Barack Obama put politics ahead of fundamental parental concerns and tried gaslighting Virginia voters about what’s happening in their own backyards.
This article displays blurred explicit pictures and descriptions of sexual activity from books offered to children in public schools.
Over the weekend, former President Barack Obama dismissed conservative media and Virginia parents as peddling “fake outrage” over recent scandals involving the state’s public schools.
“We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media’s pedals to juice their ratings,” Obama said while campaigning for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, adding: “Instead of stoking anger aimed at school boards and administrators, who are just trying to keep our kids safe,… we should be making it easier for teachers and schools to give our kids the world-class education they deserve, and [to do so] safely while they are in the classroom.”
Obama’s remarks come on the heels of a string of controversies involving Virginia public schools: A high school freshman allegedly sodomized in the school bathroom by a “skirt-wearing male student” in a “gender fluid” bathroom. A subsequent cover-up by the school board, whose superintendent lied about the incident while the board was trying to pass a new transgender policy. The transferring of the suspect to another school, where he allegedly committed a second sexual assault less than five months later. Child porn and pedophilia in public school libraries. Shocking Alexandria school violence.
Indeed, the many controversies involving Virginia public schools were enough trigger the resignation of Loudoun County School Board member Beth Barts, an investigation by the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, and an admission by Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler that they “failed to provide” a “safe, welcoming, and affirming environment.” The events were also enough to cause enrollment in Fairfax County’s public schools, one of the most sought-after school districts in 2019, to fall by more than 10,000 students since the start of the lockdowns.
Most recently, they were explicit enough to be banned from being aired on Virginia TV.
Too Explicit for 11 p.m. Virginia TV
After Stacy Langton, a mother of a student at Fairfax County Public Schools, complained to her local school board about books she found in the high school library, Independent Women’s Voice produced a TV advertisement exposing some of that content. The goal was to raise awareness about the material available to young teenagers in schools.
The content we found inside one of these books, “Gender Queer,” a memoir by Maia Kobabe, featured illustrations of a “nonbinary and asexual” individual performing oral sex on a male, “vagina slime,” “hip thrusting,” and “a massive painful boner that lasted all day.”
The ad was rejected as too explicit to run during the 11 p.m. hour on TV in Virginia. Some stations are willing to run the ad with the graphic images blurred, but others think even the blurred images are too offensive. Understandably so.
Parents Push Back
As Carrie Lukas, vice president of Independent Women’s Voice and a Virginia mom of five asked, “Why are our schools so much less protective about what high school students, as young as 14, are exposed to than TV stations catering to adults?”
Virginia state law explicitly states that “a parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.” When government officials and schools are working overtime to take away that right, to make sure that people—including many parents—don’t know what’s actually happening in their children’s schools, parents have an obligation to speak up.
But at the behest of the nation’s largest school board association, President Biden’s Justice Department labeled these parents potential “domestic terrorists.” McAuliffe says he doesn’t think parents “should be telling schools what they should teach.” And Obama suggests parental outrage over these instances is “fake.”
As a parent and a former president, Obama should empathize with the father whose daughter was allegedly raped, the parents whose children are getting beat up and exposed to pornography in school, and the children who have suffered irreversible learning loss from lockdowns. Instead, he put politics ahead of fundamental parental concerns and tried gaslighting Virginia voters about what’s happening in their own backyards.
While campaigning for Democrats in the state, Obama went so far as to accuse Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin of concentrating on controversial educational issues instead of “serious problems that affect serious people.” Yes—because no serious person would complain about unserious problems such as severe learning loss, violence, exposing children to pornography, and child rape.
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