado middle school girl encountered when she attended an after-school art club recently. It turned out to be the Gender and Sexuality Art Club. Here’s the video of her mom (Erin Lee) telling the story. The video provides more detail about “The Genderbread Person” referenced above.
How’d we get here? How did this radical version of “show and tell” become the accepted norm among progressive educators? The best explanation I’ve heard comes from theologian Carl Trueman, a professor at Grove City College. He just released a new book, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution.
It is an abridged and updated version of his earlier work, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, about which he spoke during his lecture at Beverly Heights last October. Both books explore what he calls the “expressive individualism” of our modern era, and the “strange new world” we now occupy. Dr. Trueman explains the thesis of his new book in the interview immediately below with theologian Albert Mohler.
The Trueman video is well worth listening to. Here is part of what he says:
“What you see [today] is a culture that has shifted dramatically towards seeing inner emotions or inner convictions or inner psyche as being the foundation of who we are and external reality as having to bow or conform to that,” Dr. Trueman explains. “So the modern self is one that prioritizes inner feelings and is dramatically impatient with external authorities, even now the authority of our own body.”
In our current cultural climate, children are encouraged to explore whether their “inner feelings” align with their gender (whatever that means). But as this paper from the American College of Pediatricians makes abundantly clear, the popular protocol of treating gender dysphoria in children with puberty blockers “is founded upon an unscientific gender ideology, lacks an evidence base and violates the long-standing principle [among physicians] of ‘First do no harm.’”
One mom in our church recommends that parents concerned about this trend consult the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier, an investigative journalist with degrees from Columbia, Oxford and Yale. Both Target and Amazon temporarily stopped selling her book when transgender activists sought to ban its sales. Ms. Shrier’s appearance at Princeton University last December, moreover, had to be moved off campus and limited to 35 people in response to campus unrest, and threats she received, over her alleged “transphobic views.”
Ms. Shrier, to her credit, refuses to be silenced: witness this essay; or this investigation; or this podcast on Honestly with Bari Weiss, in which Ms. Shrier reads the entire speech she gave at Princeton. It’s an impassioned and thoughtful plea on how freedom is being strangled in America, on this subject and many others.
“Parents tell me they are afraid to push back on the activist teachers and social workers at their kids’ school for fear of being called some flavor of phobe,” Ms. Shrier says. “Whatever freedom is, it isn’t that.”
Our Beverly Heights mom who is heavily invested in this subject calls Irreversible Damage “an amazing resource.” She adds, “Our opponents state, like a broken record, that no one is out there trying to convert your kids to join the LGBT movement, that exposure to these topics will only increase awareness, acceptance and inclusiveness. I am here to tell you that there are predators out there and there are influencers out there that are very much recruiting our youngest.”
Although the Biden administration recently endorsed radical medical interventions for gender dysphoric teenagers – approving double mastectomies, for instance – the mainstream news media is finally listening to trans clinicians and trans adults who say teenage transitions are out of control.
The Washington Post published this heartbreaking essay by adult trans woman Corinna Cohn, who wrote about her sex reassignment surgery. She warns young people not to rush into this so quickly. “From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life,” she writes. And: “I chose an irreversible change before I’d even begun to understand my sexuality.”
On another related subject: I’m willing to wager that “expressive individualism” is at the root of the unprecedented Supreme Court leak last week. Never before in American history had a full draft opinion of the nation’s highest court been made public until its formal release. But that’s exactly what happened. The legal eagles among you can read the entire 98-page opinion here, revealed by Politico.
It’s even more explosive because the opinion, if it holds, would overturn Roe v. Wade.
The draft majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito, whose opposition to Roe is well established. The Alito opinion is a careful, detailed reversal of the landmark 1973 decision, which made abortion legal. It is superbly reasoned and makes clear that Roe is not only a moral travesty but a legal one, too. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett concurred in the preliminary vote taken before the draft was written in February.
