Republicans: Schools Are Violating Parents’ Rights by Teaching Kids Racism Is Bad - Vanity Fair

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The GOP wants to introduce a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” so parents can abuse teachers for not telling kids all white people are perfect.

By Bess Levin

November 5, 2021

One of the most dominant features of the modern Republican Party is its love for creating moral panic over things that either (1) aren’t actually happening or (2) are positive developments but ones that conservatives insist will lead to the downfall of society. Whether it’s immigrants supposedly taking Americans’ jobs or paid parental leave turning fathers into “doting dad[s],” the GOP has a long history of shamelessly trying to convince people that something very sinister is transpiring, and only Republicans can save them.

At the moment, the cause célèbre is the idea that liberals have stripped parents of a say in their children’s education, leading to terrible outcomes like kids being required to wear masks in the middle of a pandemic, curricula that includes accurate facts about America’s racist past and present, and—and you may want to sit down for this because it’s extremely alarming—the leaders of tomorrow being taught that the Holocaust did actually occur.

Of course, out here on planet Earth, parents haven’t been stripped of anything. Masks are required in schools where responsible adults want their staff and students to live, while only one state in the country has announced a vaccine mandate for schools, also in an effort to help prevent its constituents from getting sick and dying. (Incidentally, schools already required students to get a whole host of inoculations well before COVID-19 came along). And when it comes to talking about things like slavery, systemic racism, and the Holocaust, the parents who are against it simply can’t stand the idea that their children are learning that sometimes, white people do bad things. Meanwhile, there is nothing preventing parents from involving themselves in their children’s education in a reasonable way—emphasis on reasonable—or from pulling their kid out of a school if that’s what they decide to do.

Nevertheless, conservatives have whipped their base into such a frenzy over things like critical race theory, which most of them completely mischaracterize, and the coronavirus, which they also don’t understand, that parents have taken to violently airing their grievances as though their children have been subject to human rights abuses. Here’s a fun story from The New York Times:

It was only days after Sami Al-Abdrabbuh was reelected to the school board in Corvallis, Oregon, that the text messages arrived. The first, he said, was a photograph taken at a shooting range. It showed one of his campaign’s lawn signs—“Re-Elect Sami”—riddled with bullet holes. The second was a warning from a friend. This one said that one of their neighbors was looking for Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh. The neighbor was threatening to kill him.

Like many school board races this year, the one in May in Corvallis, a left-leaning college town in the northwest corner of the state, was especially contentious, swirling around concerns not only about the coronavirus pandemic but also the teaching of what Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh called the “dark history” of America’s struggle with race. Even months later, Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh, the chairman of the school board, is still taking precautions. He regularly speaks to the police and scans his driveway in the morning before walking to his car. He often mixes up his daily route to work. “I love serving on the school board,” he said. “But I don’t want to die for it.”

“I don’t want to die for it”? Is there a sentence that was less likely to be uttered by a school board member prior to the past year? Thanks, Republicans!

Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh is not alone. Since the spring, a steady tide of school board members across the country have nervously come forward with accounts of threats they have received from enraged local parents. At first, the grievances mainly centered on concerns about the way their children were being taught about race and racism. Now, parents are more often infuriated by COVID-19 restrictions like mask mandates in classrooms.

It is an echo of what happened when those faithful to the Tea Party stormed Obamacare town halls across the country more than a decade ago. In recent months, there have been Nazi salutes at school board meetings and emails threatening rape. Obscenities have been hurled—or burned into people’s lawns with weed spray.

While Al-Abdrabbuh acknowledges that of course parents have a right to be heard, the recent spate of behavior is completely out of hand. “What’s happening now, and what has been happening,” Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh said, “is much more serious than simply listening to excited parents who want what’s best for their kids.” Like, for instance, the lawn-burning incident.

Jennifer Jenkins, a school board official in Brevard County, Florida, said she had suffered months of threats, beginning last year when she unseated an incumbent member of her school board. At first, Ms. Jenkins said, parents angered by the district’s transgender bathroom policy began to appear at board meetings, waving Trump flags and calling members “pedophiles.” But that soon escalated, she said, to angry groups of people shouting on the street outside her home.

Then in July, after the district put in place a mask mandate for students, a Republican state lawmaker posted Ms. Jenkins’s cellphone number on his Facebook page, and her voice mail filled with hateful messages. Not long after, she said, someone burned the letters “FU” into her lawn with weed killer and chopped down the bushes in front of her house. “It’s gotten really, really crazy here,” she said. “There’s just been a whole other level of rage and anger ignited in our community.”

So yeah, it’s clear that it is school boards and teachers that are under attack, and not parents, but that hasn’t stopped the GOP from cynically fanning the flames. Last month, soon-to-be Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin suggested he’ll ban books written by acclaimed author Toni Morrison. On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced that the GOP will “soon unveil a Parents’ Bill of Rights,” a thing that is obviously not necessary but plays well on Fox News. On Thursday, Senator Josh Hawley tweeted, “It’s time to turn back Joe Biden’s effort to shut parents out of their kids’ education” and then told Laura Ingraham that “the Biden administration [is] trying to use the FBI to silence parents” (it’s not). On Friday, Representative Jim Jordan simply wrote on Twitter: “The Republican Party is the party of parents.” Which is a bit rich coming from the subject of this CNN story from last year:

Tito Vazquez says he still remembers the day three decades ago when, as a wrestler at Ohio State University, the doctor he’d gone to see about a bloody nose insisted on examining his genitals. He also recalls how one of his coaches dismissed his immediate complaint. “‘I have nothing to do with this,’” Vazquez quoted the assistant coach saying, as he effectively ended the conversation and went on with wrestling practice.

That coach, Vazquez says, was Jim Jordan, now an Ohio congressman and an influential voice in Republican politics, perhaps best known for his pugnacious defense of President Donald Trump during the recent impeachment proceedings. Vazquez is one of six former OSU wrestlers who told CNN in recent interviews that they were present when Jordan heard or responded to sexual misconduct complaints about team doctor Richard Strauss. Eight others say Strauss’s inappropriate behavior was an open secret in the athletic department and that Jordan, among others, must have known about it.

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