Kansas Legislature OKs opt-outs for LGBTQ materials in schools

Kansas lawmakers approved a bill Thursday aimed at helping parents opt their children out of public school lessons with LGBTQ-themed materials, as a Democratic lawmaker whose vote was crucial to banning transgender female athletes from girls' and women's sports faced calls to resign.

The Republican-controlled Kansas House voted 76-46 to approve a "parental rights" measure that would allow a parent to place their child in an alternative to a public K-12 school lesson or activity that "impairs the parent’s sincerely held beliefs, values or principles." The GOP-dominated Senate approved the measure last week, so it goes next to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

"If there is one family who are denied their rights, we need to address it," said Republican state Rep. Susan Estes, of Wichita.

While the measure covers lessons and materials dealing with race and possibly even evolution, it also is in line with the push by Republicans in statehouses across the U.S. to roll back LGBTQ rights, particularly transgender rights. State Rep. Heather Meyer, a Kansas City-area Democrat, called the measure a "perfect vehicle" for anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

"We can see what’s been done in other states across the country where they have used this as a vehicle to attack the LGBTQ community," said Meyer, who is bisexual and has a 13-year-old transgender son.

The Legislature on Tuesday approved a broad bathroom bill and on Wednesday voted to override Kelly's veto of the measure on transgender athletes. Kansas is the 20th state to enact such a sports ban, and its law applies to club and school sports from kindergarten through college starting July 1.

GOP lawmakers also hoped to pass a bill Thursday that would require Kansas public schools to keep transgender girls from rooming with cisgendered girls and transgender boys, with cisgendered boys, on overnight school trips.

GOP conservatives also hadn’t given up on trying to pass a bill aimed at ending gender-affirming care for minors.

Kelly vetoed a bill last year that would have made it easier for parents to try to remove classroom or library materials. Supporters of this year's bill still were short of the two-thirds majorities in both chambers necessary to override a veto.

"What we heard in committee were parents who not only went to their teacher, they went to their principal and higher up in their school district and did not have their concerns addressed," Estes said.

Meanwhile, conservative Republicans were able to override Kelly's third veto of a bill on transgender athletes in three years because of the "yes" vote from a single Democrat, freshman Rep. Marvin Robinson, of Kansas City.

That Kansas vote came a day before President Joe Biden's administration announced a proposal to bar schools and colleges from enacting outright bans on transgender athletes but allow them to set some limits to preserve fairness.

Robinson represents a heavily Democratic district and replaced a retiring lawmaker who voted against overriding Kelly's veto in 2022. Kansas Young Democrats and the state Democratic Party's LGBTQ+ and Progressive caucuses demanded that he step down after Wednesday's vote.

Robinson also supported the parents' rights measure. Kansas House Democratic Leader Vic Miller said he would be "pleased" if Robinson resigned.

"Right now, he’s voting more with the other party than he is with ours," Miller said. "He ran as a Democrat, but he doesn’t seem to be serving as a Democrat."

Robinson told a conservative Kansas City radio talk show Thursday morning that he thought he was "on the same page" as Kelly because of a television commercial she aired during her reelection campaign. In that ad, Kelly looked into the camera and said: "Of course men should not play girls’ sports. OK, we all agree there."

At the time, Republicans accused Kelly of lying about her record. LGBTQ-rights advocates interpreted her comment as saying men playing girl's sports wasn't an issue because transgender girls and women are female.

Robinson told The Associated Press that no one in the Democratic Party told him last year that he was expected to vote against bills on transgender athletes. He also said a female Democratic colleague that he declined to name "told me I should die."

He rejected criticism that his vote is "hurting people’s kids." "Who could mistreat and look down on anybody?" he said. "You know, everybody is God’s creation."

He told the radio host that friends told him: "Man, you're up there with a bunch of demons."

Meyer said "absolutely none" of Robinson's fellow Democrats would have told him after the vote that he should die. "We care about mental health and we care about our colleagues, even if we disagree," Meyer said.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kansas-legislature-oks-opt-outs-lgbtq-materials-schools

****************************************************

Opting Out of College

Economist Herbert Stein once famously said, when discussing the size of our national debt compared to GDP, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

That logic might appear obvious, but our nation’s colleges and universities have in recent decades seemed impervious to it. “US college costs just keep climbing,” Bloomberg reports. “And the increase is pushing the annual price for the upcoming academic year at Ivy League schools toward yet another hold-on-to-your-mortarboard mark: $90,000. Full costs at elite private colleges already stretch well into the $80,000s.” That’s well above what the typical American household earns in a year.

