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March 6, 2022

In Wisconsin, a fight over whether children belong to the state or the parents

By Andrea Widburg

In 1991, the European release of Zero Wing, a Sega video game, contained a now-classic badly translated phrase: “All your base are belong to us.” In the massive battle shaping up across America, public school districts are metaphorically carrying a banner saying “All your children are belong to us” in their battle against parents over children’s gender (not to mention racial issues). What’s happening in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, exemplifies this battle and can be summed up in a sentence from a staff training session: “[P]arents are not entitled to know their kids’ [gender] identities. That knowledge must be earned.”

That arrogant message came from a “professional development facilitator guide” that was used in the school district at a staff development session:

“Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student,” the professional development facilitator guide states. Teachers were encouraged to “Talk amongst yourselves!”

The lesson — that teachers know better than parents about what is best for their kids — is not sitting well with some community members.

“We are appalled that ECASD would display such blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children. We are equally dismayed that current school district leadership would pressure teachers into breaking a social contract that we all know and understand—that parents and guardians hold primary responsibility and decision making for the welfare and care of their children,” said parents and school board candidates, Nicole Everson, Corey Cronrath and Melissa Winter in a joint statement.

The same article linked above explains that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has before it a case out of Madison, Wisconsin, that saw similar staff training in the public schools. The policies before the Court include the following language:

  • Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
  • District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.
  • District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.

All of this—the teachers’ actions and the parents’ response—revolves around a single question: Do parents or the state have the ultimate say regarding a child’s development?

Image: Back to school by creativeart. Freepik license.

The state has an interest in child welfare, as demonstrated by the existence of Child Protective Services agencies that can intervene when a child is being abused (and that can be abusive). The Roe v. Wade opinion holds that the state has an interest in preserving a child’s life, with that interest divided up by trimester: a minimal interest in the first trimester when the fetus is not viable outside the mother; a moderate interest in the second trimester when the fetus approaches viability; and a strong interest in the third trimester when infants are all potentially viable.

The teachers’ unstated argument is that, because parents are unforgiving, rigid, discriminatory troglodytes who might interfere with a child’s search for his, her, or its natural gender development, when they withhold that information from parents, they are acting on the same principle that sees the state rescue a child from a physically abusive home.

Parents, however, consider that it’s teachers who go beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic to force their bizarre gender beliefs on children who are the abusers—with their policy of hiding those efforts from appalled parents standing as proof of their nefarious goals. Moreover, these teachers always have the full backing of the radicals who have populated so many American school boards.

It might help you understand this battle if you got a sense of who and what these teachers and board members are. And for that, there is no better resource than Libs of TikTok:

In the next tweet, what may be a little hard to see is that, on the wall behind her, this teacher has hung President Trump’s picture upside down and included a photo of convicted cop murderer Assata Shakur:

Here's the sad thing: The above tweets cover less than two weeks in the life of Libs of TikTok. There are literally hundreds more if you keep scrolling down.

Lenin is reputed to have said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” America’s hard leftist public schools understand this principle and insistently assert ownership over the children in their care. If parents do not push back hard, displacing the board members and firing the faculty and staff playing sexual and racial abuse mind games with young children, parents will find that they have lost their children to the state. There's even a PAC that might help those who take up this fight: The 1776 Project Political Action Committee.

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