Last week the Freedom Caucus took Wyoming’s Department of Health (WDH) to task over gender ideology hidden in its Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) curriculum.
After terminating California’s PREP funding, President Trump’s HHS gave Wyoming 60 days to remove the offending passages or lose its $647,114 federal grant.
This week, Cowboy State Daily reported the governor’s response. Criticism of the WDH is “just an opportunistic attempt by [the Freedom Caucus],” said spokesman Michael Pearlman, “[to] paint the state government and the governor in a bad light.”
He’s not entirely wrong. This most certainly is a political opportunity.
It is an opportunity to understand how policies that are deeply objectionable to Wyoming’s voters nevertheless wind up in Wyoming institutions.
And just how did it happen that gender ideology ended up in our kids’ sex-education books? The WDH explained: “Wyoming does not have editorial input on specific language in any of the curricula that are purchased as an optional resource for communities.”
So, what we thought was a federal grant to help us teach abstinence and moral responsibility in our down-home way turns out to be a Trojan Horse. Instead of developing our own curriculum, the grant money paid for an out-of-state curriculum developed without any Wyoming input.
Then we opened the gates and led this ideology-laden wooden horse into schools that are supposed to be under the control of local parents. Who knew?
Every time politicians tell you that we don’t need to pass legislation to protect Wyoming from big city woke-ism, remember this debacle.
Wyoming, according to the governor’s office, is being whiplashed between opposing federal administrations. And it admitted: “These things happen with some regularity.”
Whoa, Nelly! Do you mean that terrible policies might be coming into Wyoming through other federal largess as well?
What other federal grants have we accepted that have permitted enemies to enter Wyoming’s gates? What about green-energy grants? What about Medicaid expansion? What about school vaccines? What about federal “help America vote” funds?
The list goes on. So, vigilance is a must.
It took a new administration in Washington and a federal inquest to discover what our state’s legislature and WDH should have discovered years ago. That is shameful.
I am not interested in playing the blame game. I am interested in results. The HHS letter to Wyoming has handed us a great opportunity. It has publicized to all Wyomingites the great harm that can be done through federal programs with innocuous names and grandiose intentions.
Politicians can either defend themselves for failing to ask critical questions, or they can take the opportunity to start asking them, now.
The WDH is now assuring us that it will delete the unlawful parts of the PREP curriculum that propagandize our kids with gender ideology.
That’s a good start. But how do parents and teachers un-teach what has already been taught for years?
How do you repair the damage that has been done to young, impressionable minds? How long has the indoctrination been going on? Will the WDH develop a corrective curriculum to teach the truth?
It is far easier to catch and correct a violation of state sovereignty before it is implemented than it is to repair damage after it has been done.
For this reason alone, the governor should be aggressive and proactive. He should instruct every state agency to scrutinize federal programs to see what they are bringing into Wyoming.
Politicians who want to open the hatch and look inside these Trojan Horses should not be vilified but applauded. And the governor can encourage the legislature to pass supporting laws.
One idea has already been put before Wyoming’s House. Rep. Robert Wharff (R-Evanston) introduced HB 177 to create a legislative standing committee that reviews federal policies to see if they violate the rights of Wyoming citizens. It passed out of the House, but Senate leadership never considered it.
Similar legislation has been ignored since 2019. Next time, the governor could encourage the Senate to give it a look.
Let’s face it: Washington is broken. As a result, “That doesn’t happen in Wyoming,” is no longer true. We need all of our state’s elected officials to shield Wyoming from harmful programs and policies.
Our governor, our legislature and our judiciary all share the burden and all share the blame.
The HHS letter to our Department of Health identified the problem. Our governor confirmed that it happens with regularity. This is a golden opportunity to take the bull by the horns.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
