Last week we reported on a school system in Arizona that severed its relationship with a local Christian university that supplied the district with student teachers. The college, Arizona Christian University (ACU), has tapped the team at Alliance Defending Freedom to sue the school board over the outrage.
If you missed the story the first time around, the wokes on the Washington Elementary School District board took issue with ACU’s traditional biblical stance on marriage.
Board member and “disabled, neurodivergent Queer Black Latina” Tamillia Valenzuela, who wears cat ears and a septum piercing in her official board photo and includes her pronouns in her bio, led the charge.
“At some point, we need to get real with ourselves and take a look [at] who we are making legal contracts with and the message that that is sending to our community because that makes me feel like I could not be safe in this school district,” Valenzuela said at a board meeting. “That makes queer kids who are already facing attack from our lawmakers feel that they could not be safe in this community.”
Other board members would go on to echo Valenzuela’s concerns at the meeting, although it’s worth noting that, in 11 years of ACU supplying the school system with student teachers, there hasn’t been a single report of problems with the student teachers from ACU — absolutely not a one.
So why is it such a problem that young teachers who believe in traditional sexual ethics might teach “queer kids” in elementary school? Why might “queer kids” not feel safe?
Related: Arizona School Board Cuts Ties With Christian College, and You Can Probably Guess Why
This morning, I heard authors and Christian apologists Alisa Childers and Natasha Crain on their Unshaken Faith podcast discussing what wokes mean when they say Christians make them feel “unsafe.”
“‘Safety’ in the language of woke culture doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Crain said. “Most of us think of safety in physical terms, right? But I’m sure these board members aren’t actually concerned that ACU students are going to go physically attack anyone in woke culture.”
“‘Safety’ usually refers to psychological safety from people who hold so-called ‘oppressive’ beliefs,” she continued. “And of course, oppressive beliefs are those that culture thinks are keeping oppressed groups oppressed. So in this case, a biblical view of sexuality is considered harmful and oppressive to those in the LGBTQ community because the biblical view does not morally affirm all sexual identities and choices.”
“What I think is hard for most of us to grasp is that you don’t actually have to say or do anything with respect to your beliefs for woke culture to consider you unsafe as a person,” she added.
Childers pointed out that, much like the drag queen who accused the Disney star who became a Christian of “grooming,” these school board members are worried about Christian teachers proselytizing on the job.
She noted that one of the board members was “basically saying [that Christian student teachers] shouldn’t be sharing the gospel. They shouldn’t be proselytizing. And so if a Christian is proselytizing, if they’re sharing the gospel, if they’re actually trying to convert people, they’re viewed as unsafe because they’re trying to bring those ideas those oppressive ideas that keep people oppressed into the conversation and but you know, proselytizing is a part of most religions.”
“So now they would have to actually exclude anybody who adheres to a religion that seeks to make converts,” Childers continued. “So by nature, you’re basically saying, ‘You can’t even try to convert me,’ but I just can’t help but notice the hypocrisy and all of this… The Christians are the ones who are being threatened to be canceled in the situation. One could argue that the ideologies that are being promoted, they’re proselytizing for their view, and so it’s just very hypocritical.”
Crain agreed that, to the wokes, a Christian attempting to share the Gospel is tantamount to “emotional and physical violence” because to try to convince a “queer” or otherwise woke person that there’s another way to live is to say that he/she/they-them is wrong.
What all of this boils down to is that wokes are so thin-skinned that they can’t handle even the slightest challenge to their graceless orthodoxy. Even the presence of someone who might not fall in lockstep with the woke ideology is unwelcome around wokes.
Deep down, they’re scared that their ideas won’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny, and that’s the real problem for Valenzuela and her cohorts on the Washington Elementary School District board.
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