Just how tone-deaf is the Left? Media coverage of Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill provides insight into this question.
First, the corporate media have adopted the activists’ nickname for the legislation and refer to it as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Of course, the legislation never prohibits the word gay. Instead, one short section exempts pre-kindergarten through third grade from any explicit sex education curriculum and requires that such content be age-appropriate for all grades. If a child expresses a sexual preference or gender identity, the bill also requires parental notification and involvement in the vast majority of circumstances.
The Florida legislature sent the Stop W.O.K.E. Act to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk. It prohibits content based on critical race theory (CRT), and DeSantis will sign it. The intent is to stop lessons that classify or segregate children by race or ethnicity. Additionally, it prohibits content that assigns behavior, motivations, or historical guilt based on racial identity. For the record, a curriculum like this is discriminatory as defined by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Activists and the media try to paint these laws as teaching “whitewashed” history, which is an inaccurate characterization.
On PBS NewsHour, panelist Jonathan Capehart provided commentary representative of the leftist corporate media takes on these subjects. Hysterically, he used ideas from Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’s State of Union response to set up the following conclusion after two minutes of rambling about Republican leaders. “Quite honestly, if their constituents aren’t white, male, cisgender, heterosexual — it seems like they have no room for anyone like that in their states,” Capeheart proclaimed. Perhaps he missed the fact that Reynolds is female.
PBS NewsHour panelist Jonathan Capehart asserts state-level GOP leaders are playing to conservative bigots: "if their constituents aren't white, male, cisgender, heterosexual — it seems like they have no room for anyone like that in their states." pic.twitter.com/ZsGglmEwFU
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) March 13, 2022
Capehart also asserted that the “Don’t Say Gay” bill will hurt LGBTQ students and parents. It will just ensure parents are aware of their child’s situation. It is not clear there are significant waves of eight-year-olds coming out despite the outliers the corporate media cover. Capehart also seems to think white students deserve to feel anguish and discomfort because of our nation’s history of slavery.
It would be difficult to imagine any child leaving K-12 without understanding slavery existed in the U.S. and a bloody war was fought to end it. However, no child living today should feel shame because someone with their skin color did something to a person of another race over one hundred years ago. If anyone were to assert Muslim students today should feel anguish and discomfort because of the way the events of 9/11 are taught, all people of good conscience would roundly condemn him or her. Imposing those emotions on white students is no more acceptable.
The issues of radical sex education and critical race theory in K-12 education addressed by the Florida legislation were central to the recent Virginia gubernatorial race. Until reports of a sexual assault cover-up in Loudon County and parents opposing race-based admissions to a magnet high school in Fairfax Count, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s campaign was a pretty anodyne, pro-business GOP offering. His team embraced the issues in K-12 education, and they galvanized a new coalition of voters that started to emerge because of remote learning during the pandemic– parents.
This coalition is not just white parents. In Virginia, one of CRT’s most prominent and outspoken critics is Asra Nomani. She is an immigrant born in India. The movement is also not comprised of just fathers. Instead, moms have been the driving force in many grassroots movements to address local school boards. Hundreds of viral videos show a diverse coalition of parents fighting radical school boards. These coalitions contested school board races nationwide. The movement even extended to the recall of three far-left school board members in deep blue, progressive San Francisco.
As PJ Media’s Athena Thorne reported Monday, the corporate media is even commissioning polls to demonstrate their radical views about curriculum are the norm. To get the results they wanted, an ABC/Ipsos poll admitted to oversampling members of the LBGTQ community and did not limit responses to registered voters.
In a much more representative sample, a poll commissioned by the Daily Wire showed 69% of parents supported Florida’s parental rights bill when pollsters provided the bill’s actual content. Additionally, 79% of respondents indicated they felt parents, not teachers, should be driving the conversations about sexuality and gender with their children.
Just like Karl Rove identified “security moms” in 2004, the average parent could become a newfound coalition for Republicans willing to take on cultural issues. If the Republican National Committee were paying attention, reforming public education to include more choice and effective skills-based curriculum free from social justice nonsense would be central to the party platform. However, one thing is clear. The Left ignores the lessons they should have learned from the off-year elections. Maybe they will blame that on Putin too.
Source: PJ Media
