March 2023 — Ed Reporter Monthly Email Edition

By now, everyone is aware of “cancel culture,” or the current practice of marginalizing and/or silencing anyone who dares speak out against the progressive left’s prevailing dogma. But perhaps more ominous than the censorship of high-profile comedians and celebrities is the less-well-known effort to re-stock and re-catalog our nation’s library shelves.

The term “library decolonization” has been in use since about 2016. “Decolonizing the library” is a deliberate reference to the great age of exploration whereby Western civilization was spread around the globe by brave adventurers and explorers. The goal is to minimize access to classic works, not only by removing books from library shelves, but also by changing library cataloging practices, which will ensure that classic works are less likely to be read by casual inquirers. (See Decolonizing the Library of Congress in this issue of Education Reporter.)

As Phyllis Schlafly Eagles Researcher Gwen Kelley observes: “We’re talking about the pornographic and racist books that are being added to libraries, but we have not paid so much attention to the fact that the woke left are censoring books that have been considered classic standards. They aren’t adding bookcases,” she notes, they’re adding bad books, but a child can’t even choose a good book as an alternative because they’re being removed from the stacks. The woke left that screams about conservatives wanting to ban books is itself banning books and getting away with it.”

PJ Media Journalist Matt Margolis agrees. In an article published on PJ Media’s website a year ago, Margolis wrote: “What the left doesn’t want you to know is that removing books from school libraries for sexually explicit or otherwise inappropriate content is not book banning … parents have every right to assess the appropriateness of content available to their kids in school without their supervision. Likewise, parents have every right to feel confident their children won’t be exposed to something harmful.”

Margolis adds: “As much as conservative parents might be inclined to prevent sexually explicit material in school, progressive parents are at least as inclined to want books ‘banned’ due to ‘racist content.’” He points out that the result is the removal from schools of classic novels like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Of Mice and Men. “Obviously,” he writes, “these novels aren’t racist—quite the contrary. But as much as I know that good books have been and will continue to be pulled from school curricula for stupid reasons, I’d rather parents have the opportunity to scrutinize what their children are taught than be left powerless.

“After all, parents who want their children to read controversial books can still buy them. And that’s the difference between elected school boards making decisions about age-appropriate material and actual book banning.”

But common sense has never stopped the left from wailing and gnashing their teeth over alleged “book banning” by conservatives. Last September, a group of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), introduced a resolution to keep explicit books in schools, claiming that removing inappropriate books is “an attack on First Amendment rights.” It’s unclear whether Raskin would have said the same about the removal of Huckleberry Finn or other American classics currently frowned upon by the left. The resolution was not enacted by the 117th Congress.

Sexually explicit and racist content is the problem

Parents Defending Education (PDE) Director of Outreach, Erika Sanzi, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that PDE does not support book bans, but agrees schoolchildren shouldn’t be subjected to sexually explicit content. She explained: “The fact that most school libraries don’t stock Art of the Deal does not mean the book is banned and the same goes for a book with sexually explicit illustrations and content deemed to be inappropriate in a K-12 setting.”

For years, the teachers’ unions and other leftist organizations have defended the indefensible: outright pornography on school library bookshelves, a topic Education Reporter has often covered. Some of the more egregious books have successfully been pulled from school libraries, but many more remain. A few of the most controversial titles include Gender Queer, an explicit book showing sex acts; This Book is Gay, an instruction on “the ins and outs of gay sex”; All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir about racism and bullying, with descriptions of homosexual sex acts; Flamer, a graphic book about young boys performing sexual acts at a summer camp; and The Hate U Give, a novel about racism, police brutality, and leftwing activism.

Florida exposes book ban hoax

On March 8, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lashed out at the mainstream media, teachers’ unions, and leftist activists promoting the “book ban hoax” that Florida is emptying library bookshelves and using “political theater [to pretend] that Florida’s schools cannot teach about topics like African American History, including topics like slavery.”

In a press release, DeSantis praised his state’s “high-quality standards for required instruction of African American History, extensive African American History educational requirements in state law.” The press release refutes the “myths” that Florida’s commissioner of education, Manny Diaz, Jr., says are being disseminated by the left, chief of which is the claim that the state “has banned the instruction of African American History, including the discussion of slavery and the aftermath of slavery.”

