Moms for Liberty on the Move
Moms for Liberty is a parents’ rights group founded in Florida during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has quickly grown to approximately 200 chapters in 42 states and has more than 100,000 members. The grassroots organization’s website describes it as “moms, dads, grands, aunts, uncles, friends” who support freedom and parents’ rights. Its founders are Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, self-described “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” Both women are former school board members who witnessed firsthand “how short-sighted and destructive policies directly hurt children and families.”
In an interview with Education Reporter, Tiffany Justice explained that she and Descovich both served as school board members, but she found that after four years, she “could not accomplish what she wanted to accomplish on a broad scale.” She decided to forgo another school board race, and she and Descovich together founded Moms for Liberty.
Justice emphasizes that the organization is not top-down driven, and that individual chapters have the autonomy to operate according to their state laws and the requirements of their local school districts. The chapters are organized by county. “When counties are large and include a number of school districts,” she explains, “parents are designated as district leads. But to be clear they are still set up by county in chapters. Wherever we have a chapter, parents become very involved and are making a difference.”
She points to the state of Pennsylvania as a particular success story for the organization. “Pennsylvania is amazing for the number of chapters that are operating and the level of parent engagement.”
An example of the issues Moms for Liberty tackles is Social Emotional Learning (SEL), which Justice describes as “horrible.” She explains that SEL “tries to get kids to ignore their instincts and turn against their parents and the values they’ve been taught at home. It turns them against what they know instinctively is right and good.
“It destabilizes the child,” she continues. “It opens kids up to indoctrination.
“We support parental rights,” she asserts, “but parents don’t have the right to abuse their children. They DO have the right to be informed about destructive curricula like SEL so they can make good decisions for their children.”
In recent years, a number of other education-focused conservative voices have warned about SEL. In its September 2018 issue, Education Reporter wrote: “One way social and emotional learning is cropping up in schools has to do with normalizing the abnormal. Some schools are not only subjecting students to drag queens … but students and parents whose moral compasses tell them something is amiss are subjected to harassment and re-education under the guise of SEL.”
In the mainstream media crosshairs
The coast-to-coast expansion of Moms for Liberty has caught the attention of the mainstream media. An op-ed on The Hill.com admitted that the organization has “been portrayed unflatteringly …” The Washington Post charges that they are hoping to take advantage of “brawlish … cultural divisions.” Another Post article claims parents are “seeking control over education” and “taking over school boards.”
But the Post appears to forget that the right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is implicit in America’s founding documents and traditions, and that concerned parents should be represented on school boards. “Through our county and district-based chapters,” Justice notes of her organization, “we’ve had success with school board elections.”
Yet another article in the Post (notice a pattern?) claims these are “anti-woke” school board victories that have turned “usually nonpartisan races” into something “contentious.” Yet many would argue that if indeed these races have become “contentious,” the policies of woke school boards are the cause.
A fourth Washington Post article asserts that these victories could ‘deliver chilling effect[s] on racial equity efforts,’” but more likely their concern is that parent-friendly school boards may bring an end to CRT indoctrination. Other mainstream media have also piled on Moms for Liberty, including the New York Times, USA Today, and others.
Mid-term school board election successes
On November 10, The Blaze reported that “grassroots parental rights groups achieved school board victories across the country” in the November 8 midterm elections. The article cited both Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project PAC for the wins, although not all races were settled at press time.
The 1776 PAC reportedly endorsed four candidates in Brandywine, Michigan, who were ultimately successful in flipping the school board majority to conservatives, and the PAC similarly facilitated a flip in the Carroll County school board race.
Moms for Liberty supported 67 school board candidates in Florida, of which 41 were victorious. The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) credited the organization with flipping not only school boards in Florida, but also several in Maryland, Indiana, Michigan, and the Carolinas. Tiffany Justice told the DCNF: “We’re thrilled. We were able to endorse over 500 parental rights candidates so far this year with 270 on the [mid-term] ballot. For us, starting an organization a little less than two years ago, and then having chapters across the country that have vetted and endorsed candidates in 270 races was a really big deal…”
Moms for Liberty join Dr. Phil
During an appearance last month on the popular Dr. Phil television show, Justice and co-founder Descovich were attacked by progressive activists, including Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith, over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law. Signed by Governor Ron DeSantis last March, the law bans classroom instruction on “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade.
These activists then falsely accused Moms for Liberty of attempting to “ban books” and of “smearing teachers.” Justice and Descovich refuted the fallacy that they are against teachers, but said their rebuttal to the charge did not air during the program. Descovich later told Fox News: “We were not criticizing teachers. No! We are not against teachers. We were school board members during the pandemic. We know what was thrown at teachers.”
The two sides also debated the appropriateness of certain materials found in classrooms, and what role parents should have in their kids’ education. Justice and Descovich said Smith “came armed with a list of hit statements.”
When Education Reporter inquired about the feedback the moms received following their Dr. Phil appearance, Justice said “In general it was overwhelmingly positive. In general, [it] was a great opportunity. And Dr. Phil agreed with us. I think he was surprised at how the government thinks it can usurp parents’ rights in the education of our children.”
