A Mother Takes School To Court Over Her Child's Name

Here's a case that shows everything hard and challenging about policies around LGBTQ students in school.

Michelle Landerer is suing the Dover Area School District in York County, PA over the gender identification of their child. The child had been previously diagnosed with PTSD, Conversion Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder and ADDl she already regularly saw a counselor selected by her mother.

In middle school, the student asked to be identified by a name and pronouns different from those assigned at birth. The child told the district that he did not want his mother to know about the change, and the district honored that request.

Landerer found out and told the teen that he could change his name when he was 18. The summer of 2022, the child confided with the private counselor that he thought he might be trans, leading to a series of discussions with Landerer, the counselor, and the child. The child told mom that he felt pressured by the school to stick with the name. Landerer herself sent off an email to the district:

(Teen’s legal name) is registered as (teen’s legal name) and I expect she will be addressed as such. NOT (Teen’s chosen name)... There is NO room for discussion about this matter and have discussed this with (teen’s therapist) as well so I am expecting there to be no confusion…

The 14-year-old told Landerer that he had told the district to use his birth name. Apparently what he actually told his teachers was to use his birth name in front of his mother and his chosen name the rest of the time. That secret did not last long. Said Landerer:

Even though they were well aware of my daughter's mental health issues and her educational disabilities, they took it upon themselves without my knowledge and without my consent to socially transition her and did this for an entire year without me knowing.

The lawsuit claims that the district interfered with Landerer's rights 

Defendant School Board and the individual members of the Board of Directors know or should know that the U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States and Third Circuit, provide that the fundamental right to direct the care, custody, and control of children resides first in the parent and cannot be infringed by state actors absent a compelling state interest.

 Also, she charges that the school infringed on her freedom of religion and her beliefs, in part, that “human beings are created male or female by God and the natural created order regarding human sexual identity cannot be changed.” 

She would like the court to order that the district cannot treat students differently from their birth gender or use any other name for the child without prior written consent of a parent. She wants the court to out LGBTQ students to their families, and she wants a jury trial.

Landerer is represented by the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, a "nonprofit public-interest law fir founded to defend parents' rights to shield their children from the impacts of gender identity ideology." They do advocacy, legal representation, coordination, and activism. They offer a church transgender response guide: 

For too long churches have remained silent thinking they would be safe within their walls as our young people fall prey to an ideology that’s enticing them to reject God’s created order and harm their bodies by rejecting their sex, and as families are being torn apart.

The Georgia firm, founded in 2019, has scored huge grants from the National Christian Foundation, the National Philanthropic Trust, and the Alliance Defending Freedom. The Landerer case seems to be their one big get.

There's a lot going on here.

I sympathize with Landerer. It's a big shock when your child makes a life decision and leaves you completely out of the loop. It has to be a gut punch. 

But what does she hope to accomplish here? Is she really going to go to the mat in order to torch her relationship with her child in order to stand firm on her conservative pseudo-religious point? Because, while I obviously do not know the family dynamics involved, if Landerer's end game is to have a warm happy relationship with her child, this does not seem like the way to get there.

As with all such cases, one must also wonder where exactly the child's rights lie in all this. It doesn't seem hard to see why the child didn't want the news to get to Mom. Landerer is standing up for her parental right to have total control and direction over her child's life, but does the child have any rights to make choices for his own life? Can Landerer also take him to court if he won't wear a skirt? What if he insists on speaking with a low "male" voice instead of a high "girl" voice? What if he refuses to attend church services? The suit is over the district interfering with Landerer's rights to direct the child's life, but what if it's the child who interferes with those "rights" instead?

Which is the needle that must be threaded by every district caught in one of these cases. Where exactly is the line between the rights of the student and the rights of the parent? How does a school make the call when dealing with a student who has a host of issues that add up to "diminished emotional regulation" on top of being thirteen? How much freedom should a parent allow a child, and how much does the child need a firm guiding hand? And will hiring a right wing law firm that hopes to use your child to make a political and legal point help anything?

