Thought Control In Schools Must End

By Catholic League president Bill Donohue  

The Virginia Supreme Court made a wise decision when it said it would not accept a challenge to a lower court ruling that required Loudoun County Public Schools to reinstate a teacher who was punished for not acknowledging that boys can be girls, and vice versa. 

The victim in this case, Tanner Cross, argued that his Christian convictions did not permit him to lie about sex transitioning. He knows it is child abuse. So does every honest person who knows anything about the subject, which unfortunately excludes many in the healthcare profession and education. 

The school district violated this teacher's freedom of speech as well as freedom of religion. It had the gall to maintain that Cross was suspended not for his speech but for the "disruption" he caused at a school board meeting in May.  

He was being sanctioned because of what civil libertarian Harvey Kalven once called the "heckler's veto." In short, this means that those who are upset about someone's speech can effectively veto his First Amendment right by holding him responsible for their planned, or actual, disruptive behavior.  

This is not a matter of speculation. In 1949, the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew the conviction of a suspended Catholic priest who gave an incendiary speech in Chicago. A riot took place outside the hall where he spoke, and he was held accountable for the mob's behavior. The high court overturned his conviction. Had it not done so, it would have been the death knell to robust speech of any kind. 

There was another dustup in June in Loudoun County when parents objected to the adoption of critical race theory (CRT). School officials mandated, without offering any proof that there was a problem with racism in the district, that all teachers accept the racist dogma associated with this ideology.   

An economist who lives in this area, Max B. Sawicky, recently defended the school district for ordering teachers to abide by CRT. In an article posted by The New Republic, he lashed out at parents and teachers who objected to it. He denied that CRT was racist. He is wrong.  

"White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy." Those are the words of Robin DiAngelo, one of the gurus of this pernicious brand of hate speech. 

Ironically, those who live in Loudoun are mostly white privileged people, the very ones seen as racists by CRT activists. Sawicky brags that "Loudoun is one of the richest counties in the United States," where "Joe Biden received 62 percent of the vote."  

These are precisely the kind of people who are most likely to deny that there are only two sexes. Not surprisingly, Sawicky berates "Christian fundamentalist teachers" who object to having their religious rights abrogated by sexually confused elites. He also rails against "anti-CRT fanatics" who object to branding all white people as racists. 

More important, there is no shortage of left-wing totalitarians who want to use the power of the state to dictate how people think about transgenderism and CRT. Their penchant for thought control makes these people the most dangerous segment in American society today. They need to be resisted and defeated.