RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/new-stasi-central-connecticut-state-university-jay-bergman/

Last month, in a statement issued by its Office of Equity and Inclusion, Central Connecticut State University established a new policy designating faculty, administrators, and nearly all other employees as “mandated reporters.” In that capacity, they are required to report to this office any information they come across pertaining to “gender-based discrimination.”  Infractions indicative of such discrimination range from “sexual misconduct” – a capacious concept that at other universities has included jokes told within earshot of persons who consider them sexist – to “dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking.”  And to ensure that every instance of discrimination is rooted out, persons reporting it can do so anonymously.

The statement establishing this policy raises more questions than it answers.  First, and most obviously, it fails to include any definition of “gender-based discrimination,” or any indication of its limits.  Can such discrimination manifest itself in speech as well as in action?  If it did, could any punishment by the university be reconciled with its stated commitment to academic freedom, and to the right to free expression guaranteed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and in Article I, Section 5 of the Connecticut State Constitution?

Other aspects of this new policy are no less problematic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/florida-aims-end-sexualization-children-larry-sand/

“In Florida, 33% of eighth graders are proficient in reading and 20% of the state’s residents over the age of 15 are illiterate. As such, maybe it’s time that the schools start focusing on what they have been traditionally mandated to do, and give up their warped social engineering game plan.”

The stories are jaw dropping, infuriating, and plentiful. The school district in St. Paul, MN is partnering with an organization that offers LGBTQ-affirming curricula for students as young as three years old. In Idaho, an 11-year-old girl was coached by her Coeur d’Alene school into a sex change without notifying her parents. As reported by Abigail Shrier, the California Teachers Association held a conference in October 2021, where it advised teachers “on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.”

Sadly, the above is just a drop in the perverse bucket. Stories abound nationwide of teachers and school administrators doing things to students that would be unheard of just a few years ago. In response, the state of Florida is fighting back.

https://americanmind.org/features/parents-rights/the-right-can-win-on-parents-rights/

Following Trump’s lead, a grassroots movement has forced the GOP to fight.

“There’s no such thing as other people’s children,” proclaimed the advocacy group “Together Rising” recently on Twitter. This was in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s bill protecting parents’ rights, denying schools the ability to instruct children in sexual orientation and gender identity prior to the fourth grade. This was an outrage to leftists, who ludicrously designated the bill “Don’t Say Gay” and furiously demanded to continue teaching every child—including yours—about every kind of sex.

It has always been an assumption among leftists that experts, rather than parents, ought to be in charge of child-rearing. They used to say it more subtly: “It takes a village,” they would murmur, with winsome smiles. But in recent decades, this faux rhetoric has given way to a much more direct attack. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” said former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, during a pivotal race this year in which President Biden campaigned on his behalf.

Frustrated by the general public’s hesitancy to embrace new, increasingly bizarre ideologies at a moment’s notice, woke elites have found it necessary to assert their power over children with more urgency. Attorney General Merrick Garland labeled concerned parents “domestic terrorists” this year, using the administration’s favorite catch-all accusation to subject dissidents to the full force of the law. Marx’s old demand to abolish the nuclear family has come back in vogue, popularized most notably by Black Lives Matter. Other examples of anti-parent hostility abound.

https://www.city-journal.org/diversity-is-a-smokescreen-in-college-admissions

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two more cases challenging the use of race as a criterion in college admissions, as has allegedly happened at Harvard University (a private institution) and the University of North Carolina (public). On the surface, the argument turns on whether the desire for a diverse student body trumps many laws and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit discrimination and guarantee equal protection to all. The question applies to virtually all universities because they are either public or accept government money.

The main argument in favor of discrimination in admissions is that diversity enhances the educational experience. But is it true that a student body needs to parallel, even roughly, the demographics of the general population to ensure that students are exposed to people from diverse backgrounds? In fact, we would argue that the very process of using affirmative action—read: “discrimination”—to enhance the numbers of designated identity groups can contribute to the tribalization of the student body rather than helping it cohere into a harmonious whole. Furthermore, even after receiving an affirmative action boost, minority students sufficiently qualified for a given university are already likely to have similar backgrounds to non-minority students, thus limiting the diversity of viewpoints and experiences that affirmative action allegedly enhances.