Dear editor:
I want to thank Cowboy State Daily for posting the October 11, 2022, statement by the Wyoming Education Association (WEA).
Because of that clip, I have written to Governor Mark Gordon and my Wyoming state representatives to ask that any additional financial support for public education in Wyoming schools, K-12, be contingent upon the schools’ and school districts’ compliance with parental rights in children’s education.
I asked further that parental rights be spelled out and codified into public law, to include full transparency of school curricula at every level.
Today it has become common to see news stories about public schools that would have been unthinkable in years past: school officials and teachers arrested for possessing child pornography, drag queens hired to bump and grind in front of children at a “family friendly” school Halloween gathering in California (sponsored by a San Francisco gender reassignment surgery center in collaboration with a local gay nightclub); books in Casper school libraries, paid for with tax dollars, that include illustrations of male-on-male oral sex; schools in Virginia and California whose policies deem parents the enemy in children’s “gender transition” decisions – and these were just the past week. Such incidents illustrate how entrenched is this ideology in schools and governments.
The strategy is clear: parade your pieties, ask for a little, then a little more, then a little more, then a little more. Each step seems small and inconsequential, until voters look back and realize the degree to which families have already been devastated.
The job of the schools is to prepare children for college, or to perform at a high level in the workplace if they choose not to go on to college.
Teach children to read, write, punctuate, do math. Yet the percentage of children performing at or above grade level in Wyoming was generally dropping between 2013 and 2019, even before the Covid-19 disruptions, and if schools are underfunded at present then how is it that education dollars are there for promoting disruptive and divisive ideologies and pornography?
It seems to me that if some children are confused about their sexuality, then the schools should be working with parents to refer them to licensed therapists who are independent of the schools. It is not the schools’ responsibility to play at being mental health professionals, nor their call.
I have grandchildren in the infamous Loudoun County, Virginia, public schools. I have seen this tragedy unfold up close and personal. Just yesterday, Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she will introduce a bill that will expand Virginia’s definition of child abuse and neglect to include parents and guardians who do not affirm their LGBT children. In other words, fail to affirm what the school has done to your child and you will be arrested and your child taken away by Child Protective Services.
Note too that journalists are now using the term “minor attracted person” instead of pedophile. In Arizona, Libertarian Senate candidate Mark Victor is described this week in the press as “eerily focused on age of consent laws,” which he wants put to a public vote. These are the first steps toward creating a “protected” class of sexual deviants and mainstreaming the rampant sexual exploitation of children.
But this is where it’s going.
We in Wyoming need to draw the line on this twisted agenda. Transparency in education at every level is vital. Codifying parental rights is vital. Any additional state funding for education should be contingent on both.
Candace C. Crandall
Dubois, Wyoming
p.s. I shouldn’t have to add this, but since a recent letter writer painted the majority of Wyoming voters as ignorant rubes, let me say that I am a former television producer for a PBS political talk show in Washington, DC, and my husband has taught at both the University of Colorado and the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Between us we have one Mensa card, two bachelor’s degrees, four master’s degrees (one from Harvard’s Kennedy School), and a Ph.D in political science from the University of Colorado (having turned down acceptance to the doctoral program at Cambridge University, England).
Plenty of intelligent people see this movement for what it is.
