What's at stake with the Sex Ed mandate

If there is but one flag – and there are many - flying high from the mast, as it were, of the Black Pearl having been stolen from the family, renamed and retrofitted with the heavy armaments of the National Education Association (NEA), it is the Jolly Roger of secularism and cultural relativism, of which emblematic of both is Sex Education.

What vestiges are left of a parent’s right to inculcate values, character and principle – to name just a few of the traditional building blocks of community and society – are under attack.

On June 18-19, 2020, Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program will host a private and by invitation-only event entitled “Homeschool Summit: Problems, Politics and Prospects for Reform.”

In convening the summit, co-sponsor Elizabeth Bartholet – who is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School - writes with regards homeschooling: “The focus will be on problems of educational deprivation.”

Among the proposals for the reform of homeschool is one called for by Bartholet when she presents at the morning session on Day 2: “A Presumptive Ban.”

First listed under recommended reading in preparation for the convention is Bartholet’s own work in which she writes, in the very first sentence of her Abstract: “This Article describes the rapidly growing homeschooling phenomenon and the threat it poses to children and society.”

Among the 475 footnotes in her 80-page paper she cites Germany as an example of what might be done with regards homeschooling.

There isn’t any.

It’s banned.

“Home education is not allowed in Germany . . . fines, criminal prosecution, and loss of custody of children are possible state actions against families who persist in homeschooling” (footnote 377).

Farfetched in America?

No.

“The National Education Association,” writes Bartholet, “the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has taken a strong position against homeschooling being permitted at all” (277).

The NEA of course, in partnership with Planned Parenthood, the latter “part of a panel responsible for creating widely accepted standards for sex education,” want, not surprisingly, more control of the child’s mind having most recently championed “an upgrade” – speaking of grades and education – of sex work – or at least sex talk, that discussion to take place not at home, but in schools.

As if it were a problem, which Bartholet believes it is, she writes, “A very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.”

Unwittingly, the leadership typically charged with such responsibilities – values, character, and principles, those planks which one would think were most important in keeping our country afloat - the parents, increasingly find themselves countermanded by public schools, their influence on their own children pirated away.

There’s been an ill wind blowing in so-called education, in what will become known as schooling’s Golden Age of Piracy.

It will, that is, unless prevailing are enough signers of the declaration of independence, otherwise known as Referendum 90, which would repeal Sex Ed Bill 5395 the totally partisan mandate that was signed into law by Gov. Inslee of Washington this past March 27.

Who is needed to take the helm in this hour are those of whom Ann C. Crispin wrote of none other than the notorious Jack Sparrow in what would be her last novel, namely, those “whose moral compass revolts.”

It always has been, it forever will be, and most certainly it is such who are needed now to hoist their own sails of opposition for, as Crispin entitled her book, it is “The Price of Freedom.”

Lose the battle over Sex Ed in Washington Schools (get your petition here), and next will be Homeschools.

The next salvo won’t be across the bow.