By Steve Woodward
Inconceivably, the decline of American culture found a deeper sinkhole in the opening days of February 2023 when The Grammy Awards descended into hell on live television.
Satan worship was elevated to a grand scale on CBS, once proudly known as The Tiffany Network, the home of 60 Minutes and The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
“And that’s the way it is,” Cronkite assured riveted viewers when he signed off five nights a week, and a nation was content that it was so (until Viet Nam War propaganda become too much, even coming from Cronkite). Generally, the “news” was a legitimate enterprise.
Today, devotion to journalism of Cronkite’s time is dead, and the “way it is” in these United States is that we’ve lost our way.
How do I know? Here’s how. There is not much that separates an over-the-top demonic light show to open The Grammys from the casual acceptance of the Left’s agenda for public and higher education. The same devotion to normalizing deviance is at work. Glorifying Satanic cult worship on prime-time network TV? Sure, why not? Graphic sexual encounters described in library books available to third graders? Yes, and with more to come.
Now that the unrepentant Left has been fully exposed as a terror cell infiltrating public education, it will not shrink into darkness to regroup and live to fight another day. It is emboldened by an updated narrative. Consider a recent editorial in The Wichita Eagle that said the quiet part out loud – parents who believe schools should provide a fundamental education for their children had best think again. Schools do not belong to parents, or their bigoted surrogates on school boards. They belong to race baiters and gender groomers; this is where we are. If you embrace Americanism and expect schools to do the same, prepare to face an educational landscape growing ever more hostile, or just go away and become homeschoolers.
Writes the cranky Kansan, “The sooner they’re gone, the better — and the sooner teachers can go back to teaching their students without having to constantly fend off baseless and graceless attacks from the MAGA wing of the political spectrum. … I’ve spent the last three years covering school board meetings and campaigns dominated by various wars over vaccines, face masks, books with LGBTQ characters, drag queens and critical race theory.
“I’ve had enough of this tribal tripe (emphasis added).”
Note the casual use of “teaching” and how the snowflake author tips his hand. Vaccines and face masks are a category of their own. The Left applauded imposing both mandates on children to protect their “health”. Or was there a stronger motive? In the same breath, the editorial defends obsessing over LGBTQ, drag queens and critical race theory as norms to be protected. Obsession with the former made the carrying out of the latter ever more possible.
Or so they assumed. Reforming public education in traditional classroom settings while upholding the merits of private and home schooling are not mutually exclusive. In Moore County, public education reformers were despised by a “woke” school board that turned a blind eye to declining proficiencies in math and reading and increasing fights among students (even refusing to acknowledge fights captured on video). But following last November’s thorough denunciation by voters that added three new school board members committed to a turnaround, Moore is joining school systems around the nation that are on a glide path to restoring parental control. Of course, that will not stop vindictive defenders of filth and transgenderism from creating storm clouds.
Vigilance, always. Thus, it is encouraging that he N.C. Senate on February 7 was poised to vote for passage of a Parents’ Bill of Rights (SB 49), which requires that parents be notified when a name or pronoun assigned to their child suddenly changes. The bill also will ban explicitly sexual topics and discussion of gender identity options in K-4 classrooms. Opponents believe that schools and teachers should be able to facilitate gender grooming when parents try to stand in the way. That seems absurd because it is.
The N.C. House gets a shot at the bill next, and there is optimism that it will not punt as it did last November. Inevitably, reliable radical Gov. Roy Cooper probably will try to veto it unless a Democrat or two in the Senate are hearing from parents in their districts who have had enough. Passage will also marginalize the State Board of Education’s woke agenda. It can continue to decree whatever it wants from its lofty perch, but county school boards no longer are buying what the board is selling.