Will Matt Platkin break the back of the Democrat Party in NJ?
/By Rubashov
Across the Western world, the idea that parents have the right to mentor and guide their children is the wall against which the LGBTQ+ sea is breaking. This is happening even in Canada, which – since the early 1960’s – has led the world in acceptance of what were once called “gay rights” and was one of the first nations to adopt same-sex marriage (2003).
In a National Post column (June 26, 2023: “After 50 years, Canadians encounter an LGBT frontier they don’t support”), Canadian journalist Tristin Hopper outlined the backlash the LGBTQ+ cause is taking over its perceived targeting of children:
After more than 50 years of being impressively ahead of the curve on gay and trans rights issues, Canadians may have finally encountered an LGBT issue that they consider a bridge too far.
New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs recently took the controversial stand of becoming the first high-profile Canadian politician to resist a policy of having public schools accommodate the gender transition of young students without informing parents.
…according to a Leger poll last May, a clear majority of Canadians are on Higgs’ side. Of respondents, 57 per cent agreed with Higgs, while a mere 18 per cent agreed that schools should continue facilitating gender transitions without parental consent.
For such a roundly disliked policy, however, it’s already standard practice across much of the country. In school districts from Ontario to B.C., the official policy is that if a student claims to be another gender, teachers and staff must immediately “affirm” the new identity without question. And if the student requests, the details of their new identity are concealed from their parents…
It's very much the same situation in New Jersey, where a policy that not only negates the involvement of parents in their children’s lives but actively obstructs it was allowed to take hold. Look at the plainly political definitions being used to underpin the policy. If an education system adopts radical ideological terminology to define a policy, the education that follows is little more than propaganda. In this regard, the parallels between New Jersey’s schools and those of, say, the old Soviet Union are striking.
Some argue that the terminology used has a religious or pseudo-religious aspect to it. The pejorative term “deadnaming” – which seeks to shame those who use an individual’s legal or “birth” name – reeks of the practice of renaming that goes on in cults and some religious orders.
Meanwhile, the education of children is going down the toilet – with reading and math scores plummeting. Axios.com points this out in a recent article (June 21, 2023):
American students' test scores in math and reading got significantly worse last year — continuing a decade-long freefall. The decline in math scores last year was the biggest in the past 50 years, according to newly released federal data.
The findings come from a test known as "The Nation's Report Card" — a continuous, national assessment of 13-year-old students. Results were distributed by the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department…
The average math score for 13-year-olds declined 9 points between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years.
The average reading score for 13-year-olds declined 4 points between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years.
About 8,700 students took the assessments at about 460 schools across the country.
The lowest-performing students scored at levels last recorded in the 1970s, when the assessment began. Scores declined among all racial and ethnic groups, and among both male and female students, and across urban, suburban, and rural areas.
Enrollment in algebra dropped from 34% of 13-year-olds in 2012 to 24% in 2023.
And fewer students said they frequently read for fun, which is associated with higher achievement.
Enter Attorney General Matt Platkin – as radical as any Soros prosecutor – who is attempting to use the brute hand of government to beat parents into line. Yesterday, Platkin and Acting Department of Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan threatened parents to stay out of their children’s lives and re-affirmed that children belong to the state. What’s next? Will they give them uniforms (perhaps they have?) and call them the “Murphy Youth” (or “Jugend”, in the original German)?
So, we have a wasteful education system (arguably the nation's most expensive) delivering Woke ideology but not math and reading, and more wasteful spending on enforcing a policy that splits children from their parents. How long are people going to want to pay for that?
And where has the state’s Republican Party been in all of this? How many Republican Senators voted to confirm Matt Platkin? How many will vote to confirm Angelica Allen-McMillan?
Why didn’t the party of opposition speak up while it was happening? Good question… especially when the origins of many of these noxious policies date back to the administration of the last Republican Governor – Chris Christie. But that is for another column.
Even without a political party in its corner, there is parental outrage, and that can be a mighty thing. It’s been shown that parents who are motivated into action to protect their relationship with their children can become profoundly motivated voters.
The National Post column continues:
“It’s not a benign act. It’s a psychological intervention — and it’s not a minor psychological intervention — that teachers and counsellors are entering into without any psychological training at all,” said one Ontario mother, a former academic, whose child had their new name and pronouns immediately adopted by the Hamilton-Wentworth school board.
…In a 2021 Nanos survey, Canadian support for transgender rights dropped off a cliff when respondents were asked about instances of minors pursuing surgery or hormone treatment. In such cases, 72 per cent of Canadians said that it couldn’t be left to personal choice, and that there needed to be “strict requirements” on health-care officials giving the green light to a young person “irreversibly” altering their body.
A similar skepticism is already sweeping Europe, where some of the world’s most gay and trans-friendly countries have run up against a brick wall of public and even medical opinion when it comes to the gender transitioning of minors.
In just the last few months, many of the countries on which Canada usually takes its cues on progressive issues – Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands — have dialed back official recommendations on so-called “gender affirming” care. While it’s still legal to medically transition minors in those countries, public health agencies are now saying it should be an extraordinarily rare occurrence, and not a routine treatment for gender dysphoria.
Meanwhile, the LGBTQ+ movement isn’t doing itself any favors. For example, at a recent “Pride” celebration (officially, the “NYC Drag March” on June 23rd), revelers broke into a chant of “we’re coming for your children”. Snopes checked the incident and even that far-Left “fact-checker” had to admit that it was “true”.
“We’re coming for your children.”
Yesterday, Attorney General Matt Platkin and Acting Department of Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan issued a bureaucratic version of the above.