She added that at one point he asked the other side “what makes you think you know better than a parent about what should happen to a child when they have a life-determining decision about gender or anything else?”
The Parent Pledge
A hallmark on the Moms for Liberty website is its Parent Pledge, which the organization encourages parents, community members, elected officials, and others to sign. The Pledge reads:
- I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents including, but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach, and secure parental rights at all levels of government.
Transgender Grooming Summit Unveiled, then Censored
In September, Canadian news organization The Post Millennial reported on a World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) child transgender summit that was held in Montreal. A team of mental health professionals from Minnesota gathered with other “experts” for panel discussions about treating “pre-pubescent children who have been led to believe they are transgender.” During the conference, these so-called “professionals” referred to young children as “the littles.”
The Millennial exposed a session called “Navigating the Changing Landscape with Littles And Their Families: Exploring The Role Of Mental Health Across Different Practice Settings With Transgender And Gender Diverse Pre-Adolescent Children,” wherein summit participants discussed the various therapeutic approaches to dealing with such children.
“These ‘littles’ are often as young as three years old,” the Millennial reported, and conference participants admitted that many of them “are perfectly fine and don’t need mental health treatment before being socially and medically transitioned.” This may be construed to mean that entirely normal children who express an innocent wish to play with toys of the opposite sex, play dress up, or proclaim on any given day that they are a member of the opposite sex have somehow come to the attention of adults with an agenda, and are marked as needing to be transitioned.
According to the Millennial, summit participants actually appeared to be perplexed that topics such as the risks and benefits of “puberty” suppression, the endocrine system, and future fertility did not come up with children they have worked with, and that, according to a Minnesota psychologist “these important discussions either didn’t happen at all or the knowledge just didn’t stick.” The Millennial observed: “Perhaps [this] is because the average nine-year-old doesn’t have the mental capacity to grasp the complexities of the human endocrine system, nor the implications of an experimental treatment protocol that leads to sterility and a whole host of serious health risks.
“The Minnesota psychologist thinks that therapists are in a unique position to help children understand puberty suppression,” the article continued, “given that they have more time with their patients and more of a relationship. [The psychologist] says she always jokes with ‘her little kids’ saying ‘you know what, I think you’re going to be a pediatric endocrinologist when you get older because you really know a lot of cool stuff.’”
The Millennial observed that “this was met with laughter from the audience because clearly to this crowd, the thought of small children grappling with the intricacies of their endocrine system and their future infertility is highly amusing.”
The same psychologist went on: “I also think that since we are sitting on the floor, playing with kids that ultimately trust us because we’ve talked to them about their video games … they trust me to talk about things. They need to be able to trust someone to talk about genitalia and to talk about fertility issues in the future.” But the question is why should strangers be talking about sex and genitalia to other people’s young children, even if they purport to be “experts.” Such activities were punishable with jail time not so long ago.
Summit participants also discussed prescribing puberty blockers as though they were antibiotics used to treat an ear infection. But as the Millennial pointed out, the US Food and Drug Administration “has issued warnings for the use of Lupron, and other puberty blockers, after having found that the drugs contribute to bone loss, result in brain swelling, and [may even cause] blindness. These conditions are not reversible and do not come back after the desired pubertal pause. The drugs also cause sterility.”
A California therapist who participated in the summit had a great tip for families struggling with getting their child’s pronouns right. “I encourage them to do a pronoun jar. Every time that somebody gets the pronoun wrong, they put a dollar in the jar, and then you can use the money at the end to buy a [chest] binder.” This frightening advice was met with approval by summit participants, even though when worn consistently by young girls, these binders can impact lung development and cause abnormalities to a child’s ribs and spine.
The therapist from California, who operates her own private practice, made clear that in transitioning “littles” it is important for the “unschooled” to understand that “the pathology is not being trans; the pathology is the transphobia that the kids and their families are winding through the world with. So we’re there as a mental health support if that causes really normal stress.”
Censorship swoops in on The Post Millennial
Shortly after exposing the WPATH summit, The Post Millennial received a legal demand from the participating Minnesota health system to take down its conference report, which included videos that named the experts who spoke or made presentations.
“Children’s Minnesota” publicly claims to be the “seventh largest pediatric health system in the United States,” contends the Millennial, and promotes itself as “the kid experts.” WPATH is “an international non-profit organization which describes itself as being devoted to transgender health, and The Post Millennial “intended to inform readers as to what is going on in the world of trans-affirming mental health care for prepubescent children.” This news source “believes that the footage meets every criteria of fair use.”
The legal letter demanded that the Millennial remove the article and videos from its website, claiming that they “disclosed identifying information of WPATH panelists without proper consents.” The Millennial counters with the obvious: “The information they objected to was provided in person at the conference, as well as via a live stream of the panel,” so it was hardly a secret. In the end, The Post Millennial removed the video of the full panel discussion and replaced it with a three-minute clip.