The DeSantis administration contends that instruction about African American history “has only expanded,” and that legislation signed by the governor “ensures that Florida’s students learn about the 1920 Ocoee Election Day Riots in addition to requiring instruction on slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow laws.” Also included is instruction about African history prior to the development of black slavery, and continues through abolition and beyond.

Another myth being perpetrated by activists is that “Florida teachers could be committing a 3rd-degree felony by having books on ‘certain topics’ within their classrooms.” The DeSantis administration counters by clarifying that the state “has taken a stand against pornography and sexual material in the classroom. Statute 847.012 has been in law for many years and carries a felony penalty for the distribution of pornographic material to children.”

Rewriting the classics

A new trend for the cancel culture is the rewriting of classic and/or timeless literary works. While more iconic than “classic,” the James Bond book series, written in the 1950s and 1960s, is undergoing revision in order to remove “racially insensitive or racist references.” This effort comes on the heels of the announced rewrite of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and The Giant Peach, Matilda, and The BFG.

According to The Gateway Pundit, “so-called ‘sensitivity gurus’ hired by UK-based publisher Puffin are scrubbing legendary author Roald Dahl’s children’s books for new editions in order to avoid offending snowflake liberals. The changes are so drastic, few readers will recognize them from the original works.” The Pundit noted that President Biden fully embraced this attempt to cancel the famous author’s works, and added: “Hope you kept old Dahl classics for your children and grandchildren. The new editions will be an awful reading experience.”

Journalist Matt Vespa, Senior Editor at townhall.com, whose work appears on PJ Media and TownHall.com, acknowledges that “one doesn’t have to look far either on the internet or through study that [past] times were different. In many cases, it wasn’t for the best, especially for people of color, and yet there are numerous stories of these folks not only thriving but overcoming the societal obstacles that inhibited their growth. Many of these obstacles have been removed, and while progress has been achieved—this isn’t good enough for the Left, who need a perpetual state of cultural war to push these harsh ‘wartime’ orthodoxies they feel will bring unity.”

But rather than bringing unity, these orthodoxies are causing more division. The practice of viewing everything through a racial lens is cultivating more racism, while the pornographic literature activists deem fit for children gets not merely a pass but a vigorous nod.

Vespa writes that today’s woke snowflakes call for “book bans of classic literary works due to [the] vernacular at the time” and they “threaten all who don’t support this endeavor as being enablers of racism.” But “rewriting past works to be less offensive isn’t cultural sensitivity; it’s abject stupidity.”

An example of books the Left does promote is a new series about “inspiring women” that targets elementary school children. The problem is that at least one of these “women” is a biological male. Titled She Persisted: Rachel Levine by Lisa Bunker, the book will be released later this year. The inspiration for this series is Chelsea Clinton’s book series called She Persisted, and Rachel Levine is being touted as “the perfect choice for kids who love learning and teachers who want to bring inspiring women into their curriculum.” This book includes “a list of ways that readers can follow in Rachel Levine’s footsteps and make a difference!”

But as PJ Media’s Matt Margolis writes:

• Not only was Levine put in his position solely for being transgender, but the Biden administration, obsessed with affirmative action picks and milestones, promoted Levine to be a four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Services (USPHS) Commissioned Corps and even dubbed him the first female four-star admiral even though he is a male. So not only is Levine a man who has been promoted for identifying as a woman, but he has also stolen opportunities from real women.
• Levine deserves no accolades; he is tainted by scandal from his time as Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary and has achieved notoriety for his awkward cultural appropriation of womanhood. Meanwhile, he uses his position to advance radical leftist gender theory and pushes for children to be drugged up and mutilated on the taxpayers’ dime.

Perhaps the most ominous sign of the current ongoing cultural shift in America is what has been called Decolonizing the Catalog, which was described in the November 2021 American Libraries Magazine. The concept was covered in a webinar titled “Decolonizing the Catalog: Antiracist Description Practices from Authority Records to Discovery Layers” by the American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association.

The general theme of this effort is to persuade libraries, including the Library of Congress (LC), to change the usage of key words in text summaries and subject headings in cataloging books, with the goal of ensuring that titles favored by the progressive left, such as The Bluest Eye (mentioned in Library Decolonization) by Toni Morrison are easier for searchers to locate than less preferred titles.

Since 2017, the leadership of ongoing programs surrounding the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) have focused their attention on advocating for more inclusive terminology in the LCSH. This effort purportedly gained steam after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the riots that followed. As a result, “the concept of antiracism—or actively opposing racism and promoting tolerance and inclusion—gained traction in critical conversations about library work.”