Okay, I know the answer to the last one.

But the rest are hard. This case, like the many similar instances across the country, presents a complex and difficult problem to sort out, yet these situations keep prompting simplistic answers.

The parents' rights always take first place and the school should always give control and information to the parent? The child is not chattel. The child has rights of their own, most notably the right to be safety, a right that the school is obligated to protect, even if the danger to the child is the parent. And certainly a right to define their own identity. LGBTQ students are particularly prone to being victims of abuse and being put out on the street. "The parent is always in the right" is not an answer.

The school should always follow the preferences of the child? They're a child, and the hope is always that the parents be in the loop. "Always leave the parents out of this" is a troubling default position for any school. And while a child has that right to define themselves, how much responsibility does the school have to play along? 

Schools that try to convince students to be LGBTQ would be way out of line-- if they existed. Likewise, asserting that all LGBTQ people are always wrong and deluded and sinful and demonic is not only unhelpful, but doesn't strike me as any sort of Christlike love and grace.

The absolute ideal is for parents, school staff, and children to sit down together, share, communicate, and figure out how best to move forward. There are many slices of rights and responsibilities at play in these cases, and no one size fits all policy solutions will actually fit all. I feel sad for everyone in this story, and I hope that other stories like it end up somewhere other than in a courtroom.

What Public Schools Can Learn From Parental Rights Movement

Yes, a hefty chunk of the parental rights movement is a fraud, one more disingenuous way to advance the cause of privatizing education by sowing distrust in public schools. Let's stipulate that right up front. 

But let's also note that it has so much success because it taps something real- parental frustration with school. 

Some of this is unavoidable. The notion that as a parent one can engineer a child to grow up according to your exact specifications is both seductive and doomed. Your child will be shaped by a wide variety of forces beyond your control and calculation (ironically, this will include your own parenting choices, which often include both A) choices that don't have the effect you were counting on and B) choices that are the result of your own uncontrolled impulses and baggage). When the child ends up with characteristics that were not part of your plan, whether big ("My kid is a gay atheist!") or small ("My kid does not grasp the cultural importance of The Beatles"), it is easy to start looking around for something to blame, and there is nothing better situated to take the blame than the schools. 

That blame can reach extraordinary distances. I think of one of the respondents to a "turn in your indoctrinatin' teacher or school" survey that North Carolina ran a few years back. The woman wrote

My daughter was raised with sound Biblical values, but just three short years [in]) public school has turned her into a full-blown socialist...even to this day, I cannot have a rational discussion with her regarding anything significant.

This mother was writing fifteen years after her daughter's high school graduation. Fifteen years of being unable to heal her relationship with her daughter, somehow blamed on three years in public school.  

What the whole we-don't-co-parent-with-the-government crowd wants, in fact, is to absolutely co-parent with the government, to make the school an extension of their parenting will, in hopes that that total control of their child's environment will result in a child made to their particular order. And while the aim of this sort of parenting ranges from misguided to toxic, it's understandable and as old as time. 

This, plus so much of the current cultural atmosphere, makes it also natural for schools to get their backs up, to circle the wagons, to play hard-edged defense. 

And yet. 

In a Twitter thread this week, Bill Ferriter, an accomplished educator, ran a thread that started with a simple observation:

There is nothing more disheartening than being the parent of a student who struggles in school.

He goes on to observe that "most building policies aren't designed to support struggling learners" and how this struggle affects your relationship with your own child. And this is tough to read:

You start by encouraging them to succeed and celebrating every success, no matter how small. You wait and hope that "as they mature," they will pick things up quicker and "figure things out

But after years of struggles, that hope and encouragement changes to cajoling, fussing, and punishing because you know the consequences of failing and you feel real urgency for them.