It’s a wonder our university system hasn’t yet bumped into Stein’s Law, and a wonder more folks haven’t had enough. “At some point, that math stops working out,” said Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an economist who focuses on higher education. “We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”

Compounding these runaway costs is a growing mental health crisis on campus. A recent Gallup study found that 41% of college students have considered “stopping out” in the past six months, with 55% of those who’ve considered calling it quits citing emotional stress as a reason why.

So there’s the cost, and there’s the stress — although the latter seems to say more about the fragile state of our young people than the rigors of college. And then there’s the intrinsic appeal of a college education, which doesn’t seem to be what it once was.

As former Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder writes: “We have lost sight of the basics: are our young learning a lot about things that prepare them to be responsible and productive citizens in the future? Are we downplaying the dissemination of truth and beauty in favor of spending resources on other things? For example, do universities really need umpteen bureaucrats who neither teach nor do research that might help future generations?”

Vedder’s point about the bloated bureaucracy is a good one. And nowhere is it more apparent than in the “diversity” industry that has infected colleges large and small with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staff up and down the hierarchy.

A 2021 report from The Heritage Foundation notes that many universities’ DEI programs “are bloated relative to academic pursuits and do not contribute to reported student well-being on campus.” The University of Michigan, for example, lists a whopping 163 staffers as having formal responsibility for providing DEI programming and services.

As for the breakdown of these, ahem, educational staff, Heritage writes: “Nineteen of those people work in a central office of DEI, headed by a Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity Officer, who is subsequently supported by three people with the title Assistant Vice Provost for Equity, Inclusion & Academic Affairs. Five people are listed in the Multicultural Center, another 24 are found in the Center for the Education of Women, and the LGBTQ Spectrum Center has 12 people. Eighteen people are listed on the Multiethnic Student Affairs website with another 14 found at the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives. Moreover, colleges and departments at the University of Michigan have their own DEI staff.”

Here’s another way to look at it: For every 14 people tasked with promoting DEI at the U of M, there is one person responsible for providing services to students with disabilities. And another way: Michigan has more than twice as many DEI staff as it does history faculty.

When one of the nation’s top-ranked public universities has 163 people on its payroll dedicated to “diversity,” it’s safe to assume that this university has not only failed to properly steward taxpayers’ money but, more fundamentally, has lost its way as an educational institution.

The American Spectator’s Dov Fischer weighed in on this DEI phenomenon as it pertained to the recent row at Stanford Law School, where an invited guest speaker, Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, was disgracefully shouted down by dozens of future leftist lawyers and lectured by the school’s diversity officer, Tirien Steinbach, who was later suspended for her role in ginning up the mob.

Fischer wrote: “These DEI deans are malignancies on the body academic, absolute poison. They get paid boatloads of money collected from overblown tuition, which saddles students and their parents with debt for life, to provide an ostensibly valuable service that my law degree, rabbinical degree, advanced history degree, and other educational attainments still leave me unable to fathom.

What do these noxious DEI warts do to better society other than to promote reverse racism, divide people by ethnicities and skin color, in many cases promote anti-Semitism, and preach virtue-signaling effluvium that, once analyzed objectively between the lines, promote nothing but hate, the good woke kind of hate, hate for the values that once made America great?”

These are all great questions — whether about cost, value, wokeness, diversity, or misplaced priorities — and they don’t lend themselves to great answers.

No wonder so many young people are dropping out, and so many others are refusing to even drop in.

As Professor Vedder concludes: “For years, the American public unflinchingly accepted the siren calls of the ‘college for all’ crowd: You will not succeed in life unless you go to college. They increasingly are rejecting that … [and] the trust in colleges being the path to opportunity in America has severely eroded.”

https://patriotpost.us/articles/96246-opting-out-of-college-2023-04-05

*********************************************

The Left’s ‘Banned Books’ Racket Is Actually a War on Parents’ Rights

Furor over banned books allows liberals to feign indignation over the alleged ‘authoritarianism’ of Republicans who don’t want kids reading identitarian pseudohistories or books depicting rape, violence, or gender dysphoria in their schools.

