I remember how it was -- JR
Ruling Against Middle Schooler Punished for Wearing ‘There Are Only 2 Genders’ T-Shirt to Be Appealed
The Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a “notice of appeal” after a federal district court in Massachusetts ruled that a middle school in Middleborough, Massachusetts, has the right to prohibit a student from wearing a “There are only two genders” T-shirt to school.
“We look forward to showing the court how this isn’t just about a T-shirt,” Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Logan Spena told The Daily Signal of its Aug. 4 appeal. “This is about a public school telling a middle-schooler that he isn’t allowed to express a view that differs from the school’s radical gender-identity ideology.”
By appealing the district court’s initial ruling, ADF hopes to prohibit Nichols Middle School from denying Liam Morrison, 12, who will be an eighth grader this fall, his right to wear a shirt that expresses his beliefs.
While the middle school promotes and lets their students wear attire that promotes Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ groups, and others, it would not let Morrison wear a shirt that says “There are only two genders” or “There are *censored* genders” to school.
“Public school officials can’t force Liam to remove a shirt that states his position when the school lets every other student wear clothing that speaks on the same issue,” Spena said.
Currently, the middle school has a speech policy, according to the complaint, that says “clothing must not state, imply, or depict hate speech or imagery that target groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, or any other classification.”
The school’s dress code policy adds that “other apparel that the administration determines to be unacceptable to our community standards will not be allowed.”
When ADF attorneys asked for clarification, schools Superintendent Carolyn Lyons reaffirmed the school’s policy and said that it “has, and will continue to, prohibit the wearing of a T-shirt by [Morrison] or anyone else which is likely to be considered discriminatory, harassing and/or bullying to others, including those who are gender nonconforming by suggesting that their sexual orientation, gender identity or expression does not exist or is invalid,” the legal group’s complaint says.
As a result, “the schools’ speech policy unconstitutionally censors certain student expressions merely because school officials deem a student’s expression ‘offensive’ to others,” while also giving the school “unbridled, overbroad discretion to choose what is acceptable for student expression,” Spena explained.
When the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hears Morrison’s case, it will have the opportunity to uphold the First Amendment of the Constitution and follow Supreme Court precedents by correcting the district court’s decision, which disregarded both, the ADF says.
“Our Constitution protects the right of all Americans, including students, to speak messages that are consistent with what they believe,” Spena told The Daily Signal. “Students don’t forfeit their free speech when they walk into the school building.”
But that’s exactly what happened to Morrison when he wore a shirt that said “There are only two genders” to school. Morrison was brought to the principal’s office and told to take off the shirt or go home. He chose to go home, but a few days later wore a shirt that said “There are *censored* genders.”
Morrison was again sent to the principal’s office, but rather than miss another day of class, he changed his shirt.
The school claimed students had said the shirt made them feel uncomfortable, the complaint says, adding that no one cared whether Morrison felt uncomfortable with the transgender and LGBTQ signs throughout the school that contradicted his beliefs.
“If the court of appeals corrects the district court’s ruling, and we believe that it will,” Spena said, then Morrison will be allowed to wear his “There are only two genders” shirt to school as the case progresses.
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Our academics are attacking the whole concept of knowledge
The first problem about decolonisation is the word itself. Colonisation is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonisation? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process. Today, it refers to an altogether wider agenda, whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the colonial conquests of the past four centuries.
In New Zealand, this attitude to truth has led to a revised school syllabus in which Maori folk beliefs about the world are to be treated as if they were just as valid as the body of empirical knowledge that is called science everywhere else. However, we do not need to go to New Zealand to see intellectual decolonisation in action. University faculties in Britain are all expected to publish ‘decolonisation statements’ filled with guilt and angst about the western origin of so much modern knowledge.