You pressure them in every moment. The first thing you say in the morning is, "Remember to turn your work in today" or "use your time wisely in class" instead of "Have a great day" or "Learn something cool."

I remember my mother, sitting in a training meeting for adult tutors, listening to one of the district's most clueless and inept administrators explain that here was some training they would need about how to deal with students because they were "only mothers." 

And I remember the number of times I was told, as a teacher, to just find a way to move the kid on ahead, somehow. And my colleague who didn't worry about the students in the low class because "what's the point."

I attended my granddaughter's kindergarten graduation from her private Christian school, and I was struck by just how solicitous of the parents they were, how connected they were.

This is what public schools have to learn. There are parents out there who want a connection with the people to whom they've entrusted their child, who want to feel confident that their child, whatever her struggles and challenges, is seen and supported and not simply an anonymous cog in an institutional machine. 

Yes, we sort of already know this, but we can only do so much with what we've got. Yes, this isn't entirely on schools-- there are parents who are checked out and absent and, in a non-zero number of cases, dangerously toxic. Yes, there are mountains of teachers who are fighting this same fight against institutional machinery from the inside of the machine. I taught high school students; a big year at open house was three or four parents out of 150. 

And yes, after the past several years of being called groomers and pedos and marxist indoctrinators on the daily, many teachers are not sure what to expect (or fear) when they see a parent headed for them. Yes, school districts are largely run and staffed by people who were good at Doing School and so reflexively value that ability over others. 

And double yes, the past couple of decades of reformsterism has ramped up the incentives and requirements for school districts to become more machine-like and institutional, to become upside down schools that are more concerned about what students will do for the district ("Get those test scores up, kid") than what the district can do for the student.

In short (okay, not so short), there are all sorts of things that are true at the same time, all sorts of factors converging on schools and parents in a complicated, often ugly mess. 

But it is still worth remembering that tucked in among the astro-turf and professional activists bent on privatizing education is a number (a number that varies from district to district depending, in part, on how well your district already functions) of parents who want to be seen and heard and who want their children to be seen and heard and valued and cared for and supported through whatever struggles they may have. 

Public education would gain nothing from a stance of "the customer is always right," and an administrator who always says yes to parents on the phone so that the parents will shut up and go away is not doing anyone favors. 

But there can be no doubt that some public schools could do a far better job of seeing and hearing the families they serve, even if that means difficult conversations. It should be a value set and pursued by administration, including the institutional support of teachers doing their best to pursue those values. 

Would doing better end the attacks from the various privatizer groups? No, not a bit. But it would make life better for some students and their families, and it would bring schools more in line with what their mission is supposed to be. 

ICYMI: Career Day Edition (5/19)

This coming week I'll be visiting the Board of Directors' elementary school (though not their classes) to talk about the exciting world of free lance writing. Pro: you can work in the clothes you like. Con: if it's your only source of income, you will be able to afford the clothes you like. Thank goodness I have my fat teacher pension to pad my income, as well as hitching my wagon to the CMO, who is still gainfully employed, because I really lack the self-promotion hustle gene needed to make this work. I know I mention this often, but my success in this work is largely the result of the kindness and signal boosting of others, which is one big reason that once a week I take a moment to signal boost others. It's a tough media world out there, and we need each other. 

So let's see what we've got this week.

She Campaigned for a Texas School Board Seat as a GOP Hard-Liner. Now She’s Rejecting Her Party’s Extremism.

Jeremy Schwartz has this great story at ProPublica. Courtney Gore ran for school board with every intent of rooting out all the indoctrinatin' and CRT. She won, and two things happened. First, she found that the terrible stuff just wasn't there. Second, she found out that her right-wing backers didn't care. This is her story.

Iowa school vouchers prompted tuition hikes, researchers find

Everyone already knew this, but now there's actual research to back it up. 

Zero Tolerance Policies In School ‘Promote Further Misbehavior,’ Study Finds

Nick Morrison at Foprbes.com writes up a study that shows zero tolerance doesn't help, at all.

