There’s no reasonable or even practical way to do this, but some people shouldn’t be allowed to raise children. There are some parents simply unfit to be parents. If it were ever up to me, I’d start with MAGAts. On Thursday some of those unfit parents got Hope Carrasquilla, the principal at the Tallahassee Classical School, fired because some of them decided her Renaissance curriculum was too risqué. One of the parents complained that a picture of Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of David from the early 1500s is “pornographic.” Carrasquilla was the third principal Tallahassee Classical School, a charter school, lost since it opened in 2020.
Torey Akers reported that “The school's ‘classical education curriculum model’ is an increasingly popular pedagogical model in Florida that advocates a return to the foundational tenets of Western civilisation. The school is affiliated with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution that has sought to ‘fight leftist academics’ by expanding into charter school fundraising and implementation. ‘Once in a while you get a parent who gets upset about Renaissance art,’ Carrasquilla said.”
Mother.ly reported that Carrasquilla “wasn’t as surprised by the reaction of the the school board chair, Barney Bishop, so much as she was by the rest of the board members who went along with the decision to oust her. Bishop… was lobbying for legislation that would give parents even more input in primary education. ‘Parental rights trump everything else,’ Bishop said. According to him, parents choose a school like the public charter Tallahassee Classical for its approach to children’s education. ‘We don’t use pronouns,’ Bishop said. ‘We don’t teach CRT and we don’t ever mention 1619— those are not appropriate subjects for our kids.’ It seems as though Florida schools are in the headlines more and more every day. From their recent push to pass archaic legislation limiting sexual education and banning period talk to their ongoing efforts to ban books about subjects they don’t like, conservatives are working hard to regulate education.”
Five months ago, Pen America reported that “Many Americans may conceive of challenges to books in schools in terms of reactive parents, or those simply concerned after thumbing through a paperback in their child’s knapsack or hearing a surprising question about a novel raised by their child at the dinner table. However, the large majority of book bans underway today are not spontaneous, organic expressions of citizen concern. Rather, they reflect the work of a growing number of advocacy organizations that have made demanding censorship of certain books and ideas in schools part of their mission. Between July 2021 and June 2022, 1,648 books were banned from 5,049 schools, primarily in Florida, Texas and Tennessee, where extremist Republican politicians have politicized schools as a way to frighten parents. Only 22% of the banned books were banned because of sexual content. The #1 impetus for banning books was racism of the censors (61%), followed by homophobia of the censors (41%).
Yesterday, the House halted its investigations into pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis long enough to pass one of its unserious messaging bill, H.R. 5, the so-called Parents Bill of Rights. Every Democrat voted against it and all but 5 Republicans voted for it. Right after it passed the House, Annie Karni reported that if the bill were to pass the Senate (it won’t) and then be signed by Biden, it “would mandate that schools make library catalogs and curriculums public, and that they obtain parental consent before honoring a student’s request to change their gender-identifying pronouns, part of a Republican effort to wring political advantage from a raging debate over contentious social issues… Its passage reflected the latest bid by House Republicans to focus on topics that animate the right-wing base by promoting what they cast as common-sense changes that could appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum… [T]he bill could create a legal basis for censorship in schools and book bans, and would create divisions based on sexual orientation and gender identity. During debate on the House floor this week, some Democrats dubbed the legislation the ‘Politics Over Parents Act,’ calling it extreme and a vehicle to bring political battles over social issues into classrooms while attempting to codify parental rights that already exist.”
“This bill does not give parents any more rights than they already have,” said Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania. Instead, she said, it provided a “one size fits all approach across the country, assuming the size that fits is a right wing straight jacket.”
… For Republicans, many of whom have opposed transgender rights altogether, it was an opportunity to highlight fears that many parents have publicly expressed about how schools handle gender issues, and to respond to broader fears among their conservative supporters about progressive indoctrination while providing momentum to states that are passing similar bills.
In emotional speeches on the House floor, Democrats said that hidden under the seemingly innocuous language of the 30-page bill were politics that would imperil LGBT children. And they warned that such legislation would make it easier for right-wing groups to wage campaigns against books they wanted banned, potentially saddling school boards with lawsuits if they did not comply.
