I remember how it was -- JR
Monday, March 20, 2023
Complaint Filed Over School Event Only Allowing Girls and ‘Gender Diverse’ Students
On Tuesday, parental rights organization Parents Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against a school district in Pennsylvania for hosting STEM events only open to “girls and gender diverse students.”
According to documents obtained by PDE and shared with Townhall, Lower Merion School District in Ardmore, Pennsylvania will host an academic event called “the inaugural Girls+ STEM Night.” The event is meant to “expose younger girls and gender diverse students to various STEM-related careers and fields in hopes that it will spark an interest to pursue science, technology, engineering and math inside and outside of the classroom” and promises to hold future events of the same nature.
“By its plain terms…only some students may attend this school program. It excludes others — and this exclusion is based solely on an individual’s sex,” PDE noted. “As for the future ‘girls and gender diverse’ programming and networking opportunities, that too would confer a benefit on the basis of sex not offered to all students.”
The letter outlining the complaint notes that discrimination on the basis of sex violates Title IX, which declares that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
"Discriminating against a group of students based on sex is unconstitutional and all such instances of discrimination should be examined with a fine-toothed comb. Every student deserves the same opportunities to thrive and be challenged through STEM-related programming and Lower Merion students are no exception. This is the second OCR complaint we've filed against this district in the last month. The district clearly needs to weed out the bad apples who put these policies in place,” PDE Vice President Caroline Moore said.
Previously, PDE filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights after a public high school in Massachusetts restricted auditions for a school play for students who identify as people of color, which Townhall covered. Last month, the organization unveiled documents that exposed a school district in Kansas for hiding students’ gender transitions from parents.
And, earlier this month, documents uncovered by PDE revealed that one of the country’s top public high schools, located in Fairfax, Virginia, reportedly received hundreds of thousands of dollars from groups affiliated with China’s military.
****************************************************
What Happens When Parental Rights Are Surrendered to the Government?
Considering how egregiously parents' rights have been trampled in recent years, federal parental rights legislation recently reintroduced in Congress sounds promising, but its premise is dangerous. It could erode parents' God-given rights to direct the upbringing of their children.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis initiated the precedent for parental rights legislation, whose bill was dubbed by critics the "Don't Say Gay" bill. A noteworthy feature of the DeSantis law is that it prohibits sex education in kindergarten through third grade (five through nine-year-olds). It is hard to believe that we need a law to restrict sex education for children who, at these young ages, aren't even thinking about sexuality, but it is necessary.
Governor DeSantis has done more to protect children and our country's freedom than any governor I have observed. He has been right on education policy on many fronts and continues to take the lead on common-sense education policy. But the reality is that our Creator, not the government determines parental rights. Despite such good intentions from leaders like DeSantis, any parental rights legislation is flawed at its inception, suggesting parents' rights are determined by the government rather than the fundamental, inalienable rights of parents afforded by their Creator.
Prominent conservative legal scholar Joanna Martin, J.D., recently published an article titled "A Massive Transfer of Power Over Children from Parents to Governments," She discusses similar concerns with parental rights legislation. She writes specifically about the bill passed by the North Carolina Senate, saying, "… what S.B. 49 does is to transfer power over children from parents to governments. Parents' rights' consist of the privilege of being notified of decisions made respecting their children by governments, and they are granted specific rights to challenge some of the findings."
At last count, seventy-three Republican U.S. House of Representatives members are sponsors of the federal Parental Rights bill filed on March 1, 2023. Several bill sponsors are Freedom Caucus members, which begs the question — have they read the bill? Do they understand the implication of the government delineating parental authority?
When parents file lawsuits citing an infringement of their parental rights, they do so on "a fundamental, inalienable right" basis. According to N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law, "We have at least a century of U.S. constitutional jurisprudence explaining that the history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court has described parental rights as 'beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.'"
If Parental Rights Laws are passed, the point of debate becomes the content and context of that law, not the fundamental right. We could end up arguing whether or not a school counselor has the right to assist children in accessing medical treatment, like gender transitioning drugs and surgeries, based on some loophole in the new law. Fundamental, inalienable rights do not have loopholes.
The nonprofit organization's mission, where I serve as president, is to close the U.S. Department of Education and end all federal education mandates. This is the mission because we understand that nefarious pedagogies originate and are pushed onto states by federal agencies incentivized with federal dollars.
Federal parental rights legislation creates more federal education mandates. This is a step in the wrong direction if our goal is to restore parental and local control of education.
