patrick.net

"School" is nominally only 6 hours.

"School" is nominally only 6 hours.

There likely are few issues on which Jewish, Christian and Muslim parents – and a wide range of others interested in constitutional issues – are in alignment. But there is at least one.

That would be to fight a school’s scheme to force mandatory LGBT indoctrination lessons on children as young as three years old without even letting parents know.

The fight is over demands by officials in the Montgomery County, Maryland, Board of Education who adopted their mandatory secret indoctrination program for children, drawing opposition from Jewish, Christian and Muslim parents represented by Becket.

And now dozens of members of Congress, officials from 26 states and a wide array of legal scholars have joined the multi-faith coalition of parents.

Becket explains the school officials not only adopted a program to push a “one-sided ideology on gender and sexuality” on children as young as three, the board then “took away parental notice and opt-outs for storybooks that celebrate gender transitioning, pride parades, and pronoun preferences.”

That means the district will force children to sit through such indoctrinations, and it won’t even allow the parents to know about it.

the whole idea of public schools needs to be ended. it was never about teaching. all the way back to bismark, it was about indoctrinating. and we just don’t need it anymore. it serves less than no purpose and does FAR more harm than good. the best case outcome is emergent incompetence and the worst is outright capture by those seeking to render ignorant and indoctrinate the kids of america. the wastes of time and treasure are astonishing and the whole of the system is an anachronism organized around kinds of scarcity than have not existed for decades.

Woke officials in Maryland called the police when a Baltimore County high school student asked why there were no American flags on display in classrooms.

Parker Jensen, a senior at Towson High School and an aspiring U.S. Marine, was suspended for seven days over the “incident.”

Jensen and his family have now filed a lawsuit over the punishment, citing what he believes to be a violation of state education policy and his constitutional rights.

The teen came under fire after he visited the Baltimore County Board of Education to inquire about the lack of patriotic flags in school classrooms.

However, Jensen’s inquiries triggered outrage from the board’s woke officials.

Jensen’s visit resulted in the police being called to the scene, according to a report by WBFF-TV. ...

The video shows Muth informing Jensen that he is being suspended, effective immediately.

Jensen’s suspension stemmed from his attempt to speak with school officials about their compliance with the Maryland Education Code and Baltimore County Public Schools policy.

Both policies mandate that the United States flag be displayed in every classroom.

“I just wanted to know why the flag wasn’t in our classrooms,” Jensen told WBFF.

It’s not all bad news from the Supreme Court this week. On Tuesday, ScotusBlog published a story headlined, “Supreme Court likely to rule for parental opt-out on LGBTQ books in schools.” By likely, ScotusBlog meant they tore the school board’s drag queens a new lower access point.




The above shows two pages from one of the textbooks involved in the lawsuit. It teaches kindergartners, “My pronouns are like the weather; they change depending on how I feel.” That’s confusing enough, but when you add that they are telling kids they can also swap body parts depending on how they feel, things get really cuckoo.

A group of Maryland public school parents weren’t okay with that. So they sued for the right to opt out their elementary-school-aged children from any instruction including such baffling and revolting LGBTQ+ themes. The Washington, DC-area school board refused to let them opt out, of course, and the parents claimed it violated their religious beliefs.

The case was a political powderkeg. The surprising lack of media coverage speaks volumes to where the culture is headed. (Activists held a twisted drag show outside the Supreme Courthouse during the arguments, which persuaded nobody, but spiked sales of eye bleach.)

The plaintiff parents were religiously diverse. They included Muslims, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Roman Catholics. The lower courts all sided with the school board. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals sneered that “the parents had not demonstrated that exposing their children to the storybooks compelled the parents to violate their religion.”

This time though, we have good Supreme Court news. During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral argument, a majority of the justices seemed clearly to agree with the parents, and several justices even wondered aloud: what’s the harm in simply letting parents excuse their children from the objectionble instruction?

Haha, the school board’s lawyer was hamstrung. He couldn’t afford to admit what the real harm was. The real harm the schools are afraid of is, in order to give parents an opt-out from the lessons, the schools will have to tell them the lessons are happening in the first place. I’ll bet $50 that 90% of Maryland parents have no idea what kind of gross stuff the teachers are spoon-feeding their kids. By “LGBTQ+ books,” they mean pornographic smut with erotic overtones.

Anyway, since the schools’ lawyer couldn’t say that an opt-out would force schools to give away their gross little sex secrets, he had to dissemble and obfuscate, leaving the judges wondering what the heck the argument was even about. If the parents simply want to have their children excused from instruction using these storybooks, Justice Alito asked, “what is the big deal about allowing them to opt out?”

Were I there, I would have added that we’ve already found it constitutional for parents to opt out of public schools entirely and become homeschoolers. Why should letting parents opt out of parts of public school not also be constitutional? The whole, after all, is just the sum of the parts, and so forth.

The conservative majority seemed intensely skeptical of the school board’s argument that mere exposure to school materials does not compel someone to violate their religious beliefs. Chief Justice Roberts disagreed with that logic, wondering whether giving unwanted and objectionable moral instruction to five-year-olds isn’t automatically coercive and immediately violates a family’s deeply held religious beliefs.

For their part, two of the liberal Justices wondered what the big deal was about making kids learn about legal alternative lifestyles, and fretted over creating ‘chaos’ by letting parents decide what materials their children can and can’t be exposed to. The notion, apparently, is that purple-haired, tattooed teachers are better equipped than parents to make those kinds of decisions.