The Maryland Department of Education has agreed to add “LGBTQ” content to high school history classes statewide, ensuring public school children will soon begin learning about the leftist movement as an integral part of U.S. history.
It’s a move that is quickly becoming a trend in many blue states. Already in 2019, three other states — New Jersey, Colorado, and Illinois — have passed laws requiring schools to include LGBT history as part of their curricula. In California, such lessons have been mandated for several years.
Proponents of these measures argue they are merely expanding the teaching of U.S. history to neutrally cover events that have previously been ignored. As one Maryland advocate told the Washington Post, “This is not indoctrination. These are facts.”
However, as parents in these states are now finding out, there is a much deeper agenda at play.
Consider the growing controversy in the Murrieta, Calif., School District. There, parents recently discovered, to their alarm, that students were being exposed to a highly sexualized curriculum in both sex education classes and other classes. To make matters even worse, teachers were also being instructed how to help students get abortions without parental knowledge or consent.
However, when parents brought their understandable objections to school district administrators and requested to opt their children out of such content, they were informed they could not do so. According to one of the parent group leaders, “[school officials] quote the opt out right pertaining to sex ed and never tell the parents that the LGBTQ content in other classes can not be opted out of. Everything they show the parents has to do with sex ed, and parents don’t know that these issues are now in history, language arts, assemblies, and the like.”
This, in a nutshell, exemplifies the real danger of the progressive effort to insert “LGBT history” into schools. For as long as our country has existed, it has generally been accepted that it is the right and duty of parents to instruct their children on issues of sexuality. And even with the advent of public school sex education in recent decades, the common privilege afforded to parents of opting out their children from these classes has preserved this important right, though it was severely weakened.
Now, however, progressives are attempting to totally undermine parents in their bid to impose affirmation of their sexual beliefs on everyone — including children. As alluded to above, their plan to accomplish this is by inserting these beliefs into curriculum across all subjects, not simply sex education. In being taught about alleged LGBT figures and causes throughout U.S. history, students will really be learning the “lesson” that related sexual behaviors are not only normal, but praiseworthy.
Expanding this content into other subject areas like English, fine arts, and foreign languages (as has been proposed in Montgomery County, Md., and elsewhere) will only serve to amplify this “lesson.” But most importantly, unlike sex education, parents will be unable to opt their children out. Parental rights will be completely subjugated to the debased desires of a radical movement.
Let’s be honest: this is the ultimate end goal of progressives — a goal decades in the making. While the left of the 1960s and 1970s cleared Bibles and prayer out of public schools supposedly to create a religiously neutral space for students to learn, the left of today is filling the vacuum with their own religion: the doctrine of the sexual revolution. Parents must firmly resist this cultish attempt at mass proselytization and instead insist that their right and responsibility to instruct their children on these critical matters must be respected.
Otherwise, parental rights are likely to become just another forgotten relic relegated to the dustbin of “LGBT history.”
Terry Schilling (@Schilling1776) is the executive director at American Principles Project, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to putting human dignity at the heart of public policy.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.