Watch Out Parents: Big Conservative is Not Just Coming After Teachers and Librarians

We need to talk about how you are interacting with your children at home. What are you teaching them? How are you modeling well? Are you making the right choices - the best choices? Would your legislators and political leaders approve of how you are raising your children? Do you talk about CRT? Are you too accepting of gender non-conforming behavior or ideas? Would you allow your child to use they/them pronouns? If so, Big Conservative might knock on your door for this kind of thought crime. 

We hear about parents’ choice. That is the rationale for a slew of censorship across more than a dozen states. However, which parents? What choices? For the most part, these book-banning (and sometimes burning) movements are aligned with a far wrong wing political agenda. They do not reflect ALL parents’ choices, just a specific conservative religious and usually white one.  

So this isn’t just about parents having a say in what their kids read in school. This is about ideologues having control over your children’s educations. Teachers and librarians were the first to experience this intense scrutiny and vitriol, but this movement will not end with them. 

You may think, what I teach my children in my own home is not anyone’s business but my own – and you would be right as long as what you were doing was aligned with Big Conservative. But if it is not, your behavior might be labeled child abuse and you as a negligent parent. 

Several states banned children who identify as a gender other than the one assigned at birth from receiving any interventions. They criminalized the act of assisting these children from even exploring anything beyond their gender at birth – even if their parents did it! 

So if you are looking at teachers and librarians and thinking, just pick less controversial texts, just make your lessons about the subject area and not about social issues, know this: that same message will be tailored for parents who don’t agree with the censors and extremists. 

Let’s go one step further: How will these wrong wing censors know you are veering away from their prescribed curriculum? Your children will tell them. The idea that children would “turn in” their parents was common in totalitarian and fascist regimes. Whether it was the Hitler Youth, the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers, or Communist Youth reading Mao’s Little Red Book, this technique has deep roots in authoritarian governments’ control of parenting. 

So as you are confronting those who don’t want their kids to “feel uncomfortable” in school because topics deal with parts of our past that are problematic, this is just the first battle in a larger war for who decides what your child learns – in and out of school. 

As with abortion, immigration, and elections, choice just means sticking with Big Conservative’s point of view; freedom means the right to express opinions that echo specific politicians in a specific party. They are not advocating for freedom and choice, they are creating vehicles to coerce and control – and their reach will not end at the schoolhouse – if we don’t stop it, it is going to ram through the door and enter your house!