70 years after Brown vs. Board decision, key takeaways remain buried

Brown v. Board had a birthday this week, and one of the better pieces to mark it was this one by Peter Piazza at Hechinger, pointing out that we have missed a few insights from the case, including the idea that segregation is bad for white kids, too.

Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South. One Town Grapples With Its Divided Schools.

Jennifer Berry Hawes at ProPublica looking at the history of segregation academies and how they persist today.

Separate and Unequal Schools: The Past Is Future

Steven Suitts wrote a good little book about how Brown connects with education reform. Here at Southern Spaces, he takes a look at how things stand now (not great) and where certain states are headed (even worse).

Everything you know about Brown v. Board of Education is wrong

Michael Harriot at the Grio is always a good read.

Still too little light on shadowy voucher schools

The South Florida Sun Sentinel has some blistering thoughts about Florida's black box of a voucher program.

Florida: We’re Number 1! But We Are Also Number 50… What Gives?

Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at several rankings that Florida has received lately, and explains how to separate useful insights from accountabaloney.

Jim Walton gives $500K to defend Arkansas school vouchers from ballot measure

Half a million dollars to protect Arkansas vouchers from any untoward effects of democracy.

'They’re trying to destroy public ed'

Meet Arizona superintendent Curtis Finch, who in an interview with Channel 12 news in Phoenix. He's blunt, and he gets it.

“It didn’t matter. It’s all about creating doubt in the public. That’s all these critics are doing. They’re out to destroy public ed.”

Just Who is Trashing Public Education?

Nancy Flanagan with a reminder of who is coming after public education, and why. Also, the baloney they say on the way.

Should The Success Academy SPRINT Program Be Investigated?

Gary Rubinstein has long followed the shenanigans at Success Academy, and these are extra shady--creating special ed students for fun and profit.

TX: HISD’s Mike Miles Using Texas Tax Dollars to Subsidize Colorado Charter Debt

Mike Miles continues to live down to everyone's low expectations, but at least his charter chain is raking in some money. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the story.

'That parent was me': South Western school board president filed complaint that led to book ban

How one school board president is quietly working hard, but quietly, to work out his culture panic issues.

Loophole allows Minnesota charter schools to award $132 million in contracts without following state anti-corruption rules

Becky Dernbach for Sahan Journal unveils one more style of charter scam. Well, not so much a scam, but a wide open absence of rules.

José Vilson: Good Math Education Is a ‘Civil Right’

Edutopia sent Andrew Boryga to interview the JLV, and the result is an interview about both math and education and what we should aspire to.

It’s Not (Really) About Diversity

Aaron Pallas and Alex Chin dissect the argument that we need to bring back the SAT and ACT because diversity. 

Just What Is Good Writing?

Paul Thomas has been teaching and writing for quite a while. So what exactly is "good" writing, anyway?

States Persistently Fail to Invest Enough in their Public Schools

Yeah, you knew this already, but Jan Resseger has, as usual, done her homework and can back it up with data and analysis.

The Art of Being an Education Guru

Yeah, I know you may not like him, but this Rick Hess interview with a couple of imaginary gurus is still funny, and familiar.

In Praise of Paper

Anne Lutz Fernandez reminds us of "the tech that gets students reading and writing."

Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

Cory Doctorow with another set of depressing insights into why tech is not our friend.

Feel free to join me on substack (because it is free).

More Momwashing For Privatization

The parenting bubble for anti-public ed activism is really expanding. 

Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform has just rolled out the Parent Power Index! It assigns arbitrary values measures three vaguely defined qualities-- choice programs, charter schools, and innovation-- and gives each state a letter grade. There's nothing new being quantified here, just the same old anti-public school, anti-union wine in new parentified wineskins. 

In choicer marketing, "freedom" is out and "parent power" is in.

