By: The Quillette Editorial Board

Published: Dec 23, 2023

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 with a mission to fight poverty and racial discrimination. Its early litigation campaigns, which targeted the Ku Klux Klan and other overtly racist organizations, met with success, and the group soon came to be seen as an authoritative source in regard to right-wing extremism more generally. 

Another form of expertise the organization developed was in the area of marketing—especially when the market in question consisted of deep-pocketed urban liberals. As former SPLC staffer Bob Moser reported in a 2019 New Yorker article, the group has consistently taken on attention-grabbing urgent-seeming causes that its leaders knew could be leveraged as a means to gain publicity and—more importantly—donations. It’s no coincidence that the SPLC’s co-founder and long-time fundraising guru, Morris Dees, had previously operated a direct-mail business that sold cookbooks and tchotchkes. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees told a journalist in 1988.

Dees’ big fundraising break at the SPLC came when he got access to the direct-mail list from the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. The SPLC co-founder went on to maximize the SPLC’s revenues through what would now be known as targeted methods. According to one former legal colleague, for instance, Dees rarely used his middle name—Seligman—in SPLC mailings, except when it came to “Jewish zip codes.”

Thanks to Dees’ slick marketing expertise, the SPLC was eventually taking in more money than it paid out in operational expenses. (As of October 2022, its endowment fund was valued at almost US$640 million.) But over time, his hard-sell tactics began to alienate co-workers, as there was an obvious disconnect between the real class-based problems they observed in society and the fixations of the naïve northern donors whose wallets Dees was seeking to pry open.

“I felt that [Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on,” former SPLC attorney Deborah Ellis told Progressive writer John Egerton. “The Klan is no longer one of the South’s biggest problems—not because racism has gone away, but because the racists simply can’t get away with terrorism any more.”

On March 14, 2019, Dees—by now 82 years old, but still listed as the SPLC’s chief trial lawyer—was fired amid widespread rumors that he’d been the subject of internal sexual-harassment accusations. His affiliation was scrubbed from the group’s web site; and the organization’s president, Richard Cohen, cryptically (but damningly) declared that, “when one of our own fails to meet [SPLC] standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” (Less than two weeks later, Cohen himself left the organization, casting his resignation as part of a transition “to a new generation of leaders.”)

In describing his tenure at the SPLC during the early 2000s, Moser argued that the very structure of the organization betrayed its hypocrisy: Here was an entity dedicated to social justice (as we would now call it), yet which was run by an extremely well-paid, almost exclusively white, corps of lawyers, administrators, and fund-raisers who ruled over a mixed-race corps of junior staff. As far back as the 1980s, Dees was openly admitting that he saw the fight against poverty as passé, and admitted that the “P” in SPLC was an anachronism. Jaded staff began ruefully referring to their own flashy headquarters as the “Poverty Palace.”

Dees and Cohen may have left the Poverty Palace, but the SPLC’s tendency to betray its founding principles clearly remains a problem, as illustrated by a new SPLC report released under the auspices of what the group dubs “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.” (This verbal clunker seems to have been reverse-engineered in order to yield the acronym, “CAPTAIN.”)

The report purports to demonstrate “the perils of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” and “anti-trans narratives and extremism.” Much like the dramatically worded hard-sell direct-mail campaigns that the SPLC started up under Dees, it’s marketed as a matter of life and death: According to the deputy director of research for the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” uncovered by the SPLC has “real-life, often life-threatening consequences for trans and non-binary people.”

At this point, it should be stressed that there is certainly nothing wrong with the SPLC—or anyone else—campaigning for the legitimate rights of people who are transgender. Such a campaign would be entirely in keeping with the SPLC’s original liberal ethos. Just as no one should be denied, say, an apartment, a marriage license, or the right to vote based on his or her race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, no trans person should be denied these rights and amenities simply because he or she experiences gender dysphoria.

But the SPLC’s report hardly confines itself to such unassailable liberal principles. The real point of the project, it seems, was to catalogue and denounce public figures who’ve expressed dissent from the most extreme demands of trans-rights activists—specifically, (1) the demand that children and adolescents who present as transgender must instantly be “affirmed” in their dysphoric beliefs, even if such affirmation leads to a life of sterility, surgical disfigurement, drug dependence, and medical complications; and (2) the demand that biological men who self-identify as women must be permitted unfettered access to protected women’s spaces and sports leagues.