The bill would requiter schools to alert parents if a student wanted to change his or her pronouns, or wanted to change the bathroom or locker room that he or she used at school. If a school failed to obtain parental consent for such changes, it could lose federal funding. Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, won inclusion of an amendment that required schools to alert parents if a student whose biological sex is male participated in a sport designated for women and girls.
[AOC] said the effect would be to “require schools to out trans, nonbinary and LGBT youth, even if it would put said youth in harm’s way.” She added that “for so many children of abuse, school is their only safe place to be.”
Representative Mark Takano, Democrat of California and a former teacher, shared his own experiences of children facing severe punishment at home after teachers outed students to parents.
“When a home is not safe for LGBT kids, schools becomes their safe place,” he said, noting that the bill would push “good teachers to do bad things” and force “kids back into the closet. It is a fundamental invasion of privacy that puts children in danger.”
…Many of the arguments in favor of the bill were couched as criticism of teachers’ unions, which Republicans argued were improperly pressing their own agenda at the expense of parents. [Far right crackpot Virginia] Foxx said they had “worked to push progressive politics in classrooms while keeping parents in the dark.”
Another fascist, Chip Roy from Texas lied on the House floor, claiming “nobody wants to pull books about Rosa Parks” even though books about the Civil Rights heroine have already been banned by multiple schools in Texas and Florida. Karni wrote that “the American Library Association opposes the legislation, deeming it a catalyst for more book banning and censorship, and said that was one of the core goals of the legislation. ‘It is about banning books,’ said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. ‘This bill is going to be weaponized by far right groups and used to threaten schools with legal action if they don’t pull books off the shelves. They want to ban books about Black and Brown people and they want to ban books about LGBTQI+ people.’ Scanlon called the legislation a ‘stunning act of federal overreach that would essentially nationalize our education system.’ And she noted that the libertarian Cato Institute expressed reservations about the legislation, claiming that the bill ‘suffers from a fundamental flaw: It is not constitutional.’”
So how did it pass despite being opposed by 5 Republicans, despite the GOP holding just a 4 vote majority? 10 Democrats didn’t vote, either because of absences or… for whatever reason, including DINOs Jim Costa (CA), Henry Cuellar (TX) and Jared Moskowitz (FL). Before the vote, Pramila Jayapal said that “Congress has a constitutional authority to write laws. What a mockery and betrayal of that duty it would be to pass this stunt of a bill that doesn’t address a single priority of parents, bans books, undermines teachers and hurts our kids. Democrats are the party of parents and families.”
Maebe A Girl is the most progressive candidate running for Adam Schiff’s Los Angeles seat, as he aims for the Senate. (You can contribute to her campaign here. She can really use the help as the first quarter hurtles to an end.) After the vote yesterday, she told me that “They say religion and politics should never be discussed at the dinner table— well, they shouldn’t be brought into public schools, either. LGBTQIA people are being used as pawns for political gain by the GOP, and now students, especially LGBTQIA students, are as well via the nationwide Parents Bill of Rights. While parental inclusion in student curricula might seem like a good idea, a number of the amendments, particularly from Rep. Lauren Boebert, are particularly egregious against LGBTQIA students and overstep privacy boundaries of transgender students. We shouldn’t be outing trans students to the entire student body and their families. We shouldn’t be policing transgender people in bathrooms who, surprise surprise, are just trying to use the bathroom as every human does. It’s being twisted that transgender people pose a risk to cisgender people in bathrooms, when the fact remains that transgender people are at a much higher risk for violence themselves when forced to use a gendered bathroom that doesn’t align with their gender identity.”
Morgan McGarvey, a progressive freshman and young father who represents Louisville, Kentucky, told me after he voted against the bill that he had done so "because it’s another Republican political stunt. As a parent of two public school students, this bill would open the door to deprive my kids and millions of students across our country of an accurate, honest, and fact-based education. It also unfairly targets LGBTQ students, who are already on the margins. We need inclusivity, not impediment. We should legislate with compassion and kindness, not callousness and cruelty. I will always stand up against Republican attempts to restrict our rights."
One of those Boebert kids has knocked up a 16 year old. Now the question is which one will be the first to shoot someone.