Innocence is Not a Culture War Casualty–It is the Front Line

Trump’s administration moved quickly to help protect female athletes and keep biological males out of women’s sports. He has used all the power that he has to threaten federal funding to schools that continue to allow these nonsensical actions and earlier this month he sued California to force action on this issue. But biological men playing in girls’ sports is only one front on the multifaceted threat now facing our children. Bending biological reality to conform to the gender ideology is merely the tip of the iceberg that our innocent kids are facing, and the unfortunate reality is that their innocence is being forcefully stripped from them at ever decreasing ages. While sports are flashy and command headlines, the quiet indoctrination is happening in the classrooms, not just the locker rooms. We are facing moral erosion through the systems that were once erected to help our children and are now being used to proffer an ideology that will sacrifice our children’s innocence.

The recent disputes over curriculum have exposed the fact that schools are no longer passive educational institutions and thus are no longer neutral in their ideological stances. This is relatively unsurprising given the progressive leanings of our college system; those progressively educated college graduates are taking their ideas back to their schools and are passing along the ideology. What used to be reading, writing, and arithmetic has now been slowly transitioned into a complex framework of teaching on race, gender, and power. The progressive model necessarily subsumes the role of the parent to the educational “expert” whose curriculum is now guided by political goals and not developmental needs. Where we once curated curriculum to the student to meet them at their innocence, we now worry more about how to educate them in their “true” identity. Instead of asking if their soul is ready for weighty concepts, it is instead more important to make graphic sex books available to 5^th graders. The unfortunate outcome for far too many children is confusion and by default the constant erosion of their innocence. The frightening aspect to this curriculum is that it is instead portrayed as neutral, hidden behind benign sounding words like health, inclusivity, or the latest fad of Social and Emotional Learning.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has its origins in the 1960’s and its innocuous beginnings were filled with good intent. With DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) becoming increasingly unpopular, in 2019 the concept of Transformative Social and Emotional Learning co-opted the original intent of SEL and instead used SEL as a trojan horse to bring in the racial and social ideologies promulgated by critical race theory. The focus of Transformative SEL is on critically examining root causes of inequity and identity politics which sounds remarkably just like DEI and critical race theory. SEL used to mean teaching empathy, self-regulation, and emotional vocabulary but now it is a vehicle to teach inequity, critique norms, and question institutional bias. Under the auspices of soft skills, children are becoming fluent in adult ideologies but strangers to their own innocence. SEL is not just asking kids to reflect, it is asking them to redefine.

It is not just the girls that are collateral in this gender warfare, boys are just as susceptible to the emotional and spiritual confusion brought about by these ideas. Boys are now asked, and taught, to question their masculinity and patriarchy before they even have a chance to understand it. They are taught that strength is oppressive and that their leadership is dangerous. This is not the formation of virtue but rather the systemic fragmentation of identity. Early exposure to sexualized content is damaging to both boys and girls. And our schools are demanding they be allowed to keep that content available, whether it is in the form of curriculum, books, after school activities, or special events. This is not just exposure, it is a spiritual and emotional violation that parents are told to either ignore or stay out of thus forcing their participation in this moral confusion.

This is far deeper than a culture war. This is not just political action or minor differences of opinion on how to teach children. We can no longer outsource the moral teaching of our children to the public school system in the ignorant hopes that the schools will remain neutral. As parents, we must demand accountability and transparency and not just wait for some other parent to do so. Parents must take control of the school boards, run for school board, organize parental audits, volunteer in the classroom, get to know the teachers and your children’s friends’ parents, and scrutinize reading lists and lesson plans. The time for passive actions and silent battles has long passed us by. This goes far deeper than political action and instead demands that each parent be accountable for the moral stewardship of their child’s future. Our children should never have been dragged into a culture war, but now that they are, it is the front line that parents from all sides of the political aisle should come together and circle around our wagons. Children are now being used as chess pieces in a progressive game where no one wins, and innocence is lost. A child’s innocence does not last forever, it is rare and pure, and it should be protected for as long as it can be, not sacrificed ruthlessly for an ideological gain.