Maybe it's just an attempt to create some synergy for Betsy DeVos's favorite choice evangelist and American Federation for Children "senior fellow" and his new book about the parent revolution.

But to find someone who's really doubling on momwashing anti-public ed activism, we turn to the American Federation for Children, which is launching a whole new initiative-- Moms on a Mission!

AFC is one more dark money group, probably one of the largest school privatization outfits in the country. It was organized and funded by the DeVos family. It has had a variety of names, including American Education Reform Foundation and Advocates for School Choice, Inc, and has suckled up some other DeVos initiatives like "All Children Matter," a group that was fined for election misconduct in Ohio and Wisconsin.

They're tied to ALEC, the conservative corporate bill mill. They've had a variety of projects, including Ed Newsfeed, a program for planting fake news stories on local media. They're still running Black Minds Matter, School Choice Boyz and Federacion Para Los Ninos. 

Their leadership is a veritable privatizer who's who. Betsy DeVos gave up her chairman of the board spot to go work for Trump. These days the chair is William E. Oberndorfer, who co-founded the Alliance for School Choice, one of the root organizations of AFC with John Walton and has his own foundation that is busy pumping up charters and groups like Jeanne Allen's Center for Education reform and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation).

The board also includes John Kirtley (Florida School Choice Fund, Florida Charter Institute), Kevin Chavous (DFER, New Orleans voucher plan, K12), Rosemarie Nassif (Center for Catholic Education) and Scott Walker. A staff of 49. We could run through the whole crowd, but you get the idea--there's a lot more to AFC than just Betsy DeVos.

Moms on a Mission doesn't have its own tab yet, but AFC announced their launch on May 11 (Mother's Day).  

Across the nation, school choice is opening wide the doors of opportunity for children, thanks to a powerful force: Moms. Parents are the ones who know and love their children best, and moms are often the front line confronting the obstacles that would otherwise hinder opportunities for their little ones.

There's a brief inspirational video. Also, an introduction to some of the moms.

There's Clarice Jackson, an activist from Nebraska who served as Commissioner of African American  Affairs (2021-2024) under Pete Ricketts and Jim Pillen. She has worked with dyslexia organizations and founded Black Literacy Matters in February of 2022. She has a great story about working as a paraprofessional in school and encountering a young girl struggling to read and write, and coming to realize that with an incarcerated mother and "strapped" grandmother, the girl "lacked the help she needed at home." Jackson eventually adopted the girl, and the story is a compelling example of a school dropping the ball. Of course, it's also the story of realizing that someone would have to step in and take over for the actual parents, who could not manage the job because they were overwhelmed by their own circumstances. Not sure how school choice would have helped.

Tera Myers is the Ohio mother of a child with Downs Syndrome. She spoke at the 2020 GOP convention in praise of Donald Trump. Myers is a member of Mansfield Alliance Church and is a "Mentor Mom" at Berean Baptist Church MOPS Program, or Mothers of Preschoolers. She serves as a state and national parent advocate for Education Freedom, the Trump administration's proposed scholarship program, and is a consultant for Washington D.C.-based American Federation for Children. That last part doesn't appear in the Moms on a Mission website.

Holly Terei makes plenty of appearances on Fox News, perhaps because she's the National Director of Teacher Coalition for No Left Turn In Education, where the Georgia mom hopes to see "teachers and parents working together to push against the progressive woke agenda that has infiltrated America’s public schools." NLTE is yet another culture panic group fed by Tucker Carlson; a Florida chapter head single-handedly made his district the country's leader in book challenges.

Becki Uccello is also an activist parent of a child with special needs, which has made her a frequent voice speaking in favor vouchers in Missouri. The former public school teacher used a voucher from the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation to send her daughter with spina bifida to Catholic school (her son did just fine in public school). Herzog is a foundation aimed at trying "catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education so that families and culture flourish."

