By CHRISTOPHER MANION
John Swett founded California’s oldest school union, the California Teachers Association (CTA), 160 years ago. Mr. Swett, a Unitarian and a diehard anti-Catholic, is famous for declaring that “children belong to the state, not to the parents.”
The CTA Union still runs the California Democrat Party. So true to form, this week California’s top law enforcement officer “took a school district to court for the alleged crime of notifying parents when their kids claim to identify as transgender,” the Daily Signal reports.
“That school district has gone out of its way to promote mental health and suicide prevention, and it has resources devoted to helping ‘LGBTQIA+ youth,’ but California Attorney General Rob Bonta has claimed that the parental notification policy ‘wrongfully endangers the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of nonconforming students who lack an accepting environment in the classroom and at home’,” Tyler O’Neil reports.
Michael Novak once observed that, when a guy gets hired by the government, his IQ goes up twenty points. Sometimes it seems that school union members enjoy the same self-perceived elevation of intelligence.
At our local county board meetings, union members sometimes claim that “we’re the best friends our students have.” They consider their classrooms to be a “safe haven” for children whose selfish parents don’t want the best for their children. In fact, their hostility toward parents and families has been on the rise of late.
But who cares? Unions are in charge now, of the schools and of the Democrat Party.
And yes, they think that our children belong to them.
Consider Chicago. Thousands of parents are pulling their children out of the Windy City’s collapsing public school system. No problem: The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) runs the joint. Newly elected (and already disastrous) Brandon Johnson ran for mayor only after Stacy Davis-Gates decided to run for president of the CTU — apparently the more powerful office of the two.
Johnson wants to ruin every neighborhood in town, defending rioters and looters instead of their victims.
In similar fashion, Davis-Gates wants to ruin every family in sight
“School choice was actually the choice of racists,” she once opined on Twitter. She also calls private schools “segregation academies.”
That charge might come as a surprise to members of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. The order runs Chicago’s De La Salle Institute. Founded in 1889, the school is named after St. John Baptist de La Salle, the order’s founder, who died in the seventeenth century.
We now learn that Ms. Davis-Gates sends one of her children there.
“Private schools for me but not for thee,” bray the school unions, and, in blue cities all over the country, parents have thrown up their hands. The unions have already won. They’re in power, their schools are collapsing, and so are the communities they serve. In urban areas throughout the country, crime and corruption are erasing the remnants of what was once vibrant city life.
They’ve won the blue cities, but the school unions want more. Today, in school board meetings across the country, the battle rages, and union money and heft are playing a pivotal role.
Singing The Virginia Blues
Here in Virginia, several counties surrounding Washington, D.C., are a focal point as the school year begins. Two years ago, those counties provided the margin for Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory over former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat. Youngkin stood up for the rights of parents, while McAuliffe, in a rare moment of truth, argued that parents don’t have any.
Victory in Virginia’s elections this year will be critical to advocates of parents’ rights. Democrats who hold a slim majority in the State Senate have done their best to thwart the pro-life, pro-family agenda of Youngkin and the Republican majority in the House of Delegates, but the redistricting that followed the 2020 census has introduced an added dimension of uncertainty going forward.
And as usual, the Federal Government has made the situation even more difficult.
Unfortunately, its endless expansion has led to a phenomenal growth of the number of bureaucrats, lobbyists, contractors, and their booming supply chains to Northern Virginia. Most of them are Democrats who live off the government or one of its countless mammary glands, and most of them are pretty well-off.
In fact, today the five richest counties in the United States surround Washington, D.C.
The richest of all, Loudoun County, owes its growth and its wealth entirely to government. Its population has increased by a factor of ten since 1973, when it was a predominantly rural community dotted with horse farms.
But that was then. Loudoun County is now booming, indifferent to the pervasive suffering elsewhere in the country.
But Loudoun is having growing pains of its own.
The past two years have been a long, hard slog for the radical Democrats sitting on the Loudoun County School Board (LCSB). Sexual assaults in two different schools, committed by the same grade-school male wearing a skirt in the girl’s lavatory, were bad enough. As usual, the subsequent coverups, LCSB outrages, lawsuits, and then outright malfeasance compounded the issue and made Loudoun a scar on the national map.
The scandal was topped off by the firing of Scott Ziegler, Loudoun County Superintendent of Schools last December. But that wouldn’t have happened, had it not been for Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, whom Gov. Youngkin asked to call a special grand jury to investigate the scandal when the LCSB stonewalled.
Miyares, a Republican and son of a Cuban refugee, was elected with Youngkin in 2021, and has proven to be a tough prosecutor.
The grand jury also blasted LCSB members for mishandling the sexual assault cases, but none of them quit. Arrogant board members sued to stop the investigation altogether, and it proceeded only when the Virginia Supreme Court dismissed the board’s objections.
Aiming Close To Home
The radical left and the school unions have been targeting school board elections for years, while parents have been focusing on taking care of their kids. But the sexual revolutionaries are on the warpath against the family, and the Northern Virginia Democrats are as viscerally anti-family, pro-sodomy, and pro-perversion as are Attorney General Merrick Garland and Joe Biden himself.
Unfortunately, Virginia’s Catholic Bishops, Michael Burbidge of Arlington and Barry Knestout of Richmond, have stayed out of the fray. While Bishop Burbidge’s excellent Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology was published two years ago, parents’ groups throughout the Commonwealth have been on their own in their battle to clean up school and public libraries, monitor curricula, cancel Gender Agenda in the classroom, and elect pro-family school board members.
In fact, many in the Catholic laity are concentrating on local elections, while their bishops concentrate on management and fundraising. Both Bishop Burbidge and Bishop Knestout continue to maintain their stubborn silence regarding the prominent Catholic Democrats in their dioceses who support abortion until birth abortion – Cong. Gerry Connolly in Arlington and Sen. Tim Kaine in Richmond.
Virginia’s off-year elections this fall have become a target not only for school unions nationwide, but for radical foundations and activists, who have already gotten several Marxist prosecutors elected in counties near the D.C. Beltway.
With the growth of government and the resulting influx of pro-abortion Democrats, Virginia’s political future is uncertain. Gov. Youngkin’s term ends in two years. He cannot run again, and is already being mentioned for national office.
Although he has put Virginia’s decline on hold, the odds are against us. Elections in Virginia will always be a toss-up at best.
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