(The opinions expressed in guest op-eds are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.)
For most people, the thought of an adult having sexually explicit conversations with someone else’s children buries the needle on their Creepout-ometer.
But for America’s largest teachers’ union, it’s just another day at the office.
The National Education Association (NEA), in fact, is promoting — and even orchestrating — highly disturbing sexual discussions between teachers and students with a detailed how-to sex guide helpfully titled, “Queering Sex Ed: Sex Acts That Don’t Get Enough Play.”
Jarring as it is, the name is the safest part of the how-to guide for young eyes. The sex acts described on its pages have no place in a school, and certainly are not appropriate for a teacher to discuss with students even with parental permission, let alone without it.
The so-called “resource guide” is presented as a series of recipe cards, complete with the ingredients (tools) needed, time required to perform the act, and step-by-step instructions.
You can read for yourself, but they won’t be described in this space.
And yet this material was made readily available to any K-12 school child in Hilliard, Ohio, with a smartphone that could read the QR code on the badges worn by participating teachers.
Parenthetically, it should be noted that more than 80,000 school employees — more than the total number of unionized teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Philadelphia combined — exercised their right to drop their membership and stop paying dues to the NEA and its rival, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), in the 2020-21 school year alone.
Not surprisingly, the unions’ own polling makes clear that many of the departed had grown disgusted with the politicization of modern classrooms.
Is it any wonder? Some teachers still just want to teach algebra, English literature, and music.
Just ahead of this past summer’s AFT national convention, the union released an internal report that found 40 percent of its members would consider leaving the profession in the next two years, while three-quarters said they wouldn’t recommend the field to others.
Nearly nine out of 10 respondents said schools have become too politicized and, although it wasn’t acknowledged in the study, one needn’t look far to find the source of their frustration.
AFT president Randi Weingarten has made a habit of inserting herself and her union into political debates that have nothing to do with educating the nation’s children. The list includes (but isn’t limited to) her support for Planned Parenthood, a threatened boycott of Walmart until the retail giant agrees to stop selling firearms, and, most recently, her unhinged defense of the Biden administration’s extremist climate change policies.
Weingarten’s actions are no more defensible, by the way, when they actually do concern education. After donating millions to Joe Biden’s election war chest, AFT officials were caught red-handed rewriting the federal Centers for Disease Control’s COVID policy and urging the agency to keep students out of classrooms even longer.
As for the state of Florida’s recent passage of the Parental Rights in Education law, which attempts to give parents a way to prevent their children from being indoctrinated with the left’s radical LGBTQ agenda under the guise of education, Weingarten characterized the measure as “the way wars start.”
Just as with the equally toxic Critical Race Theory (CRT), which teaches students they are either oppressors or victims based solely on the color of their skin, the unions’ strategy when it comes to exposing even the youngest students to deviant sexual material is to first deny it’s happening and then demonize parents for objecting.
As the Ohio example clearly illustrates, it is happening. And it needs to be stopped.
Parents, many of whom got their first taste of what their children are actually being taught when classrooms were closed and the filth was transmitted directly into the students’ homes, are outraged and increasingly fighting back.
But even more encouraging are the educators themselves refusing to traffic any longer in the unions’ lies.
For those teachers who remain in the union because you’re afraid of the intimidation and pushback by your peers if you leave – remember, your dues are funding this garbage.
Ashley Varner is vice president of communications and federal affairs at the Freedom Foundation.