While checking out the “banned and challenged” display at my local Barnes & Noble recently, I was reminded that the entire kerfuffle is a giant racket. For publishers and booksellers, “banned” books are likely a money-making racket.

Virtually every allegedly “banned” book on the display table is already a massive (sometimes generational) bestseller. Not that this reality stops authors like Jodi Picoult, whose books dot virtually every bookstore in the country, from running around pretending their novels are “banned” because a sliver of taxpayers are no longer on the hook to buy them.

For the left, the banned book claim is a political racket, allowing them to feign indignation over the alleged “authoritarianism” of Republicans who don’t want kids reading identitarian pseudohistories or books depicting oral sex, rape, violence, or gender dysphoria in their schools.

Yet, major media now regularly contend, as indisputable fact, that “book bans” are in place. The claim is embedded in the Democrats’ daily rhetoric. After the mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, we were not plunged into another inane discussion about “stochastic terrorism” or political violence, but rather a preposterous comparison of Tennessee’s “book bans” and lax gun control.

As Congresswoman Liz Cheney noted, “if we really want to keep our children safe, we need to spend less time banning books and more time stopping the horrific gun violence in our schools.”

Books are banned in Tennessee in the same way a person can’t say the word “gay” in Florida. It’s a myth. Yet, here is a recent headline from NPR: “Plot twist: Activists skirt book bans with guerrilla giveaways and pop-up libraries.” In the piece, the reader learns that with “a record number of book bans” on the horizon, “some activists are finding creative ways to make banned books available to young readers anyway.”

“Activists” buying books at a local Barnes & Noble, where an endless supply exists, and handing them to other people’s children against the wishes of parents isn’t so much “creative” as it is creepy. NPR makes it sound as if these people were risking their lives trading samizdat one step ahead of the Secret Police. Any dope with a car, a bus pass, a bicycle, legs, or an internet connection can hand some impressionable kid softcore porn. Because there are no banned books.

Now, if conservative activists set up “pop-up” libraries around the corner from schools in progressive districts handing out “Huck Finn” and books celebrating the Second Amendment or the superiority of traditional families, one imagines NPR would find the guerrilla effort less charming.

One New York Times columnist argues that parents who vote for legislators that temper the cultural Marxist agenda in schools are engaging in a “state-sanctioned heckler’s veto.” So much for “democracy,” I guess. It is true that leftists, who run virtually every major school district in the nation, don’t need any laws or vetoes to dictate curriculums.

Yet most schools are run by the state. How else are parents supposed to initiate change? Well, they aren’t, right? That’s the point. The contemporary left doesn’t believe that parents have any say in which state-run school their children attend or what they are taught in them. Who’s the authoritarian, again?

Teacher-union types like to argue that parental rights bills are tantamount to telling a doctor how to operate on a patient. A more apt analogy is to say that Democrats want to force patients to undergo elective surgeries performed by untrained quacks.

Parental rights bills don’t instruct teachers on methods, they only stop strangers from exposing kids to revisionist histories and ideas about sexuality and ideologies that conflict with their beliefs. Then again, even if parents who don’t want their prepubescent kids indoctrinated with these ideas are in the minority, why should they be forced to accept instruction or books that have nothing to do with genuine civics or a well-rounded education?

When the government restricts free association in the marketplace, or giant tech companies are engaged in a concerted effort to censor ideas and news, we have a reason to worry about the state of free speech. When a heckler’s veto that dominates universities makes it virtually impossible to have an open discourse on campuses, we have reason to worry. “Book bans,” however, are just curriculum choices leftists don’t like.

It is certainly true that sometimes priggish moralists are overzealous in their targeting of books, sometimes the bans are plain stupid, sometimes they are political, and sometimes they are initiated by left-wing administrations (as has been the case for years).

Yet for the most part, “book ban” is just a euphemism for progressive administrators and teachers losing some of their power over your kids. While parents are compelled to live with the devastating professional failures of a teacher-union-dominated monopoly that struggles to teach basic math, reading, writing and science, there is no reason for them to accept political indoctrination, as well.

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-lefts-banned-books-racket-is-actually-a-war-on-parents-rights

***********************************

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

*******************************