Engraving after Pieter Breughel the Elder, 1556. Caption translated from German "Even if the ass travels to school to learn, as a horse he will not return’’.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Beautiful as Connecticut is in spring, the state will remain a target-rich environment for the political action committee whose formation was reported by the Connecticut Mirror last week: Parents Against Stupid Stuff.
After all, even as Parents Against Stupid Stuff was being announced, the state Senate voted to qualify strikers for unemployment benefits, and Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, leader of the extreme left majority in the Senate, thought it was wonderful. "Workers and employers are hardly ever equal in bargaining power," Looney said. "The scales always tilt on the side of the employer, who has greater resources."
But somehow it doesn't work that way when state government is the employer. Even now Mooney and his extreme-left colleagues in the General Assembly are preparing to approve another master contract with the state employee unions that will give the store away, with bonuses on top of raises totaling as much as 15 percent. The state law authorizing state employee union contracts to nullify freedom-of-information law will remain in force, signifying again that the power in state government's labor relations does not rest with management -- that there is no management at all because the government employee unions constitute the Democratic Party's political army.
Parents Against Stupid Stuff has been started by an investment-fund manager from Stamford, Sean Fieler, who says it will focus on issues arising from what is called the "culture war," particularly sexually explicit curriculum material in public schools, participation of transgender athletes in female sports, and critical race theory.
Exactly how much sexually explicit material is being used in the schools and with what age groups isn't clear, in large part because school administrations refuse to come clean about it, as they have refused in recent incidents in Enfield and Hartford.
Transgender interference in Connecticut high-school girls cross-country competition was recently a national scandal, but most people, scared of being called some kind of a "phobe," won't summon the courage to protest it until it hampers the University of Connecticut's women's basketball team.
As for critical race theory, while there is no evidence that it is being taught outside of colleges, lower education in the state is insinuating racial issues into what it calls "social-emotional learning," which is displacing ordinary academic teaching.
So these are fair issues, especially in regard to what is age-appropriate for sexual topics in school. Should kindergarteners and other very young students be getting briefings on transgenderism, as has been alleged and not denied in Hartford? The controversy about Florida's new law restricting sexual topics to Grades 4 and above -- misrepresented as the "Don't Say Gay" law -- arises from leftist demagoguery.
Fieler hopes to raise a million dollars for Parents Against Stupid Stuff to spend criticizing Gov. Ned Lamont for his position on these issues as the governor campaigns for re-election. But Lamont is not really a champion of transgenderism, critical race theory or "social-emotional learning." Rather, he is evasive, wanting to leave those issues to local school boards.
Lamont's likely Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, seems not to want to talk about those issues any more than the governor does, though in a radio interview last week, without taking a position on policy, Stefanowski acknowledged transgenderism's unfairness in women's sports.
"Local option" as a policy on human rights is a dodge, and local education in Connecticut is already so full of state mandates that one more won't violate any sacred principle.
For many decades slavery and then racial segregation were "local option" policies. Title IX of the 1972 civil rights act has been construed as prohibiting "local option" in institutional sports and requiring equal opportunity for women. The presumption has been that women must have their own sports programs because men generally are stronger and bigger and most women cannot fully compete with them.
Denying gender differences in physique and letting biological males compete against females in institutional sports, as Connecticut law requires, effectively repeals Title IX. Maybe Parents Against Stupid Stuff can give candidates the courage to acknowledge and do something about this stupidity.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