The federal Republican bill passed out of committee 25 to 17 and now moves to the full House. In the meantime, the Democrats have offered alternative legislation touts "… inclusive, safe, and responsive public schools … and protecting the civil rights of students and families."
I like the simplicity of the Republican bill, but when reading explanations offered by leading advocates for parental rights legislation, they make it clear that these rights already exist!
One clear point in the federal legislation is the parental ability to influence their child's experiences within a public school. But this is a local control issue. We must hold school boards accountable. After all, implementing this control must happen at the local level. A rogue teacher who ignores approved parental restrictions will not face a federal law. But school boards could set policies to fire them.
U.S. Parents Involved in Education seeks to return education to its proper local roots and restore parental authority over their children's education by helping parents and local communities to escape federal and other national influences.
********************************************************
First-Year Med Students Told to Call Women ‘People With Cervices’; Professor Slams ‘Anti-Biological’ Lesson
A professor at Indiana University School of Medicine condemned a lesson inculcating gender ideology among first-year medical students as “anti-scientific” and “anti-biological,” warning that it would have “very detrimental effects to the health care profession” and stating that he had not heard of any internal discussions about the lesson before professors implemented it.
“I did not hear about it until it came out in the news,” the professor, who spoke with The Daily Signal on condition of anonymity, said in a phone interview Wednesday. He said the transgender lesson did not surprise him, however, because “the entire biomedical profession has been conquered by this aggressive ideology that inculcates a certain worldview.”
The lesson, “Sex and Gender Primer” for the Human Structure course, endorses calls for the redefinition of sex, claiming that biological sex is “NON-binary” (emphasis original). According to a PowerPoint presentation that the medical organization Do No Harm provided to The Daily Signal, it encourages medical students to use “inclusive terminology” based on the notion that gender is divisible from sex.
It presents as a “resource” the “genderbread person” diagram separating gender identity from gender expression and from anatomical sex.
The lesson laments that “most textbooks present sex as binary” and advocates for “anatomy texts to discuss sex on a spectrum.” It notes that it “will take time to update” the “sexual, reproductive, and genital system content” that is “highly gendered.”
The lesson endorses “person-first language” such as “people with cervices” rather than “women,” and “anatomy-based language,” such as “the testes produce sperm” rather than “the male gonad produces sperm.”
The lesson also notes that “linguistic practices are open to change as LGBTQIA+ advocates refine their perspectives on language.”
The school of medicine’s website describes “Human Structure” as a nine-week course in phase one, year one at medical school.
Do No Harm, an organization of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals that speaks out against medical abuses, first obtained the lesson, which The Daily Mail first published Sunday, without attribution to Do No Harm.
Do No Harm’s board chairman, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist, condemned the lesson in remarks to The Daily Signal, tying it to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion classes.
“Indiana University School of Medicine’s woke DEI classes on gender are highly speculative and won’t change the health of any group in America for the better,” Goldfarb said.
“This class conflates the anatomy of male and female reproductive systems with a highly controversial and scientifically dubious concept of ‘gender fluidity,’” he noted. “It uses complex and very rare abnormalities in human development to assert that gender is a spectrum and not the manifestation of the basic biologic reality of the sexes. These ideas should not be presented as established biology. By doing so, they provide support for the gender transition of minor children. DEI indoctrination in medical schools must be stopped for the sake of quality of patient care.”
The Indiana University medical professor agreed.
“It’s anti-scientific and anti-biological,” the professor told The Daily Signal. “This is going to have very detrimental effects to the health care profession. It’s going to degrade the trust of the public in health care.”
He warned that transgender ideology “reverts us to a pre-Enlightenment era, where biology and objective facts are not relevant.”
“I have not heard of any internal discussions about this,” he added, lamenting that “there is no open debate about it at all.”
“It reminds me of what I’ve read about the Stalinist era and the way scientists were handled by the state regime during the 20th century,” the professor added. According to English science writer Simon Ings, the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin “embraced, patronized, and even fetishized science like never before,” but “scientists lived their lives on a knife edge,” facing exile, imprisonment, or death if they countered the regime’s ideology.
“I suspect that if there was open discussion” at Indiana University Medical School, “most individuals would be opposed to forcing this very aggressive ideology on trainees,” the professor said.
He urged the medical field to “encourage and require open debate” and to “purge ideology and politics from medicine,” even if it requires politicians to use “financial leverage” to remove gender ideology from schools.
Indiana University School of Medicine declined to comment on the document to The Daily Signal.
***********************************
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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*******************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment