Cali Groups Succeed in Sexualizing Historical Figures in Kids' Textbooks
Almost immediately after Donald Trump was elected as president in November of 2016, some of the more radical elements of the leftist state of California started talking about secession.
The more Americans learn about California, though, they might be more willing to show the state to the door.
Case in point was a vote by the California Board of Education in November to revise textbook materials to include explicit references to the sex lives of historical figures – even for children as young as fourth grade.
According to the reliably liberal Time magazine, the vote was a “milestone” that capped a six-year struggle to include gay and lesbian contributions to the history of the United States.
“Advocates say that this puts the LGBT community on equal footing with other groups that kids in California already learn about, as students study the history of black Americans and farm laborers, women suffragists and Holocaust survivors,” Time reports.
Yeah, well maybe.
Or maybe it’s just a sign that a wealthy, entrenched special interest group like the organized homosexual movement in California has reached the point of political power where it is able to dictate what is taught to children in schools.
And it can do this regardless of whether parents like it or not; whether the historical subjects would approve of not; and even whether it’s true or not.
Check out this Fox News “America’s Newsroom” piece posted to YouTube on Dec. 26.
It’s all part of a California law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2011 called the FAIR Act, which requires for “Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful” representation of sexual minorities in the state’s history textbooks. And “inclusive” apparently means including what physical means of sexual gratification they might have enjoyed with their bodies, regardless of whether it was relevant to their body of work.
If an academic concept can be considered obscene, this would be it.
As the American Spectator noted in a Jan. 5 piece, the misnamed California Board of Education is requiring history textbooks to label some historical figures as homosexual even when the evidence for it is thin.
It cited a 1990s incident when “an early textbook activist waved a huge rainbow flag, shouting Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Alexander Hamilton, and Eleanor Roosevelt were all gay. Based on correspondence between Gen. George Washington and Marquis de Lafayette, he declared: ‘The father of our country may have been its first queen.'”
Whatever else that might be — polemic, rabble-rousing, outright lunacy — it’s not history as historians understand the subject.
And some publishers understand it too.
“Several Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) books didn’t meet California reviewers’ requests for explicit references,” the American Spectator noted. “The publisher’s middle-school text failed to sexualize historical figures Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and James Buchanan, for example. “
Hard as it might be to believe, a board of education in the United States is not just tolerating textbook discussion of the sexual lives of historical figures – but actually requiring it.
In a country with students that regularly trail internationally in academic performance, the liberal demagogues of California have determined it’s just as important to know what went on between the sheets for literary luminaries like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as for what they wrote on sheets of paper.
Houghton Mifflin tried to resist. It agreed that there have been substantial contributions to American history by those who don’t conform to sexual norms, but argued that “the terms lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer are contemporary terms that may not map well on past lives and experiences.”
Well, there’s that.
There’s also the distinct possibility that modern assumptions about the sex lives of historical recluses like Dickinson are the product of wishful thinking (fantasies?) of politicized educrats and gay activists.
The bottom line though is this: The politicization of even the most private aspects of human life is being exploited to serve a liberal agenda here, and the power of the state is taking over what should be parents’ most fundamental lessons to teach their children.
The American Spectator summed it up:
“Not just in California but nationwide, curriculum supervisors at all levels, by law or partiality, won’t consider volumes unless they align to multicultural premises. Old-style textbooks have been taken out of print. As a result, teachers and parents are finding it close to impossible to avoid lessons saturated in identity politics.”
If this is the future the once-Golden State is offering, they can leave any day now.
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