At schools across the country, our children’s futures are jeopardized by woke bureaucrats and unhinged ideologues waging war on everything we hold dear. Kids now spend their precious formative years being taught that America is evil and that they should be judged by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character. If they act in a way that piques the curiosity of teachers and administrators, they are told that they were born in the wrong bodies and set down a path to ruin.
Female athletes are losing their trophies and the privacy of their locker rooms to biological males, as their safety and hard-won achievements are sacrificed on the altar of “inclusion.” From kindergarten through high school, our children are told their deeply held religious and civic values are anachronistic, racist, sexist, and homophobic.
Throughout it all, teachers, administrators, and politicians insist that they’re entitled to direct every aspect of our children’s lives because they’re uniquely qualified to do so. Our children are not our own, they say, but instead are subjects of communal formation by those who know them far less than their parents do.
They speak with such unearned authority, and perhaps we’d take them seriously if their meddling amounted to better outcomes for kids. But so far, there’s no proof of that. In fact, the educational performance of kids has worsened in recent years to the great detriment of our country’s future.
A 2022 report by the National Assessment of Education and Progress found that just 13% and 20% of eighth-graders met U.S. history and civics proficiency standards, respectively, while only 31% of the same were proficient in reading. While experts emphasize the value of strong STEM skills, only 26% of these children were even proficient in math. And all of this takes place as kids report being more depressed and anxious than ever before.
This must not go on any longer. It’s time we sent a message to bureaucrats across the country: our children belong to us.
That’s why we’re proud to be a part of March for Kids, a broad coalition of parental rights advocates, policy organizations and ordinary Americans, who are standing up for our kids. No matter our religious, racial, or political backgrounds, these Americans are ready to reassert the role of parents in shaping their children’s lives and futures, including with their values, education, and medical care.
This is an idea whose time has come. Over the last four years, some of the worst abuses of this radicalized education system have been made public, and it is absolutely appalling. Every day, Americans see stories of the country of their youths – somewhere strong and aspirational – turning into something totally unrecognizable to them.
In Pennsylvania, white students in a fifth-grade classroom were lined up and forced to apologize to black students. In a Washington D.C., elementary school, 4-year-olds were given an “Anti Racism Fightclub Fistbook for Kids,” that tells them they’re at fault if they ignore their white privilege while encouraging them to identify any family members who might be racist.
In districts all over the country, children are being affirmed in gender transitions without parental knowledge, and in some cases, teachers are prohibited from informing parents. In Florida, school administrators secretly encouraged a 12-year-old girl, who would later attempt suicide twice, to transition genders, refusing to tell her own father of their manipulation because of his Catholic faith. Meanwhile, in Olympia, Wash., a family was forced to flee the country after they discovered their child was being transitioned without their knowledge, knowing the state would view their protection of their child as tantamount to abuse.
Amidst this environment of righteous parental backlash and bipartisan disgust, the Biden administration and its allies are doubling down. When outraged parents began showing up at school board meetings to express their disgust with school efforts to undermine their values and indoctrinate their children, Attorney General Merrick Garland mobilized the FBI to investigate parents who spoke out too vigorously.
Less than three years after a Loudoun County, Va., father exposed the school system for covering up the violent rape of his daughter in a high school bathroom by a non-binary student, the Biden administration is pushing changes to Title IX policies that would protect the rights of “non-binary” teenage boys to access women’s spaces. In states like California and Washington, laws are under consideration that would allow children to receive hormone therapy without parental consent.
We stand in the way of their agenda. So it’s no surprise that they’re doing everything they can to make us go away. They won’t succeed. Instead, we’re coming to Washington, D.C.
On Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024, a vast and varied group of individuals and organizations will march on the National Mall to send a message to our political elites: America’s kids deserve better. We will no longer sit idly by while our children are taught to hate themselves or distrust their classmates. We reject efforts to sexualize and radicalize our children. We refuse to allow an untrained teacher to hijack our children’s innocence and send them down a path to gender dysphoria and psychological ruin.
Most of all, we understand that no bureaucrat can love our children more than we do. That’s why we march.
Editor's note: PJ Media unknowingly published the wrong version of this column, and we have updated it with the correct version. We apologize to our readers for this error.
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