Here are excerpts from the draft opinion: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” It goes on: “We hold that Roe and Casey” – the 1992 decision that upheld Roe – “must be overruled.” Moreover: “It is time to heed the Constitution [hallelujah!] and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” where it rightfully resides, in the opinion of many legal scholars, including none other than former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Despite being a champion of liberal causes, RBG often questioned Roe’s reasoning.
Chief Justice John Roberts was reportedly against fully overturning Roe, so he could perhaps still sway one of those originally in the majority by the time the official decision is handed down (expected this summer). The day after the Politico story, Justice Roberts ordered an investigation into the “absolutely appalling” leak. The Wall Street Journal called it “an unprecedented breach of trust,” while former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr suggested that the leaker may have committed obstruction of justice, which is a criminal offense.
The leak is damaging on many levels, but not really surprising, it seems to me, given the “expressive individualism” subject mentioned above. I liked the context provided in this Bari Weiss column. While she personally favors preserving a woman’s right to choose, she nonetheless sees grave societal danger in “this age of rage.” Ms. Weiss asked “one of the smartest professors I know at one of the top law schools” for his thoughts on the leak. He offered these trenchant observations: “To me, the leak is not surprising because many of the people we’ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing.”
“They think everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.” He continued: “I’m sure this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don’t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.”
Reading his comments made me think of the recent near riot at Yale Law School, in which students disrupted what was supposed to be (ironically) a discussion about how attorneys representing different ideologies could come together in support of free speech. But not on this day. Our nation’s future leaders closed down the event. Yale Law students shouted down Kristen Waggoner, a devout Christian and general counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom.
“Protect trans kids,” the protesters chanted, among other things. Some of what they chanted cannot be repeated here. They made obscene gestures, pounded on classroom walls and more. Ms. Waggoner and her fellow panelist (a progressive atheist) had to be escorted to safety by police. For the first time in her life, Ms. Waggoner sat in the back seat of a patrol car, as she explains in this inspiring video about the event.
Before being escorted out of the building, and before the 150 or so protesters canceled the event, she received support from an unexpected ally. A Yale Law student had written her a note, which she read before the event began. It quoted Jesus’ words from John 15:18-19. “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me first,” the message read. It closed: “Keep the faith. Good luck!”
“There are a few moments in my legal career that I can look back on where I know that God had me in a place for a reason,” she says in the video. “What I did in that moment was that I said a quick prayer and I launched. And as I walked out of the Yale Law School that day [and into the squad car] … I thanked God for His provision in that moment.”
Friends, as I said at the outset, it’s been a very busy news month. There are many subjects I could reasonably take up before I close. There’s the appalling situation in Ukraine and the relentless barbarity there. There are new studies which document the extraordinarily high cost of the Covid shutdowns, and how they failed to benefit public health.
There was the Department of Homeland Security’s disclosure that it had created a new Disinformation Governance Board, to be run by a woman named Nina Jankowicz who writes songs about misinformation for fun while pretending to be Mary Poppins. At first, I thought it was a prank. It’s not. Has no one in the Biden Administration read George Orwell? Apparently not. They have, however, at the Babylon Bee. The satiric Christian website parodied what it called the new “U.S. Ministry of Truth” as it interrogates a man who shared “misinformation.”
But Ms. Waggoner has struck the perfect closing chord. With the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade, our cultural polarization is sure to intensify. Abortion advocates are continuing their protests outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court Justices. A group known as Ruth Sent Us is urging protesters to target Christian churches.
Christians who stand for life will no doubt be subjected to attack in the coming months, spiritually if not verbally. The Evil One will see to that. At times such as these, it’s useful to remember Jesus’ words, written in the note to Ms. Waggoner: “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me first.” Do not fear. Consider the biblical wisdom Kyle Bennett and Rick Wolling offer in our latest issue of Scattered Seeds on “thinking Christianly about disagreement in a hostile culture.”
I’ll be back again in June (God willing) with another of my monthly reports. Until then, may the Lord bless you and keep you.