Leftwing activism has run amok in two Maryland public school districts with “inclusivity” books for elementary students that champion gender transitioning, drag queens and children’s pronoun preferences and a high school student suspended for questioning why all his classrooms do not have an American flag as state law requires. The taxpayer-funded districts are situated about an hour apart but practice the same woke ideology that has gripped academic institutions throughout the United States, a leftist conditioning that President Trump has vowed to abolish. An executive order issued in late January states that federal funding and support will be eliminated for indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology and that parental rights will be protected. “Young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed,” Trump’s order reads. “These practices not only erode critical thinking but also sow division, confusion, and distrust, which undermine the very foundations of personal identity and family unity.”
The order’s language is especially relevant to the first case, which involves Maryland’s largest school district, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), with about 160,000 students in 210 campuses located a short distance from Washington D.C. In 2022 the Montgomery County Board of Education announced that students in pre-K through eighth grade would use over 20 new “inclusivity” books that promote gay pride parades, gender transitioning and pronoun preferences for kids. One book directs three and four-year-olds to search for images from a list of words that includes intersex flag, drag queen and underwear as well as the name of a celebrated LGBTQ sex worker turned activist. Other books promote gender transitioning for children, stating that it does not have to make sense and that doctors only guess when identifying a newborn’s gender. When education officials announced the district would use the pride storybooks, it assured concerned parents they would be notified so they could opt out their children. A year later the policy changed, so parents would no longer be warned.
A group of Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian parents sued and a federal district court and a court of appeals ruled against them so they petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed earlier this year to hear their case. A Washington D.C. nonprofit dedicated to protecting the free expression of all faiths represents the concerned parents and will argue before the nation’s highest court on April 22. Upholding parental rights meant that children would not be subjected to age-inappropriate instruction against their parents’ wishes, but the policy change denies parents the right to decide when their elementary-aged children are exposed to books promoting transgender and queer ideology, attorneys for the group say. “The Board cannot refuse parents who want to opt their children out of instruction that violates their religious beliefs on sensitive matters,” the nonprofit representing the parents further points out, adding that it is “unlawfully coming between parents and their kids and targeting them because of their religious beliefs about gender and sexuality.” That violates both Maryland law and the school board’s own policies as well as the U.S. Constitution, the religious freedom charity asserts.
In the other case, a high school student about an hour away in Baltimore County was suspended for seven days over his patriotism. The 18-year-old, Parker Jensen, who has enlisted in the military, is a senior at Towson High School and got punished for questioning why all the classrooms in his campus do not have an American flag even though Maryland law says every classroom must have one. When school administrators failed to provide an explanation, Jensen drove to the Baltimore County Board of Education headquarters to ask about the flag violation and district officials called the police on him, according to a local news report. The high school senior was subsequently suspended for seven days. This month Jensen filed a lawsuit against Baltimore County Public Schools claiming that the district violated his Constitutional rights when it suspended him for inquiring about missing American flags in public school classrooms. “He was summarily suspended without any due process whatsoever, which every student in Baltimore County and Maryland has the right to and they stripped him of that within five seconds,” said Jensen’s attorney, who assures the student’s Constitutional rights were violated.
Source: Judicial Watch