The author of the letter, Associate General Counsel for Children’s Minnesota Michael Waldrop, has actively posted on social media against anyone or any entity not fully supportive of the radical gender transition agenda. The Post Millennial noted that in 2021, he chastised on Twitter the AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Texas “for allowing the Christian men’s group the Promise Keepers to host an event at the stadium. [Waldrop] asked for ‘Texas queens’ to help stop this event from happening.”
Playing the ‘suicide’ card
Invoking the familiar theme of “suicide prevention” is a mainstay of radicals who lead dysphoric children and their families into accepting drastic and irreversible transgender procedures in the name of “health care.” Similar to the circumstances described last month in Education Reporter, The Post Millennial described the process revealed during the WPATH summit whereby children become subjects for transgender grooming.
One therapist spoke about the difficulty of identifying kids in schools because “while schools are ‘trying to be supportive,’ and ‘trying to do the right thing,’ [they] only have ‘a little bit of knowledge,’ and she worries about the ‘level of binary structure and thinking that happens in the school system.’”
She described parents who attend kindergarten orientation and find that their child’s name has been changed without their knowledge, noting: “You get the parents who agree and the parents who don’t agree, right? I mean, there’s that whole issue.” She continued as her nodding, agreeing panelists looked on: “[W]e’re always working against that heteronormative binary transphobic kind of framework… It’s up to us to help parents push against some of that to give their kid as much space as their kid needs to be whatever their kid is going to end up being. And I think if we don’t do that, society is going to do it for us.”
As always, when parents push back against this extreme agenda, they are told their children will eventually commit suicide if they do not agree to transition them. Dr. Rachel Levine, keynote speaker at the WPATH summit, said much of the work of transgender advocates and medical care (e.g., puberty blockers, hormone treatment, mastectomies, and other disfiguring surgeries) was about “suicide prevention.” She repeated the mantra that children who are not permitted to undergo social and medical transitioning will simply kill themselves.
But is this necessarily so? Researchers say not even close, and the testimony of children, now adults, who have been harmed by these transitions bear this out. (See Flawed Science Behind the Push for Transgender Treatments in this issue of Education Reporter.)
As for the summit, it concluded with panelists discussing how great it is to work with children. The moderator stated: “I don’t think we talked nearly enough about joy, and the joy that comes from this work and the joy that our kids, you know, bring to the conversations and lighting up the conversations with families, and challenging us and pushing us.”
It is just this type of exposure Children’s Minnesota evidently does not want parents and concerned citizens to see.
Flawed Science Behind Push for Transgender Treatments
Transgender advocates like to play the suicide card when faced with any kind of resistance to their agenda. They emphasize the risks of self-harm when children are denied their wish to transition to the opposite sex. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), warns that serious injury can result from failure to intervene, even while acknowledging that hormonal and surgical interventions pose risks.
The specter of suicide among transgender youth is raised from the White House to the American Academy of Pediatrics to youth-focused therapists, psychologists, and clinicians, including many who partner with public schools. A fall 2018 AAP Policy Statement asserted that “physicians play a role by offering a safe and inclusive place for transgender and gender-diverse youth, who have high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, self-harm and suicide.”
—SUMMARY, HERITAGE FOUNDATION REPORT—GENDER
In the face of so many high-profile individuals and organizations sounding the suicide alarm, supporters of parents’ rights wonder if there is any point in offering actual scientific data. Last summer, The Heritage Foundation released a report that revealed a significant increase in the suicide rate among minors who can more easily obtain “cross-sex treatments without parental consent.”
The report compared “annual youth suicide rates in states that allow minors to access care without parental consent to states that do not allow such access. The data clearly showed “no difference in youth suicide rates between these two groups of states for over a decade before 2010, when the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones begins.” But then “a 14% increase in suicide rates emerged among young people by 2020” in states that allow minors to access care without parental consent compared with states that have no such provision. According to the report: “Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates.”
One critical finding is that no difference in suicide rates was observed between the two groups of states when the youth in question were “unaffected by policies that facilitate cross-sex drugs for minors… The relative increase in suicide rates only occurs after cross-sex treatments are introduced, and the trajectory of the increase matches the prevalence of these interventions.” [Emphasis added.]
The report suggests that, given the elevated suicide risks shown by the data, “state and federal governments should reverse the push to make puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones more widely and readily available to minors. Facilitating access to these treatments without parental consent is particularly dangerous.” A further recommendation is that lawmakers “adopt a parental bill of rights to ensure that parents are informed and involved in these critical decisions about their own children. Despite what left-leaning activists may tell us, science does not demonstrate that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are necessary to prevent suicides. In fact, if anything, it demonstrates the opposite.”
As eminently sensible as this advice is, it’s unlikely to be heeded. The Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Population Affairs (OPA) asserts that “gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Claiming to have the supporting “research,” they present subjective statements including:
- Because gender-affirming care encompasses many facets of healthcare needs and support, it has been shown to increase positive outcomes for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents.
- [The] presence of affirming support networks is critical for facilitating and arranging gender-affirming care for children and adolescents. Lack of such support can result in rejection, depression and suicide, homelessness, and other negative outcomes.
But as senior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, Dr. Jay P. Greene, wrote: “When faced with divisive political arguments, the Left has a bad habit of putting on its figurative lab coat, conducting lousy research, and then declaring that Science has resolved the dispute in its favor. This tendency was on full display during the pandemic: If you didn’t obey faux-scientific orders on masks, social-distancing, or school closures, you must have wanted people to die.”
He added that the oft-cited research is defective because it relies on “surveys of trans-identifying adults recruited from trans support and advocacy groups, so they are not representative of all people who have experienced gender dysphoria as adolescents. In particular, these studies are less likely to include people who resolved these issues without medical intervention and people who had regret about receiving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.”
The continuing abuse of science for political ideation is evident in the manipulation of gender dysphoric adolescents. Greene writes: “The Biden administration and its allies are declaring that if “gender-affirming” care in the form of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is not widely and readily available to trans-identifying children, young people trapped in bodies that do not conform with their declared sex will despair and commit suicide.”
But it’s questionable whether those who profess to be one gender trapped in the body of the other gender will ever find true happiness, because their elusive goal flies in the face of true science.
The Science of Switching Genders: It’s Impossible
Despite the efforts of transgender activists to pretend that with hormones and surgeries, men can become women and women can become men, gender is assigned at conception and cannot be changed after birth. Most people recognize that gender is an immutable trait like race.
A recent article in The Daily Signal by author and researcher, Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., who penned the 2018 book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, stated: “The medical evidence suggests that sex reassignment does not adequately address the psychosocial difficulties faced by people who identify as transgender. Even when the procedures are successful technically and cosmetically, and even in cultures that are relatively ‘trans-friendly,’ transitioners still face poor outcomes.”
This is because, says Anderson “sex is a bodily reality that can be recognized well before birth with ultrasound imaging. The sex of an organism is defined and identified by the way in which it (he or she) is organized for sexual reproduction.” He quoted neuroscientist Maureen Condic and her philosopher brother, Samuel Condic, who pointed out that in organisms, natural organization is “the defining feature … Organisms can exist at various levels, from microscopic single cells to sperm whales weighing many tons, yet they are all characterized by the integrated function of parts for the sake of the whole.”
Inconvenient study conclusions
In his Daily Signal piece, Anderson cited a 30-year Swedish study that followed up on a large number of people after sex reassignment surgery. While the Swedish population is culturally supportive, the study found “lifelong mental unrest” among the study subjects. Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment,” Anderson writes, “the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.” Although this study was the most ambitious, others conducted since then have shown similar results.
A new review of the scientific literature was conducted in 2014 by Hayes, Inc., “a research and consulting firm that evaluates the safety and health outcomes of medical technologies,” including transgender treatments and surgeries. Hayes found that “the evidence on long-term results of sex reassignment was too sparse to support meaningful conclusions and gave these studies its lowest rating for quality,” based on the fact that “statistically significant improvements have not been consistently demonstrated by multiple studies for most outcomes…”
Anderson also quoted a 2015 article published on Public Discourse by the former head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Paul McHugh, MD. Dr. McHugh wrote that the notion of one’s sex being determined by a feeling rather than a fact, “has permeated our culture and is leaving casualties in its wake. Gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery.” Editor’s Note: See more on Dr. McHugh and his work in next month’s issue of Education Reporter (December 2022).
Federal legislation introduced
On September 20, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) held a press conference to introduce her Protect Children’s Innocence Act H.R. 8731, which would “criminalize genital mutilation and chemical castration of minor children.” The intent of this legislation is to shield kids from “gender affirming care,” meaning puberty blockers, hormone therapy, sterilizations, and castration.
Greene says a federal law is needed because of legislation in states like California that would usurp parents’ rights to protect their children from such procedures, and would essentially put in place “state sanctioned child abuse.” Just nine days after Greene’s press conference, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the bill referenced by Greene. (See Education Reporter, October 2022.)
She then introduced Chloe Cole as her special guest. Cole is an 18-year-old “former transgender child” who spoke on behalf of others who, as minors, received “gender affirming care” only to regret it as young adults. Greene described Cole as “one of the very brave young people who are speaking out against these procedures as they try to detransition.”
Cole told the press conference audience that she began transitioning at the age of twelve until she was sixteen, when she realized “all was a lie.” Calling her story a “cautionary tale,” she said children and parents across the country are being caught off guard by “a doctrine that has invaded nearly every academic, medical, and educational institution, seemingly overnight.”
Describing herself as “a shy tomboy who never really fit in,” Cole was a poster child for vulnerable kids most likely to fall victim to the radical transgender agenda. She had an Instagram account at 11 along with unrestricted access to the internet. She said that in no time she was exposed to “the gamut of LGBTQ propaganda” online, and thought to herself: “You mean that all I have to do is subscribe to this ideology and I’m an accepted, celebrated, and valued member of the most talked about and celebrated community on earth?” She admitted she “yearned to have a piece of it.” She disclosed that with every step in her transition, she received more and more attention. She “felt like a celebrity” when students approached her in the halls and asked to be her friend. “Being a kid, I didn’t understand how superficial these relationships were,” she said, “until they all abandoned me when I decided to become who I am.”
She now believes Americans deserve to know about this radical and perverse ideology, which is marketed as necessary and life-saving care. “When I was twelve years old,” she said, “I told my parents I was a boy. They didn’t have a clue what to do. They were scared, and desperate for answers. They wanted what every parent wants for their child; for me to be okay and to thrive.”
At thirteen, she was put on puberty blocking medication and just one month later, she began receiving testosterone injections. She said the gender clinic presented her parents “with a false dichotomy regarding children with gender dysphoria.” They asked: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” She said her parents “were frightened out of their wits, and willing to sign anything the doctors asked. This was not informed consent,” she added. “It was a decision forced under extreme duress.”
At fifteen, Cole suffered a sexual assault by a boy at school, which intensified her hatred of her breasts, and she underwent a double mastectomy. But as she matured: “I realized I wanted to be what I always was and always will be — a woman. A child does not know who she is at twelve years old.”
Cole’s change of heart shocked and devastated her parents, who felt they had failed her in every way possible. Her friends turned against her, she said, “because I was proof that their beliefs were a lie. I was a joke; I was a fraud, incapable of feeding my future children, and worst of all, I was completely alone.”
She knew she had to get off the drugs she was taking, but says the medical professionals “who got me into this mess refused to help me.” She said the experience “almost killed me as it has many who regret their transition.”
Cole noted that the media only seeks to “affirm, affirm, affirm,” and that the only media person interested in her story “was a Forbes journalist, who wrote a hit piece” on her, calling her “transphobic” for invoking basic human biology.
She ended her tragic story by stating the obvious: “There are no second chances at childhood. No child deserves to suffer under the knife of a gender-affirming surgeon. America’s children; all children, deserve better.”
Following Cole’s testimony, Rep. Greene observed: “These are the things nightmares are made of. Children should not be sexualized. They should be going to school and learning the basic fundamentals, and then they should be thinking about who and what they want to be [when they grow up].”
With the mid-term elections behind the nation and a Republican majority about to assume control in the U.S. House, Greene’s bill may have a chance to advance.
Mallard
Plucked from the Burning: Embracing God’s Purpose
By Ken & Beth Spilger, Reflections Publications, Second Edition 2017
Plucked from the Burning is the true story of the horrific crash of a small plane in St. Louis County in 1980, which took the lives of three Baptist ministers and critically injured a fourth. It chronicles the physical anguish of the lone survivor, Pastor Ken Spilger, during his long recovery, and it demonstrates the exceptional faith that ultimately carried him through those dark days. The dedication of his family and church members, as well as the hospital staff who treated him, also shines through in this moving book.
The story is not only one of intense physical struggle, it also details the spiritual challenges the Spilgers faced at that time. The first two chapters describe Ken’s disappointment with his then-new ministry at Grace Baptist Church in north St. Louis County, which was growing but not to the degree he had hoped, and he writes that his greater focus then “was on my personal ambitions.” But it was at this low point in his life that “God began to work,” which led to his fateful trip to the pastors’ conference in Kansas City and the disastrous accident that followed.
Originally, the Spilgers planned to drive to the conference together, but circumstances ultimately required Beth to remain at home with the couple’s two young daughters. Ken writes: “When an area pastor unexpectedly called saying that room was available in a four-seater plane, we felt God had indeed provided a way for me to attend the conference.”
The plane took off from St. Louis Lambert Airport for Kansas City early in the morning of September 16, 1980, with Pastor Russell Spurgeon, a licensed pilot, flying the single-engine Grumman Tiger. They stopped once in Washington, Missouri to pick up the final passenger. The flight was smooth and uneventful, and the pastors’ intent was to fly home later that day when the conference ended.
But the return flight was delayed due to a storm system that was moving through St. Louis. When the group was finally able to depart, all was well until they neared the Spirit of St. Louis Airport where they were scheduled to land. On the approach to the airport, they flew into a lingering storm cell, and the plane clipped the top of a tall tree, causing it to plunge downward. Tree limbs tore open the fuselage, splitting the fuel line. Engine fuel sprayed everywhere and ignited when the stricken aircraft hit an electrical wire. Ken was thrown from the plane as it went down, which he believes was “by God’s miraculous intervention.” Had he not been ejected from the plane, he would have perished with the others.
Although he doesn’t recall his actions or much detail about the crash, investigators later said Ken must have pulled the other men from the burning wreckage and then begun searching for help. Because the crash site was so steep, he fell 30 to 40 feet in the darkness, finally coming to rest on “a small muddy shelf” at the edge of a ravine.
A farmer living nearby heard what he thought was a lightning strike and came out to investigate. When he saw fire down in the field near the ravine, he immediately called the fire department. First responders found the bodies of the three other pastors outside the plane where Ken had pulled them, and Ken’s cries for help alerted them that a fourth person was involved in the crash.
As he was being transported to the burn unit at what was then known as St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in west St. Louis County, Ken writes: “I never could have known when I prayed at the conference that within a few hours I would rapidly and unknowingly be approaching my death. When the plane crashed and I was still alive, I never doubted God was beginning a journey to show me what was wrong in my life and how to make the needed adjustments and corrections.”
In chapter three, Beth Spilger takes up the narrative, describing how she was notified of the accident and chronicling the agonizing hours that followed. The information she initially received was sketchy, but she soon realized the extent of her husband’s life-threatening injuries upon her arrival at the hospital. She was allowed to see him briefly in the examining room, but he was quickly whisked away as the severity of his burns demanded immediate treatment.
In the waiting room, Beth describes how she was questioned by police investigating the crash, but she was not much help because the Spilgers had not known the other passengers or their families prior to the crash. She writes: “Even though I knew the questions were important to solving the mystery of who was in the plane and what caused the horrendous accident, I had a thousand thoughts flying through my brain — the least of which involved the investigation.”
Later, the doctors told her that Ken had sustained “grave third-degree burns on more than 30 percent of his body,” some of which were deep into the muscle. He also had internal injuries and second-degree burns on his right hand. The doctors predicted he would be hospitalized at least until Christmas, but the Spilgers are convinced that their total reliance on God, along with their prayers and the prayers of their congregation and countless others, bolstered the level of care Ken received and permitted him to be released before Thanksgiving, after being hospitalized for just 59 days.
The book’s descriptions of the care and suffering of a burn victim are engrossing, and the sequence of events in Ken’s recovery clearly show the power of prayer. In one example, just three days after the crash, Ken was suffering from an agonizing thirst and was determined to leave his bed to get a sip of water. Only a limited number of ice chips were permitted because, in severely burned patients, additional fluids can cause serious problems or even death. Had his attempt to make it across his hospital room to the sink been successful, it may have proved fatal. Instead, Ken believes that God’s will and the power of so many souls praying for his recovery permitted the hospital staff to catch him in the illicit act and guide him safely back to bed before he could take that forbidden sip of water.
As may be expected of a minister and his wife, the Spilgers’ account of their challenges and sufferings is filled with Scripture references that inspired and carried them through the most harrowing times. Especially touching are Ken’s accounts of the intense pain he suffered.
In chapter nine, for example, he relates his agony to that of souls condemned to hell:
- As I lay in the hospital bed enduring pain that could not even be quenched by all of the pain medication the medical personnel could give me, I thought of Jesus’s story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. …As the rich man looked up from the torments of hell, he saw Lazarus, who had lived on crumbs from his table. The rich man begged Lazarus to dip his finger in water and to touch his tongue because he was in torment. Even a drop of water would have felt cooling to him. However, nothing could be done for the rich man. A gulf had been fixed between the two that no one could cross. I can honestly say that during those weeks of painful convalescence, I understood the rich man’s desire. But the desire of those in hell will never be met.
With such severe burns, Ken required skin grafts. Remarkably, he only needed three surgeries because all of the grafts were successful, which the doctors described as quite rare. Again, the Spilgers attributed this miracle to their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who had so far carried them through all of their trials.
When Ken arrived home, long months of care and rehabilitation were still ahead for the family. Beth writes of her excitement at his homecoming, admitting that “the thought that Ken’s return could be a difficult transition still hadn’t crossed my mind.” An exhausting ritual of caring for his wounds, driving him to therapy, and helping him with rehab at home became her routine, all while taking care of her children, tending to her household duties, and doing her part in the ministry of their church.
The book describes the strong pressure-applying Jobst gloves and leggings her husband had to wear in order to keep his scar tissue from becoming “grotesque and unmanageable.” These were extremely difficult to put on over the still-painful burns and skin grafts, and she at first relied on her mother to help with the gloves. Finally, one day her mother pointed out: “I won’t always be here to help you. Go in there and do it!” Beth admits that it “was a daunting challenge until another burns caregiver showed us how he put them on his wife. His technique worked beautifully! Both Ken and I marveled how once again God had brought the right person at the right time.”
Throughout the book, Pastor Spilger shows how his spiritual struggle dovetailed with his physical one. On the physical plain, he lost several fingers and toes as well as muscle in his left calf. But while the accident did leave him with some handicaps, he is able to walk without a limp and his overall recovery was amazing. In the spiritual realm, he maintained his trust in God, surrendering his will completely to Christ, which he believes got him through his ordeal. “God’s power—not our own—has the control,” he writes. “When we seek to take control, we step into pride and all its destruction.”
Several appendices at the end of the book provide fascinating insights about Ken’s caregivers, about the three widows of the pastors who lost their lives in the crash, about the Spilger family, which grew from just two children at the time of the accident to a total of seven with four girls and three boys, and about Ken’s injuries and treatments.
Particularly touching to this reviewer was the brief account of Carolyn Lombard, wife of Pastor Donald Lombard, whose ministry was located in O’Fallon, Missouri at the time of the plane crash. Carolyn faced a series of tragedies following the loss of her husband, but along with the other two widows, she remained faithful to God. At the time of the book’s original publication in 2015, she was anticipating that she would soon join her husband in heaven.
While Plucked from the Burning is of course specific to the religious beliefs of the authors, its Scriptural references can be appreciated by Christians of all denominations. It is a story of extraordinary faith, hope, courage, and perseverance. As such, it is also uplifting and inspiring.
To read the entire book, go here to order!
Education Briefs
Beneath the dark cloud of controversy surrounding the midterm elections in Arizona, a ray of light shone with the victory of Republican Tom Horne as the state’s new education superintendent. Horne defeated the Democrat incumbent Kathy Hoffmann in what The Western Journal called “a huge win for Republicans,” not only because the post is a statewide office, but because Horne campaigned against CRT and in support of parental rights. In a November 7 Twitter post, he reinforced his “Commitment to Arizona’s Parents,” which consists of four priorities he will have as superintendent: (1) To focus on academics; (2) To teach students “how to think rather than what to think”; (3) To ensure “safety and structure” in the classroom; and, (4) To empower parents “by ensuring full transparency to their child’s education.” Among the fed-up parents, citizens, and organizations that supported Horne is the group Arizona Women of Action, which states as its aim “to revive U.S. freedoms in education, culture, and politics.” Responding to Horne’s campaign tweets, a spokeswoman for the group posted: “This is what we want; parents to be empowered.” During his campaign, Horne pledged not only to “get critical race theory out of our schools,” but also to “get social and emotional learning out of our schools so we can focus on academics.” He further vowed to raise test scores and to end “bilingual education” so that immigrant children “can learn English.” Unfortunately, as the post-election chaos continues, no one is certain who all the winners will be, and so Horne may have a tough road ahead if a majority of Democrats prevail. His supporters appear confident he’ll be up to the task.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito says the status of free speech on our nation’s university and law school campuses is “pretty abysmal, disgraceful, and really dangerous for our future as a united, democratic country.” Alito made his remarks during a live interview on October 25 with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. “We depend on freedom of speech, and colleges and universities should be setting the example,” Alito said. “Law schools should be setting the example because our adversary system is based on the principle that the best way to get at the truth is to have a strong presentation of opposing views.” He added that law students should be free to speak their minds without worrying about the consequences of everything they say. “They should have their ideas tested in rational debate,” the justice noted, “and law schools are not doing that.” He believes the many law schools and universities who are failing to foster a wide spectrum of ideas are not carrying out their grave responsibility to do so. When Roberts asked where Alito would draw the line on protected vs. unprotected speech, the justice replied: “The real test, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, is whether we’re willing to protect the speech we hate… The general rule, with only minor exceptions, is that any speech involving public issues such as politics, government, history, economics, law, science, culture, religion, the arts, anything of that level of importance, has to be that the government must stay out.” He acknowledged that this does not mean free speech gives people the right to say anything they want about anything or anyone at any time or any place and in any way. “Like other provisions of the Bill of Rights,” Alito noted, “it picked up on a pre-existing right that was understood before the Bill of Rights was adopted. From the very beginning of our country our legal system has recognized that there are categories of speech that are not protected, such as extortion and threats, fraud, defamation, shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Several of Alito’s past opinions intimated, however, as Roberts noted during the interview, that his view of free speech is broad, and that today it is being unconstitutionally restricted in many if not most of our educational institutions as well as in the public square.
More scandalous teacher antics are coming to light thanks to Libs of TikTok, and one high school teacher was indefinitely suspended. Along with concerned parents who continue to speak out at school board meetings, these atrocities are being brought to light by pro-child, parent-friendly organizations. On November 2, Libs of TikTok reported that a transgender teacher at Chesapeake High School in Pasadena, MD, was finally suspended months after disturbing videos surfaced of an LGBTQ “safe space” that showed “students engaging in what appears to be sexual acts …” Students are reportedly able to “hang out” in this space whenever they choose throughout the school day. Willa Hoard is a male-to-female transgender social studies teacher who oversees the safe space in the back of “her” classroom, and runs the Gay Student Alliance club at the school. A concerned mom whose child posted on Facebook about “dead naming” — a derogatory term for calling a transgender student by his or her birth name — revealed that the school considers “dead naming” to be sexual harassment. When the mom investigated further, she found messages from Hoard on several social media platforms referring to “herself” as “mom” and “directing students to ‘carry on, be gay, and start a revolution.’” Even more alarming, the GSAs are set up not only to provide safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in middle and high schools, but also to promote the gamut of woke propaganda related to “racial, gender, and educational justice.” Libs of TikTok reported that the parent who blew the whistle on Hoard is being persecuted, to the point of activists calling police to her family’s home for bogus reasons. Another parent observed: “It is like [Hoard] is a cult leader and the school is either afraid or in on it. We [parents] are afraid to speak out because the whole mob will come after us.” In October, the Chesapeake High School Principal “sent a letter to parents stating that Hoard was not fired but on indefinite leave and would not be able to return to school property. The letter never addressed the allegations, why this was allowed to occur, or what corrective measures the school is taking to prevent this from happening again.”
The Systemic Racism of the Teachers’ Unions
As SCOTUS contemplates the future of affirmative action, the teacher’s unions try to save the race-based admission policies.
[In early November], the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”
One of the glaring outrages of the case is that the two national teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — filed amicus briefs in which they pound the racial bean counting drum. The unions insist that “diversity” must remain a factor in choosing who gets to be admitted into a given college.
The NEA brief claims that “elementary and secondary schools remain heavily segregated. In the 2019–2020 school year, the average White student attended a majority White school. By contrast, students of color are far more likely to attend schools where the majority of students are also students of color.”
The irony of the teachers unions’ deploring racism in education is glaring, because it is the very same unions that essentially imprison children — notably poor children of color — in substandard public schools. Specifically, the union-mandated collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), in place throughout most of the country, bring to light why government-run schools fail so many kids.
Collective bargaining, a term first introduced into the lexicon by socialist Beatrice Webb in 1891, is a process of negotiations between employers and employees aimed at reaching agreements that set wage scales, work rules, etc.
In reality, CBAs dictate that teachers unions don’t treat teachers as professionals, but rather as interchangeable widgets, all of whom are of equal value and competence. To differentiate between effective and ineffective educators as a result of what their students actually learn would necessitate doing away with their industrial-style work rules. Those include one-size-fits-all salary scales, tenure (contractually known as “permanence”) and seniority or “last in, first out” (LIFO), whereby if a teacher must be laid off due to budgetary belt-tightening, it is not the least talented teacher who is on the chopping block, but rather the newest hire.
Regarding salaries, teacher quality doesn’t matter a whit to teacher union honchos, only the number of years he or she has on the job. The other way teachers can increase their salary is by taking “professional development classes” which typically have no impact on student learning.
Permanence clauses make it just about impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. In California, it was revealed during a court case in 2012 that on average just 2.2 of California’s 300,000 teachers (0.0008%) are dismissed yearly for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance.
The arbitrariness of seniority-based decisions is epitomized by Bhavini Bhakta, a teacher-of-the-year who lost teaching positions in four southern California schools over eight years because she lacked seniority. One of her ongoing encounters with LIFO involved a situation where either she or another teacher-of-the-year — who was hired on the same day — was to be laid off. The district had the teachers pull numbered popsicle sticks out of a hat to see which one kept her job. Ms. Bhakta got a lower number and thus lost her position, yet again. Also, The New Teacher Project found that only 13% to 16% of the teachers laid off in a seniority-based system would also be cut under a system based on teacher effectiveness.
Many studies have borne out the harm of CBAs to America’s children. In 2013, an analysis by the University of Chicago showed that strong unions have a greater impact on student proficiency rates in math and reading than weak unions. The researchers found that a $233 rise in union dues per teacher causes student math and reading scores to drop almost 4 percentage points. Also, a $14 increase in union spending per student results in a 3 percentage point decrease in math and reading scores. The reason for the correlation between spending and test scores is that powerful teachers unions are able to get laws passed that protect their interests, and make it more difficult to implement child-friendly reforms that boost student achievement.
Released in 2019, “The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining,” a study by researchers Michael Lovenheim and Alexander Willen, found that, among men, exposure to a collective bargaining law in the first 10 years after passage depresses students’ future annual earnings by $2,134 (3.93%). The negative effect of CBAs is particularly pronounced among Black and Hispanic males. In these two subgroups, annual earnings decline by $3,246 (9.43 percent), and at the same time, employment and labor force participation are reduced.
Another way the unions have done great damage to children, especially minorities, was their insistence on shutting down schools during the Covid pandemic. Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and D.C., researchers found that “shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences on student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in-person, “there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading).”
Additionally, a study by Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider, examined test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found that the shutdowns led to a spike in students unable to read at grade level, with literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades. The study revealed that during the 2021-2022 school year, 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders fell behind on literacy and needed “intensive intervention,” compared to 26% of their white peers.
Of course, if any students try to break out of their public-school prisons, the teachers’ unions are standing at the schoolhouse door fighting tooth-and nail against any kind of parental choice.
Clearly, the NEA, an organization that frequently rails about “systemic racism,” is guilty of that sin. Yiddish maven Leo Rosten wrote that the word “chutzpah” can best be exemplified by a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. The union’s chutzpah on beating the systemic racism drum, while acting in a way that ruins the lives of many minority kids, is another suitable example.
Larry Sand is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, a nonprofit , nonpartisan, non-political organization dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues — information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions. He retired from teaching in 2009.
This article appeared on The Heartland Institute.org, Nov. 10, 2022. Originally published at For Kids and Country. Reprinted by permission.