So once again, some experienced activists coded as moms, their activist bona fides downplayed or erased. There's a definite emphasis on students with special needs, which is an interesting choice given that so much of the choice school world is not available to those students. At the same time, it makes a certain sense because so many parents of students with special needs are (or at least feel) ill-served by public schools. 

Moms on a Mission is just getting on its feet, so it remains to be seen how it figures in AFC's ongoing work in dismantling public education. But if these moms ("moms just like you!") show up in your neighborhood, they aren't there to give public education a hand. 

Something Else AI "Teachers" Can't Do

"Okay, I think I see where you went wrong..."

"Hmm. Can you explain to me why you took this step here...?"

"That's an interesting interpretation, but I think you might have overlooked this..."

There are so many ways in which generative language algorithms (marketed as AI) can't do the work of a teacher, some larger than other.

Some are pretty basic. The notion that AI can create lesson plans only makes sense if you think a good way to do lesson plans would be to have an assistant google the topic and then create a sort-of-summary of what they found.

But other obstacles are fairly huge. 

Certainly there's a version of teaching that looks like this:

Student: Here's an answer.

Teacher: That's wrong. Try again.

Student: How about this?

Teacher: Still wrong. Try again.

For different sorts of content, there's a version like this.

Teacher: Do A, then B, then C, and you will get X.

Student: Um, I got Q somehow.

Teacher: Do A, then B, then C, and you will get X.

Student: I'm not so sure about the B part. Also, I got V this time.

Teacher: Do A, then B, then C, and you will get X.

The technical term for this kind of teaching is "poor" or even "bad." Also, "teaching via Khan Academy." This also applies to new AI-powered versions like Khanmigo, which tries to help by essentially directing you to a video that specifically shows you B. Or you can throw in "special interests" and the AI will "incorporate" references to your favorite hobby.

Part of the work is to try to get inside the students' head. It is not enough to assess whether the student has produced an answer that is right or wrong or sort-of-right, and it's certainly not enough to repeat some version of "Don't be wrong. Be right," over and over again. The job is to figure out where they may have stumbled, to see where they are in the vast territory of content and skills that we are helping them navigate.

Part of the work is watching students struggle, watching the cues that they have hit a rough spot, collecting data that reveals how they are trying to work their way through the material, sorting and sifting the clues into important and unimportant sets. Part of the work is thinking about how the students are thinking. Part of the work is looking at how certain soft intangibles (e.g. the Habits of Mind) play out as the student wrestles with the material. 

Sure, the algorithm can "learn" cues that indicate certain mistakes in thinking (if you looked at 2 x 3 and got 5, you probably added instead of multiplied), but the more complex the task, the more varied the outcomes, and the more varied and unpredictable the outcome, the less capable AI is of dealing with it (e.g. how does Hamlet's character arc reflect his relationship with death). Does the student show an attempt to really come to grips with the materials, or are they just spitting out something that the AI would recognize as correct?

It all makes a difference. Is the student soooooo close, or just flailing blindly? Is the student really trying, or just coasting? Is the student making operational errors, or operating with flawed fundamentals? Part of the work is to try to assess the student process, but AI can only deal with the result, and the result that the student produces is often the least critical part of the learning process. 

For young humans, the best learning requires relationship with another actual human being. Eventually humans learn to teach themselves, but that comes later. Until that day, small humans need interaction with another human, some being who can do more than simply present the "right" answer over and over again. 

The Freedom Foundation Assault On Unions

The Freedom Foundation wants you, public school teachers, to come to their  second annual Teacher Freedom Summit this summer. July 8-10 in Downtown Denver. 400 teachers for 3 days. Training, hotel, F&B included. And it's free! You just have to apply!

Who are these folks, and what do they want? The blurb on their website is pretty clear:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN  started giving out an award in his name in 2017. 

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania). 

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter.  The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts. 

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions. Only, of course, because of their deep and altruistic concern for those teachers' freedoms, and not because they were hoping to defund and defang unions as a source of support for Democrats. Their website boasts of how many members and how much money they have taken from the unions.

