Don’t let the Department of Education silence our children

The Biden administration, in thrall to a radical gender ideology, would like to roll back the progress women have made in pursuing their dreams and expanding their athletic, academic and economic opportunities. (Photo illustration: RyanJLane/Getty Images)

The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was essential to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society.

In 1818, our third president described public education as “the means of giving every citizen the information he requires to conduct his affairs properly…to express and preserve his own ideas…to improve his morals and faculties…to understand his duties and exercise his rights.”

In 1972, Congress, recognizing some inadequacies in the law for women who did not fully fit this Jeffersonian vision of no harassment or discrimination, passed Title IX of the Education Amendments.

For 52 years, Title IX has protected the pursuit of women’s dreams, expanding their athletic, academic and economic opportunities.

Today, the Biden administration and its Department of Education, in thrall to a radical gender ideology, would like to erase this progress.

By deciding to reinterpret the law by replacing “sex” with “gender identity,” the Biden administration would turn a law that was supposed to protect women into one that punishes them. From kindergarten to college, girls would be denied the voices to defend the very rights that Title IX has guaranteed them for more than five decades.

The consequences are deeply disturbing.

Last year in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, parents raised the alarm when a fully intact coach, who goes by the name Sasha Yates and identifies as a woman, would regularly change in the girls’ locker room, exposing his male genitals to 15- and 16-year-old girls. In West Virginia, a group of girls was banned from a track and field meet after refusing to compete against a man in a shot put competition.

Under the Biden administration’s proposed rule change, these girls could be cited for sexual harassment for expressing extremely natural and justified concerns about their mental and physical well-being.

These rules are part of school curricula and guidance programs that are designed to drive a wedge between children and their parents. They are also deliberately designed to undermine our children’s ability to use logic and reason to understand the world, which was, until recently, the real purpose of education.

Once again, forced speech and censorship come into play.

Elementary school students who clearly see their teacher as a man in a dress are being urged to challenge their senses and pretend that the adult is a woman. Students who may feel uncomfortable adapting to another person’s ever-changing personal pronouns or sharing a bathroom with someone of the opposite sex are being urged to seek psychological support.

These students are then emotionally manipulated into believing that if they tell the truth, they will cause transgender students to self-harm. Teachers who reject this newspeak are forced into submission and face disciplinary action if they stand up for the truth.

We used to have a school system where children were given the tools to form their own opinions and navigate the world. Now we have a system where children are trained to conform to gender ideology. of the day.

Such a model is incompatible with the maintenance of a free society. But that is the problem.

This is a war on our families, our children, and the First Amendment. And make no mistake, the Biden administration is taking actions like this because it is losing.

Across the country, organizations like Moms for Liberty, Leadership Institute, and Moms for America are mobilizing concerned parents to run for school boards and fight back against this madness.

Louisiana recently became the 11th state to adopt universal school choice, giving parents more power over their children’s schools. At the urging of groups like the American Principles Project, states are passing laws to protect women’s sports and ban the social and physical gender transition of our children.

And here at the Southeastern Legal Foundation, we are working tirelessly, inside and outside the courts, to challenge these actions by the Biden administration and protect our students’ right to tell the truth.

Everywhere you look, committed parents and grandparents are bridging the partisan divide to restore and preserve an education system that gives our children the skills they need to be upstanding citizens in a free republic. They are courageously protecting our children’s ability to reason, to dream, and to speak the truth without fear of reprisal from some Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

Now more than ever, we must come together to support and learn from each other, to share our stories, and to show the bureaucrats in Washington that we will not stand idly by while they rob our children of their birthright.

That’s why I will join the March for Children on August 31 on the National Mall, peacefully protesting with thousands of families to remind the government that we will not let bureaucrats steal our children’s right to free speech.

Parents and grandparents who are concerned about their children’s education should join us.

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