Throughout most of the history of Western civilization, it's been presumed that parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit. Barring cases of abuse, it is up to parents how their children should be educated, what they should eat, what they should wear, and what social trends they should be exposed to. Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I, Dowager-Empress of Chappaqua, was notorious for (among many other things) the quote, "It takes a village to raise a child."
That is, of course, wrong. It takes a family to raise a child.
But some groups want to step between parents and children. One of them, the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), is even taxpayer-funded, and they are pushing materials out to Wisconsin daycare centers that are not only pushing gender ideology to toddlers — but also overt racism.
“It’s okay to wonder: Am I a girl? Am I a boy? Am I both? Am I neither?” says one page of Being You: A First Conversation about Gender, a board book in the kit sent to daycares that parent children as young as four weeks old. “Today I feel like a boy!” exclaims one character in the book by Megan Madison, Jessica Ralli, and Anne/Andy [sic] Passchier, a “nonbinary” illustrator who describes herself as “very queer.”
The kit worth approximately $600 came from the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), according to a daycare owner who received one, Elise Wiegert, co-owner of Little Rainbows daycare in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Who the hell thinks this is appropriate for toddlers? No organization that accepts government funding has any business promoting anything like this to other people's kids. And the material itself is pretty shocking. For example, one of the books pushes some pretty radical gender ideology:
Being You further tells babies: “Some babies grow into a different gender than the one that grown-ups called them … Some people are girls. Some people are boys. Some people are neither. Some people are both.”
It also tells tiny children, “For a long time, many people have said and believed untrue things like: ‘You are either a boy or a girl’ … People who work together to change unfair rules about gender are called feminists.” The board book approvingly depicts an activist child changing a sign on a girl’s bathroom to say “All gender” instead of “Girls.”
Did you get that? Babies and tiny children. There's an old saying, "Give me the boy, and I'll give you the man," implying that ideas inculcated into the very young are difficult, if not impossible, to shift later, and that's clearly what WECA is aiming to do.
But it gets worse — oh, it gets much worse. WECA also indulges itself in racist accusations.
Another book in the kit, by Madison, Ralli, and illustrator Isabel Roxas, is titled Our Skin. It tells babies and toddlers, “A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else.”
Later, it tells small children, “Racism can be a way we’ve done things for a long time, like how there aren’t as many books written about people of color.” It positively depicts people participating in a Black Lives Matter protest.
This is racist. That's how principles work. If it's wrong to judge a "person of color" based on their skin tone, then it's wrong to judge anyone else, of any color, by their skin tone. End of discussion, full stop. And as WECA is a taxpayer-funded organization, they are arguably in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans the promotion of racially divisive claims. These are racially divisive claims. Nothing but. Racism has no place in public education, there is no place for it in taxpayer-funded preschool literature, and there is no place for it in America.
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It's not the material that is the worst part of all this, either. It's the target. These books are clearly written for preschoolers, illustrated for preschoolers, and aimed at, frankly, brainwashing preschoolers. It's unconscionable; it's unforgivable.
Look, if an 18-year-old boy or girl wants to seek out this kind of information, we may well think of it as ill-advised — but our legal system has determined that an 18-year-old is an adult, unless, that is, he, she, it, they, zem, or zoop wants to drink a beer or buy a handgun. But that young person is within their rights, and there will surely be advocacy groups that will cater to such young skulls full of mush.
But toddlers? Not only no, but hell no. As Pink Floyd said so eloquently, "Teacher, leave them kids alone."