The SPLC’s authors seek to cast their ideological enemies as hate-addled reactionaries whose nefarious activities must “be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right.” And it is absolutely true that some of the organizations they name-check are hard-right, socially conservative outfits that endorse truly transphobic (and homophobic) beliefs.

But many of the supposed transphobes targeted by the report aren’t even conservative—let alone members of the religious right. In a multitude of cases, they’re simply parents, therapists, and activists who argue the obvious fact that human sexual biology doesn’t evanesce into rainbow dust the moment that a child—or middle-aged man—asserts that he or she was “born in the wrong body.”

It’s also interesting to note who gets left out of the SPLC’s analysis. The most influential figures leading the backlash against (what some call) “gender ideology” are women such as author J.K. Rowling and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, both of whom come at the issue from explicitly feminist perspectives. Being successful public figures, neither woman needs a cent from the conservative think tanks that the SPLC presents as being back-office puppet-masters of the alleged anti-trans conspiracy outlined in the CAPTAIN report.

In keeping with the conspiracist motif that runs through the document, the authors have provided spider-web diagrams that set out the connections binding this (apparently) shadowy cabal. In this regard, it seems that Quillette itself served as one of the SPLC’s sources: In a section titled, “Group Dynamics and Division of Labor within the Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network,” the authors footnote “an August 23, 2023 podcast for Quillette,” wherein

We’ve chosen to highlight this particular (typo-riddled) text from the report not just because of the absurd suggestion that our publication has enlisted in an imaginary “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network,” but also because the above-quoted roll call of supposed gender villains illustrates the intellectual dishonesty that suffuses the whole report.

Let’s go through the references one by one, in the order in which they are presented. The Gender Dysphoria Alliance (GDA) is a group led by people who are themselves transgender, and who are “concerned about the direction that gender medicine and activism has taken.” Are we to imagine that its members are directing transphobia—against themselves? Lisa Littman, formerly of Brown University, is a respected academic who’s published a peer-reviewed analysis of Rapid Onset Gender Disorder. Ray Blanchard is a well-known University of Toronto psychiatrist. The Archives of Sexual Behavior is a peer-reviewed academic journal in sexology. Michael Bailey is a specialist in sexual orientation and gender nonconformity at Northwestern University. Colin Wright is a widely published writer (including at Quillette) with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. (The SPLC’s claim that he is in a relationship with journalist Christina Buttons, who also writes about gender issues, is completely true. But the fact that the group saw fit to report this fact as if it were evidence of sinister machinations says far more about the report’s authors than it does about either Wright or Buttons.) FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a classically liberal group led by a Harvard Law School graduate named Monica Harris. Do any of these people or groups sound like extremists?

The fact that the SPLC is attempting to market its report as a blow against the “anti-LGBTQ+” movement, writ large, is itself quite laughable, since many of the activists who’ve been arguing for a more balanced approach to gender rights are themselves either gay (as with Navratilova and Julie Bindel) or (as with the founders of the GDA) transgender.

Others on the SPLC gender-enemies list are author Abigail Shrier, and therapists Sasha Ayad, and Stella O’Malley. These women openly broadcast their views in best-selling books, as well as mainstream magazines and newspapers. The idea that the SPLC has successfully “exposed” these women through some kind of investigation, as suggested by the title that’s been slapped on the CAPTAIN report, would be ludicrous even if they’d said anything scandalous (which they haven’t).

And what course of future action does the SPLC endorse? For one, it concludes that educators should stigmatize gender-critical views as analogous to “racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.” The report's authors also want academic journals to sniff out groups that “espouse an anti-LGBTQ+ ideology” (as that latter term is speciously defined by the SPLC). And in a final flourish, the group urges reporters to “be aware of the narrative manipulation strategies and the cooptation of scientific credentials and language by anti-trans researchers when sourcing stories about trans experiences.”

With this last point, we get to the real nub: The apparent goal is for this report to be read as a catalogue of people, ideas, and groups that must be shunned. Indeed, the authors explicitly cite the work of one Andrea James, a once-respected arts producer who, as Jesse Singal has documented, now runs a creepy (“stalker” is the word Singal uses) web site called Transgender Map, which lists personal details of anyone whom James deems a gender heretic. When it comes to one-on-one communication, James’ manner of dealing with critics is exemplified by an email sent to bioethicist Alice Dreger, in which James referred to Dreger’s then-five-year-old son as a “womb turd.”

One way to describe the CAPTAIN report is as an SPLC-branded rehash of the information contained on Transgender Map. And one can understand why the authors thought that such a gambit might work. The SPLC already publishes other curated lists of hatemongers—e.g., its “Hatewatch” service, “Hate Map,” and “Intelligence Report.” It wasn’t such a long shot to imagine that this new report might convince readers to treat the listed “Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network” acolytes as equally disreputable.

But if that was the authors’ goal, it doesn’t seem to have been achieved. The SPLC report landed with something of a thud—and has attracted little attention on social media except insofar as it was mocked by its intended targets.

This may have something to do with the report’s timing. For several years now, a backlash against this kind of gender agitprop has been building within many of the same liberal and progressive circles that the SPLC has traditionally targeted for donations. The trend is reflected by the rise of such groups as the LGB Alliance, a coalition of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who are fed up with the ideological takeover of LGBT groups by a militant subset of trans activists.

The same trend is playing out internationally. While the SPLC does its best to heap blame on America’s conservative Christians, many of western Europe’s governments (none of which are in thrall to the Heritage Foundation or the Charles Koch Foundation) have been following a more gender-critical path for years.

Just a week after the SPLC put out its report, in fact, the UK government published new guidelines advising teachers that they have no duty to automatically “affirm” a child’s assertion that he or she is transgender; and that, in considering such situations, teachers should speak with a child’s parents and consider whether the child is under undue influence from social media or peers. Sweden, Finland, and Norway—hardly bastions of Christian conservatism—have also rolled back policies that rush children into transition. In Canada, several provinces have recently enacted rules that require parents to be notified when a child seeks to transition, even in the face of a sustained media campaign that repeats lurid claims to the effect that such policies will cause an epidemic of trans suicides. Are all of these foreign governments also complicit in the vast “junk-science and disinformation campaign” against trans people that the SPLC claims to have “exposed”?

The SPLC would hardly be the first progressive organization whose reputation has suffered by going all-in on the gender issue. The American Civil Liberties Union, which also was rooted in traditional liberal values before succumbing to more faddish progressive tendencies, has attracted ridicule due to its parroting of slogans such as “men who get their periods are men,” and the claim that males have no “unfair advantage” over females in sports.

These organizations have never been shy about angering conservatives and reactionaries; indeed, they wear such anger as a badge of pride. But their cultish refusal to engage with the reality of biological sex also antagonizes progressive feminists seeking to protect female spaces from biological men, and LGB activists who see the attempted erasure of sex-based attraction as a species of progressive homophobia.

Which is to say that the SPLC’s report seems not only intellectually dishonest, but also self-destructive. While the SPLC leaders who green-lit this project once may have been able to bank on the popularity of pronoun checks and esoteric gender identities among the wealthy white coastal progressives who comprise the bulk of their donors, this is an ideological movement that’s decidedly past its peak. It’s a marketing error that the savvy Dees likely never would have made.

The SPLC obviously does a lot more than lend its name to sloppily edited gender propaganda: A review of its press feed shows that it still has staff working traditional legal beats such as voters’ rights, police accountability, and humane treatment for prisoners. But when an organization publishes misleading materials in regard to one issue, the natural effect is to raise serious questions about the group’s values and credibility more generally—questions that SPLC supporters will want to think about the next time one of the group’s fundraisers hits them up for a donation.

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This is what institutional capture looks like.

By: Leor Sapir

Published: May 17, 2023

On Tuesday, the ACLU tweeted an article written by one of its staff members and published by CNN. The author, Henry Seaton, a 24-year-old transgender man, is the “trans justice advocate” at the ACLU of Tennessee, one of the states currently passing restrictions on minor access to “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries. The ACLU’s tweet said: “When Henry was 17, gender-affirming care saved his life.” It also quoted from Seaton’s CNN article: “To enact a sweeping ban on this age-appropriate, medically necessary care is akin to telling kids like me that their lives aren’t worth living if they decide to be true to themselves.”

