I remember how it was -- JR
Don’t Buy Media’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Distortions About Florida’s Parental Rights Bill
For the crime of trying to protect young children from sexually explicit material in the classroom, Florida legislators are being crucified by the media.
The Florida House recently passed the parental rights bill known as HB 1557, and it has cleared a final committee in the state Senate. Senators now have until March 11 to pass the legislation and put it on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk.
The media has wildly distorted the intent of the bill. Yes, I know, what’s new?
But the sheer level of message discipline by a broad swath of media outlets to promote the message of left-wing Democrats is impressive.
A quick internet search reveals an almost uniform effort in the media to call HB 1557 the “don’t say gay” bill. NPR, ABC, NBC, and The Associated Press are among many news outlets that have labeled it as such.
Not only is this label for the legislation clearly just aligning with the message that Democrat opponents want to promote, it’s also not in any way accurate about what the bill would do.
When one looks at the text, there is nothing about not saying “gay.” This points to the larger issue that Democrats who oppose the bill, and their media allies, don’t want to discuss the specifics.
Instead, they want to use the debate as an opportunity to label conservatives and Republicans as mean and hateful.
Some of the criticism has devolved into outright hysterics.
President Joe Biden jumped in with the straw man, calling the bill “hateful.” What a surprise.
Again, the implication—from the media headlines and political attacks—is that Florida lawmakers are considering an extremist, anti-gay hate bill.
So, what would the legislation do? In short, it would ban sexually explicit content for young children in public school classrooms.
A fact sheet produced by Heritage Action for America explains:
The bill would prevent school personnel from pushing planned instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity issues in kindergarten through third grade or in contexts that are not age-appropriate in later grades. The bill does not prohibit organic conversations between students and teachers, nor does it prohibit age-appropriate discussion of social issues including sexual orientation if it is in accordance with state standards.
Again, nothing about the bill requiring that Floridians not say “gay.”
Another media distortion is that HB 1557 would force schools to “out” students who are not heterosexual. This just isn’t true.
The bill actually encourages any student “to discuss issues relating to his or her well-being with his or her parent or to facilitate discussion of the issue with the parent.”
This provision is a response to what’s happened in some schools, where a student is pushed by school officials to undergo a gender transition without the permission or knowledge of parents.
There may have been a time and place where such restrictions on sexually explicit content for young children didn’t have to be addressed, but the reality is that more of such content is getting injected into children’s books and other materials.
This is pretty commonsense stuff. Even the leader of a prominent Republican LGBT group has said as much.
Charles Moran, president of Log Cabin Republicans, also said it was important to put restrictions on curriculum. A third-grade-and-younger demographic, he said, is “entirely too young of an age bracket to be having these types of very adult and very complex conversations around sexual orientation and gender, specifically gender identity issues.”
Sexual orientation and gender identity, Moran added, “is not an appropriate subject matter [to be] teaching at that time.”
Importantly, Moran said, the bill wouldn’t prevent children from having discussions about related topics, even while in class. Instead, he said, it “prevents the school from building this into curriculums and having some sort of forced conversation about it.”
Despite how some are portraying it, this isn’t a free speech issue. Teachers and school administrators can’t just say or do whatever they want in public school classrooms, yet that is the message that the left has sent over the past few years.
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More And More Schools Caught Discriminating Against Unvaccinated Children!
Disgusting propaganda about COVID-19 vaccines that featured fifth- to eighth-graders in a musical play is now facing allegations of organizing a play that discriminated against unvaccinated kids.
The said show used the tune of ’80s hit “The Safety Dance,” including: “It’s safe to vax/and if your friends don’t vax/then they ain’t no friends of mine.”
Overall the play only shows disgusting propaganda about submitting to the medical mafia and taking experimental shots, reports said.
But the performance organizers of the December holiday show at MS 243 Center School on 84th Street and Columbus Avenue allegedly took things to another despicable level by using kids in dance numbers, songs, and skits that ostracized anyone that stood up for their bodily autonomy.
Here are more details from the New York Post report:
During one sketch, kids held signs with the names of big pharma jab-makers “Pfizer” and “Moderna” painted in red and drawn into the outline of a syringe.
Another scene had students mocking conservatives and those seeking medical or religious exemptions to the jab. Some held signs reading “I fear God not COVID” and “I am not a science experiment.”
They were pitted alongside people intended to look crazy, including one child dressed as a box of Kool cigarettes and another as Napoleon Bonaparte. Another student paraded around the stage as Jacob Chansley — the infamous horn-hat and fur-wearing Jan. 6 Capitol rioter who was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison.
Parents outraged by the theatrics said afterwards the show shouldn’t have gone on.
“It was an abomination,” said mom Antigone Michaelides, who watched the play with her husband. “It is discrimination and bullying and there is no reason you should make kids feel bad about themselves. Haven’t they been through enough in two years?”
Michaelides said several unvaccinated children were required to participate in the production which denigrated their parents’ decision to keep them unvaxxed. She said the show has been created by teachers at the school and was part of a larger climate of intolerance, and that unvaccinated kids — like her son — were frequently singled out.
