Our next guest on the Knight and Rose Show is Tyler O’Neil, who is the senior editor at Daily Signal. It’s still in editing. Tyler is an expert on the SPLC, and monitors threats to religious liberty. Well, he had back-to-back articles this week exposing two different ways that the secular left showed their hostility to family integrity and parental authority. I thought it would be worth putting these together into a blog post, so you can read about them, too.
The first Daily Signal article was from March 18th, and it talks about a new program designed to indoctrinate young women in wokeness:
The organization that sets the agenda for the 130,000 school counselors across the U.S. just promoted a left-wing activist program that advocates for transgender ideology and critical race theory, according to a new report.
“While the American people are actively rejecting the harms of transgender ideology, the invasion of women’s private spaces, and the culture of critical race theory, the American School Counselor Association is working overtime to install these very same radicalisms into our daughters,” Alvin Lui, president of the conservative group Courage Is a Habit, told The Daily Signal.
The American School Counselor Association, which counts about 42,000 of the nation’s estimated 131,230 school counselors as members and which releases guidance for the entire profession, held a Feb. 19 webinar promoting the Lean In Girls program. The Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation, founded by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, launched Lean In Girls as a leadership program for girls ages 11-15.
[…]The handbook’s section on “Gender Inclusion” warns facilitators that “some teens in the program may identify strongly with being a girl, while others may be exploring their gender identity or may feel uncomfortable with the label ‘girl.’” The section recommends resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the British LGBTQ nonprofit Stonewall, and GLSEN (which rebranded to GLISTEN in February).
[…]Courage Is a Habit also faults the handbook for promoting critical race theory, the idea that American society is systemically racist despite the progress of civil rights laws and that it requires fundamental change to root out “white supremacy.”
“Group facilitators are directed to rank themselves and each other on an intersectional hierarchy of oppression, a textbook critical race theory exercise that divides children by race, sexuality, and perceived victim status—all disguised as harmless ‘mental health’ support,” the Courage Is a Habit report states.
The second Daily Signal article has to do with how secular leftists in government view the parents who pay their salaries:
When the Biden administration turned its attention to concerned parents in the fall of 2021, the Central Intelligence Agency drafted a memo warning about white racial extremists recruiting women for “traditional motherhood” and “homemaking.”
The CIA produced an intelligence assessment focused on “women advancing white racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist radicalization and recruitment” on Oct. 6, 2021.
[…]The CIA warned about the “great replacement” theory, which it framed as extremist.
“White REMVEs and their sympathizers have claimed in online posts that it is essential for white families to have as many biological children as possible to counter the rising birthrates among non-white populations, white REMVEs allege that this rise is a conspiracy, which they have termed the ‘great replacement,’” the assessment states.
The CIA discussed a specific organization—the identity of which has been redacted—and noted that this group “has lauded motherhood and homemaking as women’s most important responsibility.”
Now, I work with a fair number of conservative Christians. They love to read people like Russell Moore and David French and Tim Keller and JD Greear. If I had to summarize what their worldview is like, I would say that they are experts at Netflix, Star Trek, Disney and especially Star Wars. When I talk to them about these threats to religious liberty and parental authority, they say “I don’t want to get involved in the culture war, I just love everybody”. They just don’t believe that corporations or governments could ever interfere with their ability to live out Christian life plans. They just “love everybody”. But their taxpayer dollars are going to pay the salaries of powerful people who don’t love them.
I think it’s something that we all need to think about. You might not be interested in fighting the secular left, but the secular left is most definitely interested in fighting you. We should be learning from what happens to Christians in places like Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc. and make sure that it never happens here. Part of that is going to be voting conservative, but part of that is surely convincing others to vote conservative, too. And you’re not going to learn how to do that from Star Wars. Instead of feeding at the trough of popular culture like good little piggies, Christians are going to have to work a little harder and learn how to discuss policy issues.