This is one of countless examples in recent months of transgender activists and advocacy groups—of which the ACLU is arguably the most powerful—declaring that loss of access to hormones and surgeries will prompt transgender-identified kids to kill themselves. This politically potent “affirm or suicide” narrative has been marshalled at nearly every opportunity in public debates over pediatric gender medicine. It enjoys the endorsement of top-ranking officials in the Biden administration. Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services called “gender-affirming care” a “potentially lifesaving” intervention.

On Thursday, in a debate in the Georgia House of Representatives over a bill that would impose liability on doctors who perform child sex-change procedures, state Rep. Karla Drenner, a Democrat, tearfully said: “To all the children in our state who are going to be negatively impacted, please don’t lose hope. Please don’t give up. Please don’t kill yourself.”

In February, in response to legislative efforts to ban “gender-affirming care,” transgender activist Erin Reed declared on Twitter: “I have had multiple calls—4 to be exact—of kids who have attempted or completed suicide because of anti-trans legislation. . . . These bills are killing our kids.”

By invoking the suicide trope, individual activists, organizations like the ACLU, and Democratic politicians are violating well-recognized, research-based guidelines on how to talk responsibly about suicide. That they do so with such consistency and despite evidence of the danger suggests two possibilities: they are either ignorant about suicide and its prevention, or they are invested in the suicide narrative and its political advantages more than in reducing the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable youth.

Decades of research suggest that suicide is a socially contagious behavior, especially in youth. In 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a document titled “Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide: Recommendations from a National Workshop.” In a section titled “Aspects of News Coverage That Can Promote Suicide Contagion,” the CDC cautioned against “[p]resenting simplistic explanations for suicide.” Suicide, it explained, “is never the result of a single factor or event, but rather results from a complex interaction of many factors and usually involves a history of psychosocial problems.”

Transgender advocacy groups acknowledged the dangers of speaking irresponsibly about suicide and agreed with the CDC’s guidelines—that is, until Republican-majority states started pushing back against medical associations and the Biden administration on the issue of pediatric gender medicine.

In 2017, the Movement Advancement Project (an LGBT advocacy group), the Johnson Family Foundation, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention coauthored a document titled “Talking About Suicide & LGBT Populations.” The nation’s leading LGBT advocacy groups officially endorsed it. These included the Human Rights Campaign, GLSEN, the Trevor Project (which focuses on suicide prevention), GLAAD, PFLAG, the Transgender Law Center, SAGE, the Center for American Progress, and the National LGBTQ Task Force. In a section titled “Guidelines for Talking About Suicide in Safe and Accurate Ways,” the document contains this recommendation:

This recommendation couldn’t be clearer. Insisting, as the ACLU, CNN, and countless journalists, activists, and Democrats have, that a law restricting access to drugs and surgeries will cause kids to kill themselves is a perfect example of the kind of messaging that “Talking About Suicide & LGBT Populations” considers dangerous.

The document also recommends: “DON’T use social media or e-blasts to announce news of suicide deaths, speculate about reasons for a suicide death, focus on personal details about the person who died, or describe the means of death. Research shows that detailed descriptions of a person’s suicide death can be a factor in leading vulnerable individuals to imitate the act. Also, avoid re-posting news, headlines or social media content with this kind of information.” It adds: “DON’T idealize those who have died by suicide or create an aura of celebrity around them. Idealizing people who have died by suicide may encourage others to identify with or seek to emulate them.”

Pediatrician and “gender-affirming care” activist Morissa Ladinsky apparently did not get the memo about avoiding the description of “means of death” and not “creat[ing] an aura of celebrity” around those who kill themselves. At the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Anaheim, California, last October, Ladinsky told an audience of fellow AAP members about Leelah Alcorn, a trans-identified 17-year-old who committed suicide in 2014. To the horror of some of her colleagues, Ladinsky said that Acorn died by “stepping boldly in front of a tractor trailer.”

Ladinsky later gave what some would regard as an apology. “I regret my choice of words that has been interpreted to glorify self-harm.” But no LGBT advocacy group criticized her comments or expressed concern that they might contribute to self-harm among vulnerable youth. The ends of Ladinsky’s rhetoric—maintaining the legality of child sex-change procedures—were apparently enough to justify the means.

To be clear, evidence exists that youth who identify as transgender and feel acute distress over their bodies, especially around puberty, have higher rates of both suicide and suicidality (the latter referring to thoughts of suicide as well as nonlethal self-harm without an intent to die) than population-matched controls. Thankfully, however, actual suicide in this population remains extremely rare. A U.K. study found that the suicide rate among clinic-referred transgender-identified youth was 0.03 percent, or four deaths out of 15,000 gender-distressed minors.