Some of the complaints that surfaced in the webinar are revealing. For example, one panelist bemoaned the fact that the LCSH “is a very old vocabulary that dates back to the late 19th century, and the terms in LCSH are interconnected. In order to change Blacks to Black people and whites to white people, you need to revisit every heading that includes the word Blacks or whites. So it’s not just a matter of changing one thing but changing many things and convincing LC that it is worthwhile to make those changes.”

A wholesale shift in library cataloging, starting with the nation’s premier library, appears to be the goal and it is clear that more recent works, especially those of progressive activists, will be prominently listed in search results.

Webinar panelists described how they have worked to persuade the LC to change headings to make it easier for searchers to find books on “racism against Black people” as opposed to books on “racism” in general. Another proposal calls for changing the historical term “slave hiring” to eliminate the term “slave” and “instead use more inclusive language to describe this concept.” The panelists complained that “LCSH tends to use the language that is commonly used in the literature.” Yet another example of a change they want made is to overlay what they called “the anti-immigrant” term “illegal aliens” with their preferred term “undocumented immigrants.”

One panelist discussed a process whereby activists in universities and other institutions can submit for “remapping” terms or headings they don’t like but which are being used in their library catalogs, and can suggest terminology they think should replace it. “People submit headings they’d like to remap through a simple Google form,” she explained. “The only required field is the problematic term they think should be overlaid, but we also asked for suggestions on what term to use instead, sources for the suggested term, contact information, and comments. Submissions from the Google form populate a spreadsheet the metadata team uses to review proposals … ”

These activists say their next step “is to consider how to increase the transparency and visibility” of their projects. Conservatives might hope that such transparency will shed light on their true intent to further erase American history in particular, and Western civilization in general, by making classics and older works harder to find, and install in their place today’s oppressive, Orwellian view of the world.

Parents may be interested to know, and many likely do not, that a popular school program masquerading as a reading aid might be teaching your children to interpret the news from a leftist point of view.

A little-known EdTech startup company called Newsela was founded by Matthew Gross and Dan Cogan-Drew in 2013, although some sources trace it back to 2012. Newsela supports Common Core’s reading and “English Language Arts” standards, hence the “ela” portion of its name. The fact that it was financed by Silicon Valley money — Zuckerberg Investment Ventures for one — is no surprise. Toss in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as donors and you’ve come full circle, since Gates was a key player in the development of Common Core.

Newsela rewrites and repackages articles from mainstream publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press (AP), PBS, and others, to correlate with five different K-12 reading levels. PJ Media reported in 2016 that “the creators of Newsela found an opportunity to profit from the Common Core standards by adapting news to the classroom and selling it to schools as ‘Common Core-aligned.’” It provides modified versions of newspaper articles as reading exercises, “coupled with four-question quizzes to test students’ comprehension.”

The platform also enables “differentiated instruction” or “differentiated learning,” the education fad that promotes “a range of different avenues” for teaching children, even in the same classroom. As far back as 1997, Phyllis Schlafly picked up on the folly of differentiated instruction when she wrote about its use in a so-called Gifted and Talented program. What she described was anything but a challenging curriculum for bright students, but instead was an exercise in “analysis” and “abstraction.” One section employed “guided imagery” for the purpose of collecting information about each student. Phyllis rhetorically asked: “For what purpose will the teacher ‘chart’ this imagery information about each student?” She then answered the question with more questions: “To scan it into the child’s computer profile? To follow up with psychiatric sessions with the school counselor? Is this how public schools are helping our best and brightest students?”

According to one online source, differentiated learning can take many forms; e.g., in “small work groups,” but to the casual observer, it’s more about students “teaching each other” and doing whatever they want in the name of “learning.” It’s also about teachers tailoring instruction for students according to their race, gender, family economic status, etc., which signals that they are not all equal and therefore can’t be taught the same subjects in the same manner. In any case, Newsela’s format apparently fits with differentiation.

Biased content

“While [Newsela] may seem a useful teaching tool,” observed PJ Media, “not everyone thinks of it favorably.” Indeed, parents have complained over the years about the platform’s leftist point of view, and some have charged that the articles are not well written and contain factual errors.” But as the articles were originally the work of professional media, the political bias reflects that of the original sources as well as that of Newsela.

Examples abound of rewrites that move left-leaning views even farther left. In one example, PJ Media compared an actual excerpt from the AP with the Newsela rewrite as shown below.