Oxford University’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division may seem an unpromising candidate for decolonisation, but its decolonisation statement attacks the whole concept of knowledge. ‘As we work towards greater inclusion’, it declares, ‘we need to have a broader understanding of what constitutes scientific knowledge.’ Among other things, this is said to involve ‘challenging western-centric ideas of “objectivity”, “expertise” and “merit” ’, and ‘removing structural hierarchies that privilege certain knowledge and certain peoples over others’. The instinct behind statements like these is not scholarly or scientific. It is political. It devalues knowledge by redefining it, as a way of protesting against the endemic sense of racial superiority which is said to characterise British society.
Doug Stokes is based at the University of Exeter, an institution whose history department proclaims on its website that ‘the very ways we are conditioned to look at and think about the past are often derived from imperialist and racialised schools of thought’. His new book, Against Decolonisation, is a powerful protest against this kind of stale cliché.
Stokes challenges the dominant cultural and political narrative which portrays Britain as endemically racist. Racial prejudice is too natural to human beings to be eliminated entirely, but statistical studies suggest that by most measures Britain is one of the least racist societies in Europe. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Mayor of London all come from minority ethnic groups. British universities, including the most selective, have a student population in which ethnic minorities are well represented at every level of academic attainment.
Stokes digs deeper into the figures, to show that ‘ethnic minorities’ is too large and varied a category to serve as a useful instrument of analysis. There are significant differences between racial groups. And all of them do significantly better than the category that persistently loses out on university education, namely poor white males.
These points have been made before, notably in the March 2021 report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. The report concluded that economic geography, socio-economic background and family values were far more significant determinants of outcomes than racism. As it pointed out, the life chances of the child of a Harrow-raised British Indian accountant were very different from those of the child of a Bradford-raised British Pakistani taxi driver. Both of them had better prospects than ‘low income white boys, especially those from former industrial and coastal towns’. The Commission’s report was received with howls of outrage by those who felt that they were being deprived of their victimhood. But the objectors rarely engaged with the detailed supporting data on which it was based.
Although the points which Stokes makes are not new, they have rarely been made with such verve and force as they are in this succinct demolition of modern decolonisation theory. He is particularly critical of the reports of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which he accuses of dodgy statistical analysis, and Universities UK, the representative body of vice-chancellors, which has uncritically imposed a decolonisation agenda on the whole university sector.
How did we come to this pass? Stokes argues that the narrative of embedded (‘institutional’) racism in western societies was adopted to fill the intellectual gap left by the decline of Marxism. Cultural control replaced class oppression as the mechanism by which the capitalist West was said to maintain its dominant role in the world. The chief prophets of this doctrine were the French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, and the Palestinian-American historian Edward Said. Foucault taught that the structures of power determine what is generally perceived to be true. What we think we know is actually no more than an artificial consensus created by our invisible control over schools, universities, publishers and museums and other cultural institutions in our own interest. It followed that to change the world, it was necessary to take control of those institutions and impose a new intellectual consensus. Said took this idea further. The notion of the inherent superiority of western science and culture, he argued, was a new form of colonialism. It enabled the West to maintain its dominance long after it had shed its colonies. Yet western ideas, western science and western history had no objective claim to authority. They were simply the products of western power structures.
These ideas have never had much traction in France, the land of their birth. But they have taken root in Britain and America in the minds of many who have never read Foucault or Said. In Britain, race theorists such as Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham University, have argued that the claims made for western culture are a form of racial prejudice. They are an assertion of the inherent superiority of whites over people of colour which is hardwired throughout British society. This kind of thinking, says Stokes, is what lies behind the obsession with race that is currently transforming British universities.
The problem about postmodernist theories is the same as the problem about other forms of determinism. They underestimate the originality of the human mind. They also ignore the universality of abstract ideas. The fact that Aristotle or Einstein first articulated an idea does not make it a ‘western’ idea. If some statement about the world is true in New Zealand or Africa, it must be equally true in Britain or America, or it is not true at all.
