River News: Our View

They say there’s always a silver lining in a bad situation, and one of the silver linings of having schools closed during the pandemic is that, because of remote learning, parents actually got to see what educators were teaching their kids, many of them for the first time.

None of that will ever make up for the severe damage done to our younger ones collectively, which is a generational tragedy, but school closures and shocking revelations about what was happening in America’s classrooms did spawn a robust parental rights movement that continues to this day, as parents more closely monitor what is going on in their children’s schools.

It’s a good thing the movement continues, too, because the same shocking things are still happening in our classrooms. It used to be we sent our kids to school to learn to ask questions and to introduce them to critical thinking skills. These days, it’s goodbye critical thinking and welcome to indoctrination.

And that’s going on not just in some blue city far, far away. It’s happening right here. Last week, thanks to some very aware parents, it came to light that, in the Minocqua-Hazelhurst-Lake Tomahawk (MHLT) school district, a teacher was reading two books centrally featuring same-sex relationships to third-grade students.

As our story in today’s edition documents, the teacher, Karen Stinemates, read “Prince & Knight” and “Maiden & Princess” to the students on Friday, May 31, during a read-aloud portion of class, according to the parents, as reported by The Lakeland Times. The books are essentially same-sex love stories.

When confronted, Stinemates, along with MHLT principal Betsy Gruszynski, reportedly defended the reading of the books, claiming it was part of a learning objective focused on family dynamics.

The truth is, as some parents told us, these two books are anything but focused on family dynamics. They are focused on same-sex relationships and are inappropriate for young children. Critics of the books have accused author Daniel Haack and illustrator Stevie Lewis, as well as those reading the books to young audiences — some as young as 4-years old in some places — of indoctrinating students, and they point to the potential dangers of exposing young children to such material, including confusion and gender dysphoria.

Indeed, these books take children down the slippery slope of gender identity manipulation, and that’s the true goal of those pushing this material in elementary schools — to move beyond the boundaries of biological sex to preferred sexual preference and then to preferred gender identity. It’s all part of critical gender studies, or theory, that biological sex isn’t relevant. At an age when many young children feel uncertainty about their bodies, their personalities, and their preferences — which resolves on its own 90 percent of the time — children are taught that their temporary confusion about sexual preference and preferred gender, which the teaching itself intensifies, is authentic and permanent and part of a coming-out that should be celebrated.

They are not teaching about gender identity — inappropriate at that age anyway — but teaching gender identity itself.

And that’s what books like “Prince & Knight” are doing. This is how the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD portrays that very book: “The book is part of a partnership between children’s book publisher, Little Bee Books, and the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, GLAAD. The partnership represents a commitment to increasing positive representation of diverse gender and sexual identities in children’s books.”

And in children themselves, and that’s nothing to celebrate. Lose the biology and you lose reality, and we may just lose the child, no matter whether that child is truly nonbinary or not.

There’s more to fear. The books may not be pornographic as such, but that misses the point. By forcing children to come to terms with such hot-button cultural, religious, and social issues, and in a personal way at ages when they are so impressionable, we take away their ability to face those issues in their own time and on their own terms, especially when the material being served up represents such a minuscule part of the population.

According to the latest Gallup survey, 7.1 percent of adult Americans identify as LGBTQ+ — something other than heterosexual — while more than 86 percent identify as heterosexual. Yet the indoctrinal material fed to these young kids suggest a very different world. It’s a fiction that is bound to confuse young children even more.

Now we can hear the screams, but we are not moralizing or being judgmental. We are not anti-LGBTQ+. What we are for is letting children be children — letting them play outside and reading them “Where The Red Fern Grows” — and letting adults live in their bodies the way they see fit.

Or to put it another way, rather than subtly indoctrinating children through literary elevation of LGBTQ+ lifestyle — some say grooming them — let’s go back to teaching critical thinking skills so they can make their own choices when they grow up.

Let’s also not forget that, while our concerns about the inappropriateness of this material for young children is our number one priority, parents are the other side of the equation. Indeed, it is interesting what Haack told the Times: “At their core, my books like ‘Prince & Knight’ are chaste little adventure stories that just so happen to also reflect the reality of millions of families around the world.”

Well, millions of Americans may or may not think what Stinemates did is AOK, but for sure millions and millions of parents most certainly do not think they are harmless and chaste little adventure stories, and Stinemates and Haack miss that larger reality altogether.

Some oppose it for the same reason we’ve talked about above — the topics just are not suitable for young children. Others oppose it on moral or religious grounds. At this young age, exposure to adult material and themes should be the parents’ choice, not some teacher who decides she knows better than parents what young children need.

It’s not like Stinemates didn’t know what she was doing, or at least she certainly should have known what she was doing. These two books have caused this exact same controversy around the country, from West Virginia to Indiana to South Carolina and beyond.

And it usually comes as a surprise to the parents when they discover what the teacher is reading, or when they run into it at the local library’s children’s reading hour. So it’s curious that, as district administrator Dr. Jim Ellis said, the books were not part of the class curricula and parents were not forewarned.

Another important point to make — because the charge will come down the pike — that this is all about banning books. To the contrary, Daniel Haack has every right to write and publish his book, and Lewis to illustrate it. Adults should have every right to buy it in a bookstore, or check it out at the library, and they have every right to let their children read it, or to read it to them, if they want.

But it must be the parents’ choice, not the government’s. And to decree through education curricula what is morally OK and what is not is wrong at any age. To rob us of our right to make educational choices for minor children is to rob all of us of our freedom, and the children of their future.

Once the government is run by philosopher kings, we are all puppets in the kingdom.

So far, we think MHLT superintendent Jim Ellis has done a good job navigating this. He has expressed his opinion that the material is inappropriate and that parents should be informed about the reading material their children will encounter in younger grades. 

The school board should find a way to make that mandatory, and also mandatory that parents can opt in or out of what the schools have the children reading, or listening to, as the case may be.

However it is done, the indoctrination of children in our schools must come to an end. It is great to expose it, but that is not enough. We need to end it.