Sex Education and Democratic Parents
– By Howard Sierer –
The liberal media would have us believe that extremist right-wing conservatives have riled up parents into objecting to sexual content in public school curricula. Turns out that lots of Democratic parents don’t want school teachers talking to their 8-year-old children about sex either.
“Let parents reject politicized instruction in NJ schools” reads the title of an editorial in a New Jersey newspaper. It goes on, “Parents in many school districts have sprung into action in response to state orders to start instructing grade school students in such politically divisive and personal issues as sexual identity and gender diversity.”
“Springing into action” does not mean these parents are rightwing, anti-LGBTQ bigots. According to a Pew Research Center poll, most Americans favor protecting trans people from discrimination.
But even in heavily-Democratic New Jersey, a recent poll by New Jersey’s own Stockton University showed that “two-thirds of adults believe parents should be more involved in local decisions about what curriculum is taught in the schools,” while only 5% believed parents should be less involved. Curriculum was New Jersey parents’ top educational concern, far surpassing bullying.
Only 12% thought “gender identity and sexuality” should be introduced in grades K-4. An overwhelming majority said they don’t want these subjects introduced before middle school and 21% said “never.”
So parents in liberal New Jersey are no different than millions of others across the country who are waking up to what their children are being taught in school.
Florida’s 2022 law prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade reflects parents’ values not only in Florida but those of both political parties across the country. This in spite of constant claims from the national liberal media that Florida’s law is anti-LGBTQ and fosters discrimination.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis praised the law, saying, “Parents have every right to be informed about services offered to their child at school and should be protected from schools using classroom instruction to sexualize their kids as young as 5 years old.”
The liberal Washington Post surprised its readers with an article titled “Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows.” Using the term “anti-trans” is clearly an inflammatory and misleading political statement by the Post’s editors. The poll showed that almost two-thirds of Americans, far more than the Republican base, oppose medical treatments facilitating teenage gender change and oppose allowing biological men to compete in women’s athletics.
The Post’s poll also unsettled the paper’s liberal readers by reporting that 57% of respondents believe gender “is based on sex assigned at birth.” Likewise, the Pew Research Center poll hyperlinked above reports that 60% of adults believe gender “is determined by sex assigned at birth,” a percentage that has been growing since it was first reported in 2017. Even half of young adults agree.
In aggregate, these polls reflect the majority of American’s common sense on contentious gender and school curriculum issues despite continuing bombardment by liberal media to the contrary.
One participant in the Washington Post poll spoke for the majority of Americans – including me – when she said, “My concern with transgender is mostly with the children. We can’t vote until we’re a certain age, we can’t smoke, drink or whatever, but we can change our bodies’ anatomy and how it works? It just doesn’t seem like that’s okay to me.”
So are two-thirds of New Jersey parents rightwing extremists? Hardly. Once again, progressives and their allies in the media are characterizing all those holding an opposing view as right-wing extremists, even when a majority of Americans are in opposition. That tactic is getting old and the majority are waking up to who the extremists in this country really are.