This is an outfit that can afford to put up 400 teachers in downtown Denver, plus "an amazing lineup of speakers and panels" that will cover topics such as "JANUS rights, running an opt-out campaign, standing up to union bullying, decertifying your school district, and so much more." 

We are equipping public school teachers with the tools they need to counter the tactics used by the NEA and AFT to bring the socialist dogma of their leadership into our children’s classrooms.

What could be more inspirational than a bunch of rich people spending a whole lot of money to convince not-so-rich workers to give up their union support and protection so that the rich people don't have to face political opposition. Lord knows I've had plenty of beefs with the union over the years, but this convoluted plan to keep workers from contributing to the Democratic party is not the way to go. You could always, I don't know, convince workers that your policies and candidates are worth supporting. 

These plans always remind me of that scene in every vampire movie, where some poor guy is holding off the vampire with a crucifix, and the vampire soothingly tells him, "Just put that down. You'll be perfectly safe without it, I promise." Listening to the bloodsucker is always a bad idea.

OK: Getting On The Satan Chaplain Train

The push for school chaplains is moving across the country, pushed by the National School Chaplain Association, a group that pretty clearly hopes school chaplains will be a means of putting a particular brand of Christianity in schools. 

So far the movement's two big wins are in Texas and Florida, where the legislatures actually passed a law allowing anyone who wants to call themselves a chaplain to get into schools that set up the chaplain post. In Texas, the big pushback came from actual professional chaplains, and so far, one charter school has decided to bring in a "chaplain," because a real chaplain has actual training, sometimes specialized, and follows a set of professional ethics and is not, in fact, just some untrained true believer who thinks Jesus wants him to go recruit some children. In fact, several states have said no to the amateur hour first-amendment-busting bill.

Florida also passed a "chaplain" law, and that led to a predictable next step, which was for the Satanic Temple to announce that they would also be offering chaplains, with said announcement followed by Governor Ron DeSantis declaring that he couldn't read the plain English of the law that he would forbid any such thing to happen. 

The law is written to avoid any obvious First Amendment violation; in fact, it doesn't even require the "chaplain" to have a religious affiliation. But never mind-- DeSantis will tell you what is and is not a legitimate religion.

Well, if Texas and Florida are going galumphing off into far right field, you know Oklahoma will be close behind.

So here comes SB 36, passed through the House and now facing the Senate. The bill is a step up from the versions in Texas and Florida and some other states by virtue of some amendments to the bill. It requires the "chaplain" to have some sort of "ecclesiastical endorsement from their faith group" indicating they are an "ordained minister or member in good standing." It even requires them to have a bachelor's degree and some graduate work. The House also added a "no proselytizing" clause. 

None of this really addresses the issue that chaplains are not trained as child mental health professionals. Nor does it make it any less a violation of the First Amendment.

Critics have noted that the bill has one particular religion in mind. But you know some other group is cued up and ready to go. And Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters has come out swinging.

Let me be crystal clear: Satanists are not welcome in Oklahoma schools, but they are welcome to go to hell.

Legislators have also announced their inability to read and their misunderstanding of the Constitution opposition to the Satanic Temple. SB 36 simply wouldn't invite the Satanic Temple to send ministers to school children, said one group. 

Instead, it gives permission for the local school boards to decide whether to implement a chaplain program, leaving the decision to the duly elected school board members who represent their community’s values. Additionally, parents can decide whether or not to let their child participate in the program.

All true, but it skips over the part where the Constitution forbids discriminating against an employer on religious grounds. This is not news. The Good News Club, a program of the Child Evangelism Fellowship way back in 2001 won its case before SCOTUS that it must be allowed to have an after school club like any other group. And that was followed by the Satanic Temple winning cases to have its own after school Satan club in districts, because the First Amendment is clear on not allowing the government to pick and choose which religions are okay.

Dudebro Walters is not a dummy. He most certainly knows all this (he was an AP history teacher). But he's got an audience to play to. So here he is on Fox News, sitting in an office, playing the rightwing hits.

Asked to respond to the Satanic Temple's stated intention to expose "harmful pseudo-scientific practices in mental health care," Walters says 

I am not surprised that people who worship Satan lie. They are liars. What they are trying to do in worshipping Satan is ruin the lives of children, undermine the very Judeo-Christian values of this country and destroy our schools.

The Satanic Temple has always been pretty clear that they do not worship Satan, but are on a mission to push back against those with a theocratic bent. Walters declares 

Satanism is not a religion and we will not allow them in our school. Our bill will not allow Satanists into our schools. It will only allow religions, religions that we have protected in our country since the outset.

Sooo much baloney here. The IRS says that the Satanic Temple is a religion. And if we're going to have state officials going around declaring what is and is not a real religion, there is all sorts of bad trouble ahead. This has been a tough line for us to draw as a country, because "since the outset," we have not protected all religions. The Puritans of Massachusetts used to banish or execute folks of different religions-- and I'm not talking about the Salem witch trials, but folks like Mary Dyer, who was executed in Boston for being a Quaker who wouldn't stay properly banished. Or we could talk about when the Baptists had a fun nickname for the Catholic Church and/or the Pope-- the whore of Babylon.

"Satanists want to destroy families, want to destroy kids' lives," Walters continues. He gets out the chaplain talking point that "we've had chaplains in the military, chaplains in Congress" (trained professionals, but, you know, chaplains) and then he pivots to another point.

Under President Trump, you didn't see the Satanists believing they could actually inject themselves into schools, but under President Biden, he has really cleared the way where they feel very emboldened to try to get in there and influence our kids and they are not going to send our kids to hell.

Well, one of the more recent Satanic Temple victories came courtesy of a Trump-appointed judge. But in fact the first round attempts to launch After School Satan Clubs all came when Trump was President, including the first successful attempt in Tacoma, WA. If Walters were serious about getting his facts straight and not just working on his national profile, he could have discovered this by looking at Wikipedia. 

And that religious tax exempt status that the Satanic Temple got from the IRS? That happened in 2019, under President Trump. TST had previously rejected the idea of pursuing such status, but when President Trump signed the "religious freedom" executive order in 2017, church president Lucien Greaves told members, “As ‘the religious’ are increasingly gaining ground as a privileged class, we must ensure that this privilege is available to all, and that superstition doesn’t gain exclusive rights over non-theistic religions or non-belief."

And if you're still wondering which religions the bill is aimed at, Walters has more

We want the influence of Christian ministers. We understand that Judeo-Christian values were the foundation of this country. In the 1960s the Supreme Court weaponized the federal government against Christians. We have allowed our schools to be state-sponsored centers of atheism. 

This fits with the other Dominionist baloney that Walters has espoused, his stated intent to elevate and center one particular brand of Christianity. The same problem keeps tripping these folks up-- that darn First Amendment. You can't write laws that specify that only one brand of Christianity is to be elevated, so you say "religion" when you really mean "my preferred religion." But you're stuck with the language you have, that "religion," means that all brand of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Buddhism and the Satanic Temple all get to play.

Folks like Walters only have a couple of choices for a fix. Either you officially codify your brand of faith into law, giving it protection and support. Or you leave the code wide for "religion," but you install an official government agency to declare which religions are "real" and may have the full benefit of the law.

Either of these options should terrify Americans, both those with the Christian faith and those outside of it. Walters knows better, and the fact that he's willing to play these games, presumably because he wants power and attention on a greater stage, marks him as a person not remotely serious enough to have any position of authority. 

P.S. Also in the news this week, an Oklahoma man has been indicted after he traveled to Salem with a pipe bomb to blow up the Satanic Temple.