Opening paragraphs, AP:

• In the course of a 17-year experiment on more than 1 million plants, scientists put future global warming to a real world test — growing California flowers and grasslands with extra heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen to mimic a not-so-distant, hotter future.
• The results, simulating a post-2050 world, aren’t pretty. And they contradict those who insist that because plants like carbon dioxide — the main heat-trapping gas spewed by the burning of fossil fuels — climate change isn’t so bad, and will result in a greener Earth.

Opening paragraphs, Newsela 580L (5^th grade level):

• Scientists in California know it will be even hotter in many years. They want to know what will happen to plants. They are growing many different plants. They are using extra heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
• They hope the elements will create an environment that is like the world in the year 2050. The scientists want to see how the plants react. So far, the future does not look good.
• The scientists have been doing this for 17 years. They are creating the changes that come from global warming. The scientists say it is like having a time machine to look ahead.

The AP article presented global warming as a given, but 5^th graders were fed a still more partisan version by Newsela instead of an impartial report, albeit not very well written and arguably at a less than 5^th grade reading level.

In another example, a Newsela slide deck of Women’s History Month Lessons sheds more light on the platform’s bias. In viewing women leaders in the 1800s, for example, the presentation appears to ensure that the main takeaway is the overall subservience of women during that time, but also that some women were more subservient than others.

The slides go on to review the changes that have occurred over time for women, but the implication is that women’s prospects today remain negative. It assumes all students agree that the emphasis for women should range from “reproductive justice to indigenous rights to economic empowerment — and beyond.” The exercise then encourages students to pick an issue and “create a plan for how you will get involved and take action on [it]. You may identify organizations that are already working on this issue and explain how you plan to support, or propose an individual project around fundraising, mutual aid, political organizing, or spreading information, or other. Note whether your plan reflects any of the strategies you read about in the readings, and why you feel those strategies will be effective, given the results of previous efforts…. Once you’ve written up your plan and explanation, it’s time to take action!”

Parent and teacher reviews

Common Sense Media posted parent reviews of Newsela as well as those of teachers, which were mixed at best. While some were supportive, many were negative. One suburban Colorado mom described the AP stories as “abbreviated,” with “grammatical errors and poor content.” This mom found them lacking “in any kind of robust classroom discussion” and felt they provided “a poor substitute for language arts.”

Another mom wrote: “I am thoroughly disappointed in Newsela and plan to go back to Dogo News for reliable and consistently informative content.” Yet another parent’s post read: “In theory, [Newsela] sounds great. But the political slant is out of control. Further, and this is what really bothers me, the questions are horrible. The answers in many cases do not make sense. I am working to get this garbage removed from my kid’s school.”

A high school teacher commented in part: “[Newsela’s] liberal bias is evident in EVERY article that has anything to do with politics. Liberal teachers love it because it furthers their own agenda, but I won’t assign anything from Newsela again.”

And then there was this review, posted during the Trump presidency and titled “Horrible Left Progressive Indoctrination of our kids”:

• My twin girls are both eight [years old] and are in 3rd grade. We have been reviewing their reading assignments from an organization known as Newsela…. They are trying to feed our kids an article from the Washington Post about how they must stop Global Warming from destroying humanity. It states we ‘must’ act and ‘if’ we don’t the world will end and of course it’s all Trump’s fault that he doesn’t want to protect the environment. In addition, they are making our kids answer questions about “special” kids that made a difference…they have hit every Progressive point that our kids must answer: kids filing lawsuits to stop global warming, a “safe space” for bullied kids, kids changing gun laws, kids walking out of class to protest gun violence and “laws,” plastic straws (enough said), removing Confederate statues, white supremacists, and racism. No facts to back up the left bias or any balance of a different opinion!

As PJ Media noted: “Newsela could use some healthy competition. Until then, as Common Core’s afterglow fades away, Newsela may need to find a new way to market itself.” One change the platform did make was to separate its content into two websites; with one containing only articles geared to elementary school students. There is also an upgraded version for teachers that offers additional features.

Regents Research Fund tied to Common Core

The founder and CEO of Newsela, Matthew Gross, was previously the first executive director of Regents Research Fund, a New York-based think tank embedded in the state’s education agency. In 2013, Regents was described by the online news outlet Times Union.com as “having its own agenda” and “unaccountable to the public.” Critics charged the organization with being “a team of two dozen well-paid analysts,” some of whom were earning $200,000 or more annually in 2013 and none of whom were public servants, yet they were “helping drive reforms” that affected public-school students and employees in more than 700 New York school districts.