However, the main objection to decolonisation is not that it is false but that it is narrow-minded, obsessive and intolerant. People will continue to disagree about the prevalence and the origin of racial prejudice. Error and discord are inevitable hazards of the free market in ideas. But the decolonisers are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them. This is a natural consequence of their approach to intellectual inquiry. For those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs there is no point in debate. Alternative visions of the world are just the product of social conditioning. Social change and suppression of dissent are the only answers. Schools and universities must be the battlegrounds. Hence the obligatory decolonisation statements, the imposition of a highly controversial agenda on the syllabus, the no-platforming of opponents and the real fears of so many academics that if they step out of line their careers will be blighted.
These are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world, even in the citadels of the mind which should be its foremost defenders. Perhaps books like this one will encourage more academics to summon up the courage to resist the bullying and to challenge the new conformity. Not everyone will agree with them. But everyone who truly cares about truth will welcome the opening up of a debate which the universities have largely foreclosed.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/the-new-orthodoxy
*********************************************‘M’ is for Marxism: schools get an ‘F’ for fail
Senator Ralph Babet
Australian schools are failing our children. Instead of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, schools have become centres for brainwashing. From kindergarten up, children are not being educated they are being indoctrinated with the toxic lies of identity politics, Critical Race Theory, and climate alarmism.
This is due to the long march of cultural Marxists through our institutions. Unable to bring about a communist revolution in the West, cultural Marxists have slowly gained control of our universities including the teaching faculties. They have written textbooks, converted teachers, and now they are reaping the fruits of their labour with educators throughout Australia brainwashing their students.
But it’s not just our schools that are suffering. University-educated students with their neo-Marxist values make their way into the media, into the professions, and the human resource departments of corporations. Everywhere you look our institutions – the ABC, the big sporting organisations, big businesses, libraries, museums, and art galleries – are all marching to the beat of the same drum.
This is a disaster for our society. Our schools are no longer places where young Australians acquire the skills to become productive members of society and critical thinkers, they are taught to feel guilty and to be ashamed of our country.
Students are taught that Australia is a racist, sexist, white supremacist nation. They do not learn about the great achievements of Western Civilisation. Instead, they are taught that the economic, social, and environmental practices of the West are destroying life on Earth.
It’s no wonder that young Australians are so pessimistic about the future after 13 years of relentless negativity in schools.
Some are suffering from a brand new psychological disorder called ‘eco-anxiety’.
Some don’t want to have children because they believe that the world is such a terrible place.
Some are driven to drop out and start taking drugs.
Some succumb to deaths of despair.
A call is made to the Kids Helpline every 80 seconds in Australia, equating to a devastating 330,000 cries for help from children around the country every year.
Yet despite the obvious demand, most of these calls are not answered due to a lack of funding.
It’s a dire situation, according to mental health experts. Of the 328,424 young people who tried to contact the Kids Helpline in 2022, only 145,000 were connected to a counsellor. That’s just two calls connected out of every five that are received.
This is truly a tragedy. We have to stop the barrage of lies and negativity that are poisoning young people’s minds. More than one hundred thousand people choose to migrate to Australia every year because it is a beacon of freedom, democracy, and economic opportunity in a world where far too many people face poverty and oppression.
Is it any wonder that homeschooling is booming in Australia? It’s not just because of Covid. School lockdowns were an eye-opener for a lot of parents.
Supervising their children at home, parents became aware of some of the toxic or time-wasting content in the school curriculum.
As a result, registrations for home education took off in 2020.
There was a 20 per cent increase in NSW and Victoria and a 26 per cent increase in Queensland compared with the previous year.
But the trend has been on the rise in every state and territory over the last decade.
In 2011, just over 9,000 children were being educated at home. Ten years later, in 2021 there were 26,000 children registered for home education.
Young Australians need an education system that fills them with pride in this country and gives them the skills to thrive in modern Australia. It’s time that people with conservative family values demanded better in all walks of life, starting with our schools.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/m-is-for-marxism-schools-get-an-f-for-fail/
******************************************************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
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