Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe showed his true colors in his last debate with Republican Glenn Youngkin by telling the truth about his position on education. He said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
After the firestorm of criticism that followed McAuliffe’s statement, The Washington Post attempted to throw him a lifeline. Last week it published an op-ed entitled “Parents Claim They Have the Right to Shape Their Kids’ School Curriculum. They don’t.” It affirmed that concerned parents’ only option is to buy their kids’ way out of toxic public schools.
It explained: “Courts have found that parents have great authority when it comes to deciding how to raise and educate their children. This right, however, does not mean that public schools must cater to parents’ individual ideas about education. Parents can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools.”
Thus, for the Post, if a Virginia mother does not wish to have her daughter’s public school push pedophilia, that amounts to demanding the school “cater” to her “individual ideas about education.” But rest easy, Virginia parents—like a 13th century vassal, you can purchase a dispensation from your lords if you wish to avoid the despoliation of your daughters.
McAuliffe’s educational philosophy is akin to a doit de seigneur (“the lord’s right”) over school children. In medieval times, a lord (seigneur) was the owner of his vassals’ property. The lord’s rights even extended to control over his vassals’ children, including to decide whom they would marry. If a vassal’s daughter was to be married, on the night of the marriage his lord had the right (droit) to have sexual relations with her before she slept with her husband. The vassal (or the new husband) could save her from this fate by paying a monetary tribute to the lord.
Striking a similar pose, McAuliffe claims he owns the right to dictate to his vassals, the parents of school-aged children, just how those children will be educated indoctrinated. Like 13th century vassals, under Lord McAuliffe’s plan the parents are to have no say in the matter, unless they comply with the Post’s suggestion and purchase a dispensation by paying private school tuition while still sending money to their lords in the form of taxes to fund the public schools.
McAuliffe’s attempt to usurp parents’ roles is not new in leftist circles or those of the Democrat Party (please excuse the redundancy). Just ask the author of “It Takes A Village.” And remember this?
That is Melissa Perry promoting her show on MSNBC. Like McAuliffe, she rejected the archaic idea that “kids belong to their parents” and instead urged adopting “a very collective notion” to “recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
There is no doubt that Lord McAuliffe seeks to implement Perry’s “collective notion” that children belong to the state, not to their parents, and that he is aided and abetted by other prominent Democrats and government officials.
In an interview after the debate, McAuliffe doubled down on his view that parents’ input is irrelevant: “Listen, we have a board of ed working with the local school boards to determine the curriculum for our schools. You don’t want parents coming in in every different school jurisdiction saying, ‘This is what should be taught here’ and, ‘This is what should be taught there.’” In other words, parents, keep your mouths shut.
The Biden administration has made clear that they are allies in Democrats’ “collective” (to use Perry’s word) war against parents. For example, after coordinating with the White House, Attorney General Merrick Garland commanded the FBI to launch an investigation with U.S. attorneys and “federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders” of the “terrorist” parents who dared protest, even loudly and vehemently, against school boards that are indoctrinating children with their porn and leftist propaganda.
Barack Obama himself demagogued the issue at a McAuliffe rally last Saturday. For him, a distraught father’s outrage over his eighth-grade daughter’s alleged rape and sodomization is just “fake outrage.” Parents who protest racist teachings, pornography, and pedophilia are just actors in “phony, trumped-up culture wars.”
Don’t forget the context of McAuliffe’s proclamation during the debate. McAuliffe made his comments after Youngkin noted that when McAuliffe was governor, he had vetoed a bill that would have required schools to notify parents if their child’s assigned materials included “sexually explicit materials.” Although reasonable people could disagree about whether the bill was over-broad, that is not the argument McAuliffe made. Instead, he was perfectly candid about the role of parents if he is elected governor: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.”
Just to be clear about what kind of books McAuliffe does not want to hear parents protesting, the parents at the Fairfax County School Board meeting whom Youngkin referenced were not objecting to “Canterbury Tales,” “Madame Bovary,” or Shakespeare, as some have contended. Some of the books parents were protesting included “Gender Queer,” “Lawn Boy,” and other books with graphic descriptions of violent sex, pedophilia, and such things as a fourth-grade boy performing oral sex on an adult man. They also include detailed illustrations of pedophilia, fellatio, sex toys, masturbation, and violent nudity.
The Fairfax County School Board cut off the microphone of one mother, Stacy Langdon, as she was objecting to the inclusion of such trash in her school’s library. They are so vile that as Langdon read passages and showed illustrations to the school board, the board president interrupted to complain, “There’s children here.” Exactly.
Like the school board members, McAuliffe does not think Langdon’s objections are worth being heard. Virginians will tell us on November 2 if they agree with McAuliffe and wish to grant him an educational droit de seigneur or if they want concerned parents’ voices to matter.