Regents’ Research Fund fellows trained New York teachers in how to implement the state’s Common Core standards, all while being financed by — drum roll here — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other wealthy philanthropists. Around this time, Gross left Regents to form Newsela, which he described as “a new venture aimed at improving reading.”

Times Union.com reported that Gross praised the Regents fellows as “nationally recognized ‘thought leaders’ to help lead the implementation of ‘next-generation’ assessments and other education reforms surrounding Common Core.” Donor representatives said that financial support of the fund is made “in the spirit of improving education.”

As of this writing, both USNY Regents Research Fund and Newsela remain in business.

In recent years, awareness of the disastrous and harmful doctrine of Critical Race Theory (CRT) has grown across the U.S., and many concerned citizens, parents, and state and local government officials have endeavored to rein it in. Countless news items have shed light on the extensive scope of CRT in American education, government, business, and culture. Now, at least one survivor of the Chinese cultural revolution is warning that CRT is taking America down the same path as Chairman Mao took her native country of China.

Xi Van Fleet is a Chinese American citizen residing in Virginia’s infamous Loudoun County. She is also a mom and a survivor of the Maoist purge in China during the 1960s and 1970s. She was just six years old when the purge began, but she escaped to the U.S. in 1986 at the age of 26.

Van Fleet was a player during the parent uprising in Loudoun County in 2021 and 2022, testifying against the teaching of CRT and warning of its similarity to the tactics employed by the Chinese Communists, which she experienced first-hand during her early life. (See more on the Loudoun County controversies in Education Reporter, October and November 2021.)

“I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” Van Fleet told members of the school board in 2021. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history. This is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” she added, in reference to the Mao Zedong-led purge that left between 500,000 and 20 million people dead during the period 1966 to 1976.

Member of 1776 Action

Van Fleet is currently a fellow at 1776 Action, an organization spawned by President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, which was created to “restore honest, patriotic education,” and which President Biden promptly abolished when he took office. The 1776 Action group provides support for the “grassroots patriotic moms and dads” who reject the racial, sexual, and socio-emotional indoctrination in the schools, and who want school choice to be the rule throughout the land.

Recently, Van Fleet took public issue with Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is famous for her role in the controversial 1619 Project. In conjunction with New York Times’ authors and with the news giant’s assistance and blessing, Jones rewrote American history to reflect the claims of CRT proponents. She claimed on Twitter that the mere presence of black people in the U.S. is the “greatest rebuke to the narrative of American exceptionalism.”

But Van Fleet corrected Jones on Twitter, and in an interview with the Washington Examiner, she debunked Jones’ “assertion about the presence of black people rebuking the narrative of American exceptionalism, asserting that the presence of immigrants is ‘proof of American Exceptionalism’ rather than a refutation. She pointed out that, as immigrants, both she and Jones “are the proof of American Exceptionalism.”

Van Fleet believes it’s important to defend this country and that our “guarantee of natural rights” is in stark contrast to Maoist China, “where you can only think the way you’re allowed to think. The lives of all citizens are controlled. “There’s no individual freedom … no individual success.”

She continues:

• The problem today is that the people haven’t been taught real history. People haven’t been taught what communism is all about. That’s why when communism showed up at our front door in a different kind of a disguise, people have no clue what it is. We have so many examples right in front of our eyes that people [of all races] have succeeded.

The harms of CRT

Many states have attempted to restrict the teaching of CRT, but school districts and even individual teachers have found ways to circumvent the laws. In Arizona, a law banning “teachings that judge or blame people on the basis of race” was signed in 2021 by then-Governor Doug Ducey but was later struck down by the state’s Supreme Court. More recently, GOP legislators in Arizona passed a bill that “would have limited school discussions on race and ethnicity,” but Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it, and the legislature did not have enough votes for an override.

Nonetheless, Conservative Journal.org reports that the Arizona Department of Education has established an “Empower Hotline,” which parents and citizens can use “to report K-12 class curriculum and lessons they consider ‘inappropriate.’ The hotline is said to have been initiated by Republican State Superintendent for Public Instruction, Tom Horne, whom conservatives applauded as one of the few bright spots in Arizona’s controversial November election. Horne campaigned “on a platform to fight critical race theory and prevent liberal indoctrination in schools. He believes classroom materials that focus on race or ethnicity, promote gender ideology, and social emotional learning detract from teaching standards.” The purpose of the new hotline is to allow residents “to voice their concerns about such lessons.”

Doubtless Xi Van Fleet would applaud Horne’s initiative. She told the Independent Women’s Forum a year ago that CRT “is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The only difference is that [they] used class instead of race… [C]ritical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism. It should have no place in our schools.”

In mid-March, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced the establishment of an emergency hotline website for citizens to report cases of “gender-affirming care” targeting minors in his state. This action comes on the heels of publicity generated earlier this year by whistleblower Jamie Reed, who exposed atrocities going on at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. In the wake of Reed’s disclosures that hormones and puberty blockers were being prescribed and surgeries were being performed on minors — sometimes without the proper consent of parents — Bailey’s office acted. In addition to the hotline, the AG is filing a set of rules targeting gender-affirming care for minors with the goal of “restricting how doctors provide such care.” Yahoo News reported that “these rules include strict psychological therapy requirements for doctors providing care as well as banning care until all of a patient’s other mental health issues have been treated and resolved.” Bailey cites the troubling fact that Missouri has recently experienced “a massive increase in transgender surgeries.” In a March 20 press release announcing the proposed rules, he vowed: “As Attorney General, I will protect children and enforce the laws as written, which includes upholding state law on experimental gender transition interventions. Even Europe recognizes that mutilating children for the sake of a woke, leftist agenda has irreversible consequences, and countries like Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom have all sharply curtailed these procedures. I am dedicated to using every legal tool at my disposal to stand in the gap and protect children from being subject to inhumane science experiments.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement forbidding the use of gender transition drugs and the performance of gender altering surgeries in Catholic hospitals and medical centers. LifeSiteNews.com reports that on March 20 the bishops issued an instructional document titled “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body.” The bishops made a number of salient points, including the basic tenet of Christianity that God created humanity, that there is “order” to nature, and that this order “is good.” They point out that mankind did not create human nature and thus it is not ours to do with as we please. The bishops also rejected the argument that some individuals are born in the “wrong body,” noting that this is impossible: “The soul does not come into existence on its own and somehow happen to be in this body as if it could just as well be in a different body.” They further contend that each person’s body is “intrinsically connected” with the human sexual differentiation of that body. They write: “In the Book of Genesis, we learn that Man is created ‘from the very beginning’ as male and female: the life of all humanity — whether of small communities or of society as a whole — is marked by this primordial duality.” The document acknowledges that there are two scenarios recognized by the Church’s moral tradition “in which technological interventions on the human body may be morally justified: 1) when such interventions aim to repair a defect in the body; 2) when the sacrifice of a part of the body is necessary for the welfare of the whole body.” But they confirm that gender transition interventions “do not respect the order and finality inscribed in the human person” and thus may not be carried out in Catholic medical institutions.

Last month The Blaze reported on an incident at Kenwood Elementary School in Springfield, Ohio, when a group of black students “herded several white students over to the playground and violently coerced them to say ‘black lives matter’ against their will.” The coercion intensified to the point that the school was forced to call police. When the local TV station WKEF made a public records request for surveillance footage, it reported that the evidence corroborated what principal Evan Hunsaker told law enforcement officers who responded to the scene. Surveillance video showed a student in a white shirt being dragged to the playground “in the grips of two larger students” and shoved to his knees. On the way, one of the students who was violently pushing the boy “appeared to punch him in the head. Then another student ran over and joined in by tackling the victim to the ground and then beating him.” The parent of one of the white students made an astute observation: “Instead of activist-weaponized racial acrimony, [they] should just be worried about being children.” Were it not for the relentless CRT propaganda taught in many schools, kids would likely not be fixated on the differences in their skin color. Ironically, while the local NAACP president said her organization agreed with the school’s handling of the incident, her fear was for the safety of the perpetrators over potential retaliation. But the police report admitted that “the alleged assaults were of an ‘anti-white’ nature,” and at a recent school board meeting, concerned citizens asked how the student perpetrators would be punished. Board President Chris Williams declined to say, calling the attack “an isolated incident” and citing state and federal laws preventing the release of personal information. One citizen who testified before the board pointed out that “no one asked for any personal information, but only if the offending students were being held accountable. It’s important that our kids go to school and not live in fear of being humiliated. These children were humiliated.”