“I do know for a fact that he’s been exposed to hurtful things being said around him. This I can tell you for a fact,” Michaelides said. “Hurtful things were said to him about the vaccine by other kids.”
A representative from the Department of Education said the agency is investigating the allegations.
“Every student deserves to feel welcomed in their school and this incident was immediately referred for investigation,” said spokesman Nathaniel Styer.
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At the University of Massachusetts, STEM professors resist indoctrination
by Jeff Jacoby
HERE'S SOMETHING you don't see every day: More than 50 faculty members at the University of Massachusetts Boston are openly criticizing a campaign to bind their institution into an ideology of racial and social engineering far removed from the time-honored role of higher education.
The professors' criticism takes the form of an online letter posted in response to proposed new mission and vision statements for the university. They reflect what faculty members regard as a hyperfixation on the part of the campus's leadership — UMass Boston recently installed a new chancellor and a new provost — with casting everything the university does, as some of them put it, in terms of power dynamics and hidden racism.
UMass Boston already has a mission statement. Adopted in 2010, it admirably lays out the university's purpose. Its first sentence identifies UMass Boston as "a public research university with a dynamic culture of teaching and learning, and a special commitment to urban and global engagement." It celebrates the school's "vibrant, multi-cultural educational environment" and "broadly diverse campus community." And it commits UMass Boston to "creating new knowledge while serving the public good of our city, our commonwealth, our nation, and our world."
Following that statement is a longer discussion of the university's values. They include "creativity and discovery," "diversity and inclusion," and "economic and cultural development." Emphasized again and again, however, are three values in particular: teaching, research, and service — quintessential objectives for the only public research university in New England's largest city.
As a concise summary of what UMass Boston stands for, the 2010 statement is close to ideal. By contrast, what the administration suggests replacing it with reeks of woke indoctrination.
The proposed new mission and vision statements mention "research" and "teaching" only in passing. They begin instead by proclaiming that UMass Boston must become "an anti-racist and health-promoting institution" that supports "diverse forms of knowledge production" and is dedicated to education "rooted in equity, environmental sustainability, [and] social and racial justice." They reiterate that the university's purpose is to be "anti-racist" and to promote "climate, environmental, and racial justice."
The draft of the vision statement concludes with a vow to hold everyone associated with the university "accountable" for ensuring that "these values drive all decision-making" at UMass Boston — including decisions about research, the allocation of funds, and the development of campus policies.
Alarm bells went off when these drafts were released. In the College of Science and Mathematics especially, several instructors were dismayed by the statements' heavy dose of political and activist code language with the unmistakable implication that at UMass Boston, the pursuit of knowledge and exchange of ideas is to be subordinated to a rigid left-wing agenda.
In an email exchange shared with me, several faculty members described UMass Boston as being under pressure from administrators to change its image from that of a research and teaching institution that highly values social justice to that of a social justice institution that does a bit of research and teaching. Several feel strongly that what is at stake is the soul of the institution.
So late last month, a group of professors in the STEM fields — engineering, biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and computer science — released a letter expressing their "extensive concerns" about the tone and direction of the proposed new statements.
"Under no circumstances can political or ideological activism be the primary purpose of a public university," they wrote. Of course individual students or staff members have every right to be active in social causes. "However, in this regard the role of the university is to empower people to take action themselves — not to coerce students, faculty, or institutional units to do so."
They are objecting not because of their political views but because they are teachers: If political activism becomes "a central goal of the university," warns the open letter, inevitably "it will conflict with education and research. The search for truth can never be subjugated to social or ideological beliefs."
Most worrying to many of the signers was the draft statements' exhortation that all decisions about research must adhere to an overarching creed of racial, social, and climate justice. Not only is such a mandate antithetical to the spirit of open inquiry and academic freedom, but in some cases it is downright incomprehensible.
"If your research on quantum computing is not perceived as promoting climate, environmental, or racial justice," the authors of the open letter ask, "will you be held accountable and your resources re-allocated?"
There was an era, not so long ago, when spirited debate over questions of university policy and politics was an integral part of higher education. Today, when expressing the "wrong" opinion on a controversial social issue has led to the investigation, censure, suspension, or firing of hundreds of faculty members around the country, it takes moral courage to openly criticize the progressive dogma being pushed by the UMass Boston leadership. In opinion surveys, nearly 2 in 3 American adults say that they are afraid to honestly express their views. In too many institutions of higher education, illiberal hostility to free speech has grown endemic.
All the more reason, then, to applaud the UMass instructors who have put their names to the open letter challenging the university's misbegotten — but ideologically fashionable — statement.
What the administration proposes, the objecting faculty members write, "would bring serious damage to . . . the demographically and ideologically diverse group of students we serve — particularly those who see education as a means to rise socio-economically."
The professors' letter continues to collect signatures from all UMass Boston departments. It is a tribute to the intellectual integrity of which American higher education remains capable. Perhaps it is also reason to hope that the woke juggernaut rolling through academia may not be unstoppable.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26064/at-the-university-of-massachusetts-stem
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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