In the United States, where between 2.1 percent and 9.1 percent of youth now identify as transgender; and where rates of diagnoses of gender dysphoria have skyrocketed in recent years; and where, so we are told, these numbers of “trans kids” have always existed, albeit “in the closet,” we would expect to have seen an epidemic of suicides among gender-distressed teenagers before “gender affirming” drugs and surgeries first became available 15 years ago. Yet no evidence of such an epidemic exists. Indeed, rates of suicidal behavior among youth have increased since 2011.

Claims about trans identification being a proxy for suicidality typically rely on apples-to-oranges comparisons. They compare rates of suicidality among youth with trans identification or gender dysphoria with rates among youth in the general population. An apples-to-apples study would compare suicidality rates in the first group with suicidality among non-gender-distressed youth with similar mental health comorbidities (e.g., depression). A recent study did exactly that and found that the disparities in suicidality between gender-distressed and non-gender-distressed youth all but disappeared. For example, in Canada, referred trans-identified natal males had almost 49 times more suicidal behavior than non-referred males but only 1.8 times more than referred (non-trans) males. Among females, the rates were 17:1 (referred to non-referred) versus 1:1 (referred to referred). Youth with gender-related distress are more or less in the same category of risk as youth without gender issues but with similar psychiatric problems.

Studies from multiple countries that offer “gender-affirming care” have shown that the majority of minors referred to pediatric gender clinics are teenage girls with no history of gender-related distress before puberty and with at least one psychiatric diagnosis. Typically, these diagnoses precede the advent of gender issues. Researchers in Finland found evidence of “severe psychopathology preceding onset of gender dysphoria” in 68 percent of patients seen in the country’s gender clinics. In the U.K., the review by physician Hilary Cass of the Gender Identity Development Service found that up to a third of the minors referred for services had autism or other neuroatypical conditions. In the U.S., one study found, 70 percent of pediatric patients are diagnosed with autism, ADHD, or some other mental-health problem prior to receiving a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

By now it is well-known that members of Generation Z—and young liberal females, in particular—are experiencing one of the worst mental-health crises on record. The crisis is strongly linked with smartphone and social media use, and the social isolation and lack of psychological resilience they breed. The extraordinarily high rate of comorbid mental-health conditions among teenagers who reject their bodies and their sex must be understood against this background. More importantly for this debate, the common comorbid conditions in this population—anxiety, depression, eating disorders, ADHD, autism, and history of sexual trauma—are independently associated with suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

Given the high rates of preexisting psychiatric comorbidities among referred adolescents and the fact that these comorbid conditions are independently linked to suicidality, the transition-or-suicide narrative is very likely a confusion of correlation and causation. It is more likely that teenagers with suicidal tendencies are gravitating toward a trans identity—perhaps believing that the fresh start promised by gender transition will solve their problems—than that some kids are born transgender and are suicidal as a result of being an embattled minority (the “minority stress” theory).

Worse, 20 states and the District of Columbia have enacted bans on so-called conversion therapy, a term misleadingly borrowed from research on homosexuality to mean any form of counselling intended to help youth come to terms with their bodies (or as activist-physician Jack Turban has put it, forcing kids to be “cisgender”). By promising a “quick fix” for a much more complicated and intractable problem, social and medical gender transition obscure the true nature of the current mental health crisis and put viable solutions even further out of reach.

When it comes to suicide, the ACLU and its de facto client, the American gender industry, are woefully out of step with a growing international consensus. In January, Riittakerttu Kaltiala, chief psychiatrist of the pediatric gender clinic at Finland’s Tampere University and the country’s top expert in the field, told Finland’s liberal newspaper of record that it is “purposeful disinformation” to say that denial of gender “affirmation” will result in suicides. Presumably recognizing the risk of inadvertently fueling suicidal behaviors among vulnerable youth, Kaltiala said that such messaging was “irresponsible.”

There is a reason why systematic reviews of evidence in Europe and Florida examined the link between suicidality and “gender affirming” hormones and found that the certainty of evidence for benefits was “very low.” Studies that purport to demonstrate benefits suffer from severe methodological weaknesses. One study from Sweden found that adult transsexuals who had undergone full medical transition had a suicide rate 19 times higher than population-matched controls, though the study’s design makes it impossible to say whether the high suicide rate was because of their transition.

Medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, the U.K., and (most recently) Norway are not indifferent to teen suicides; they have simply been able to put the problem in its proper context, avoiding moral panic or activist manipulations.

The ACLU’s irresponsible suicide rhetoric must be understood against the collapse of its historic mission as defender of civil liberties, a collapse precipitated by the infusion into the organization of a younger generation of activists schooled in academic “critical social justice.” The ACLU has become one of the most powerful forces driving the expansion of the “civil rights” state, often at the expense of civil liberties. In 2020, one of its star attorneys currently working on LGBT issues and representing the organization in the media, Chase Strangio, publicly declared that “stopping the circulation of this book [Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage] and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” And this, to emphasize, comes from a lawyer at an organization that has defended the constitutional right of neo-Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, where many Holocaust survivors lived.

The ACLU has gone all-in on illiberal trans activism, allowing young attorneys like Strangio to disseminate falsehoods about medical science and compromise an organizational reputation earned, lawsuit by lawsuit, over more than a century. It is time for ACLU leadership to hold its staff accountable—if not for defending medical practices other countries have recognized as harmful, then at least for talking about suicide in irresponsible ways.

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We might well wonder about the mental health and capacity for comprehension of long term consequences in an individual who insists that if they do not get cosmetic surgery or cosmetic-enhancing drugs (hormones) they will unalive themselves.

We might further question the intentions of someone asserting that there are large swathes of such individuals ready to die for the lack of cosmetic embellishment. And further, where they are, both now and throughout history.

This is even more sickeningly predatory than the Church. When the clergy ask someone if they're afraid of going to hell, they're trying to manipulate the mark's own fear of death. When gender crackpots use "affirm or suicide" on a parent, they're trying to manipulate the parent, exploiting their instincts to do anything to keep their child safe.

That is, while the church goes after you, genderists go after your kids.

By: Michael Tanenbaum

Published: May 2, 2023

By: Josh Gerstein

Published: Jun 6, 2022

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Excellent news, considering the ACLU has been ideologically captured and surrendered its mission and values.

In 2013, the ACLU said of sex education curriculum, that "the process will be transparent and that members of the community are involved - as they should have been from the beginning," and "we are all well served when decision on the appointment of sex education advisory committee members is subject to public scrutiny, rather than the result of the presentation of a narrow range of interests."

In 2022, the ACLU said of curriculum transparency, that "curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools."

How it started

Link: STUDENTS WIN WITH RECENT SCHOOL BOARD DECISIONS IN LYON AND CLARK COUNTIES

How it's going

FYI that the ACLU has been ideologically captured.

It is worth noting that K-12 teachers do not enjoy academic freedom as tertiary educators do.

For the same reason that a Xian teacher cannot just decide to teach "intelligent design" as a fact, or "alternative theory," in K-12 science class as a matter of "academic freedom" or "freedom of speech."

For the same reason Kim Davis doesn't get to decide who can and can't get married based on her conscience.

Like Kim Davis, K-12 teachers are employed to undertake a specific civic role, to the standards set by the government body responsible. Anyone who does not meet those standards, or refuses to, can and should be dismissed, and we need feel no guilt about it.

If academic autonomy is important to them, perhaps they would be better suited to tertiary education, where they can say what they want -- and others can argue back.

It is as appropriate that parents see that their children are being taught what they've been told they will be taught, as it is for citizens to see that the marriage laws are being applied as intended.

Considering the politicization of education, particularly over the last 18 months, simple transparency should be something everyone can agree with. For example, if they're not teaching Critical Race Theory, then transparency should show that and shut up the critics once and for all. On the other hand, if there is a problem with what's being taught, then teachers should want it addressed as much as anyone; hiding and coverups of unethical behavior with children didn't work out well for the Vatican.

Transparency isn't just about what you say you're going to do. It's about demonstrating that you have done what you said you would, and haven't done what you said you wouldn't. No more language games, no more misrepresentations, no more hyperbole. Who could object to that?

That the ACLU sees transparency as a problem, when they have not just supported but demanded transparency in the past, by their own slogan, indicates they prefer schools and teachers to be unaccountable. The ACLU.

There are certain government institutions that require secrecy. Institutions that involve children do not belong on that list.