Killing Kids to Own the Libs
Via Getty Images.
The conservative war on public education, LGBTQ+ youths, and the safety of American schools isn’t just misguided. It’s killing children.
This article includes references to sexual assault, transphobia, homophobia, and school shootings.
On May 28, 2021, a ninth grade girl was sexually assaulted in the women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County, Virginia. The assailant was a then-14 year-old boy whom she had been having a sexual relationship with. While most local and national news outlets reported the facts of the case, conservative media seized on the incident, spinning a tragic sexual assault into a rallying cry against LGBTQ+ rights. The assailant, according to prosecutors, had been wearing a skirt when entering the bathroom, which conservatives used as supposed “evidence” that he was genderfluid. In the ensuing media circus, conservatives called for the removal of a school board policy that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity, despite the policy not even being in effect at the time, and despite there being zero evidence that letting transgender individuals use bathrooms that align with their gender identity decreases safety. But conservatives, like those at right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, continued to openly spread misinformation about the incident to demonize transgender students and the few laws that protected their rights. Chief among them were the victim’s parents, Scott and Jessica Smith. Not only did they state (without evidence) that the assailant was genderfluid, but Mr. Smith soon attended a Loudoun County school board meeting in protest of the aforementioned transgender bathroom policy. After getting into an altercation with other adults present, Smith was arrested and charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct.
So. Why does this story even matter? Well, it’s just one of thousands of instances over the past couple of years of conservatives stepping up their attacks on public schools, specifically school boards, over a seemingly endless laundry list of grievances. From mask and vaccine mandates, the supposed scourge of critical race theory, protections for LGBTQ+ students, to even safety for schools in the face of horrific gun violence, conservative activists have made mountains over molehills. But by attempting to politicize education to such an extreme degree, they’re playing a dangerous game–and at the end, the ones who will feel the effects most are their children.
Let’s start with two things that are always fun and easy to talk about: racism and education policy, specifically how American schools teach about race. In recent decades, historical literature has been getting more diverse, and with that, diversity has brought new perspectives on how we should present and understand history. One of those perspectives is critical race theory, a complex academic discipline that, to grossly oversimplify, discusses how the intersections of race, the law, and society converge to create differential outcomes for people of color in the United States. It emerged from a branch of legal studies called “critical legal studies” in the 1970s, which argued that the legal system in America was inherently subjective and politicized. If those sound fairly obvious, then it’s probably for a good reason. It’s just not possible to dismiss the existence of systemic racism in 2022, not after over 403 years of American slavery (I’ve written about this before), 51 years of the War on Drugs and its role in mass incarceration, and the two years since our national reckoning over the illegal lynching of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But conservatives have begun pushing dozens of laws across the country attempting to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” (as it turns out, “critical race theory” just means history that conservatives disagree with). This July, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the embarrassingly named “Stop Woke Act,” which prohibited instruction that might cause individuals to feel “guilt,” “anguish,” or “personal responsibility” over historical injustices on the basis of race, sex, or nationality. If that law sounds incredibly vague to you—almost as if it’s meant as a smokescreen for conservatives to ban any educational material they dislike—then you (and District Court Judge Mark Walker, who issued a temporary injunction against the law) would be right. Conservatives don’t want students to learn about the America that stole, raped, cheated, and slaughtered yesterday, because those students might start asking if America steals, rapes, cheats, and slaughters today—and if it will tomorrow.
Conservatives have also renewed their anger against the rights of LGBTQ+ children, from the fake panic over the Stone Bridge High School sexual assault, to a gay student being investigated by their school for making a presentation on the 1969 Stonewall riots in their history class, and laws that actively curtail LGBTQ+ children’s access to sports and medical care. Several months before he would tell Florida’s schools to “Stop Woke” lest they get sued by angry parents, Governor DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill, better known among some as “Don’t Say Gay.” The law bans classroom instruction on “sexual orientation or gender identity” that is “not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards,” and provides parents with the ability to sue school districts for violations of this policy. Much like “Stop Woke,” “Don’t Say Gay” is another intentionally ambiguously-worded farce of a law. “State standards” are to be defined by the Florida Department of Education in the near future, but schools across the state, already wary of potential lawsuits, have resorted to taking down any open identifiers of LGBTQ+ identity as a preemptive measure: safe space stickers, rainbow flags, and even books that reference the existence of gay people.
But perhaps the most insidious of all are conservatives’ efforts to prevent LGBTQ+ children from just being able to lead normal lives. Multiple states have now passed “Save Women’s Sports” bills, all of which generally prevent transgender individuals from playing on women’s school sports teams, out of the belief that trans women possess a biological advantage over their cisgendered counterparts due to their natural levels of testosterone. While the science is still in its infancy, medical experts have expressed doubt that gender reassignment surgery, hormone blockers, or other aspects of transgender healthcare might cause an individual to have an unfair advantage in sports. Besides that, banning transgender girls from participating in sports (which provide innumerable physical, social, and emotional health benefits) that align with their gender identity is simply cruel and ignorant: after all, people don’t go through years of gender dysphoria, potential mental health crises and bullying, gender reassignment surgery, and medication just to become better at spiking a volleyball. But again, none of this matters to conservatives. The fact that stripping children of their joy, their rights, their humanity, would inevitably lead to deep distress—possibly even death!—for hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ youths simply does not register.
And speaking of children’s lives, it’s not just the lives of LGBTQ+ children that don’t matter to conservatives, but the lives of all children (except for the unborn, since those are the only kids that matter, apparently), especially in schools. The elephant in the room is gun violence, of course, especially after the horrific May 24th shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, but the obvious inaction of the American right on that front is, well, obvious. Instead, it might be more important to discuss conservatives’ go-to when another tragic school shooting occurs: greater funding for law enforcement in schools. It’s a cop-out solution that has arguably caused more violence then it has stopped, considering how school resource officers are wont to harass students of color and the disabled and how during the Uvalde massacre, 376 law enforcement officials, including school police, waited 73 minutes to stop one lone shooter, allowing him to slaughter 19 students and two teachers in that time. And yet, conservatives still take the cop-out answer on protecting schools: they don’t, and instead wax lyrical about filling schools with police officers, or getting rid of doors to prevent further shootings. All the while, the corpses of children pile on top of one another, in the very same classrooms where they are meant to be safe.
If conservatives had any empathy, any at all, perhaps they would care about children. Perhaps they would care enough to teach children accurate history, to let them be themselves, or even to protect them from school shooters. But as much as I wish this was true, as much as I don’t want to cast aspersions where they are undue, there is no evidence to support this. Conservatives don’t care enough to stop the killing of children, because at the end of the day, the lives of children do not matter to them. They are pawns in a game to simply trigger the libs as much as possible. All the while, America’s soul bleeds black and brown. America’s soul bleeds all the colors of the rainbow, the discolored hues of clear children’s backpacks and green shoes never to be worn again. America drowns in the inky-red blood of its children.