2016 | Week of April 11 | #1146

Parents and grandparents. Today’s commentary is for you—especially if you have children or grandchildren in Wisconsin’s public schools.

First, this Friday, April 15, is recognized in most Wisconsin middle and senior-high schools as “Day of Silence.” This event, sponsored and pushed annually and nationally by the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network and by the local Gay-Straight Alliances in the schools, is nothing more than a raw promotion of and attempt to get sympathy for homosexuality and transgenderism in our public schools.  Ostensibly the day is about bringing attention to, and I’m quoting from the Day of Silence website, “anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools.”

While I am sure some of that takes place still in schools, I also know that the students identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender aren’t the only ones being subjected to the “name-calling, bullying and harassment” in our schools. What if every group subjected to this type of behavior, including Christians, had its own “day of silence”? Of course that won’t happen primarily because no other group already has so much sympathy, so much money backing its national groups, so much legal protection and more.

Fortunately, there is a bit of a counter to “Day of Silence” available for students who want to respectfully not be silent but rather actually talk about important issues with their fellow students.  “Day of Dialogue,” according to the website is a “free-speech initiative that creates a safe place for public school students to exercise their religious freedoms and express their deeply held Christian beliefs in a loving and respectful manner,” especially on issues such as marriage and sexuality. This year’s “Day of Dialogue” is this Thursday, April 14. For more information on this “Day of Dialogue,” visit dayofdialogue.com.

You can be sure that this year’s “Day of Silence” in many places, including right here in our Wisconsin schools, will have a heavy emphasis on students who identify as “transgendered.” That’s the big push right now. Now that the US Supreme Court has waved its magic wand and claimed that people of the same-sex can legally marry everywhere in the country, the goal is now to normalize and mainstream the incredible fiction that sex is not binary but rather a continuum and able to be changed to fit whatever one wants it to be or whatever a person “feels” he or she really is.

Proof? For starters we have a biological girl who ran for Prom King this past weekend at Tremper High School in Kenosha. The district originally told the student that she could run as Prom Queen but not Prom King because she wasn’t a biological male. Because of tantrums and threats from a few people, the district administration, of course, backed down and allowed this girl who would be king to run—and run she did.

Meanwhile in Eau Claire, last Monday the school board passed a policy that adds “gender identity” and “gender expression” to its growing list of protected classes of students. While the words “restrooms” or “locker rooms” aren’t mentioned anywhere in the policy, the wording of the policy itself makes it very clear that in order to comply with the policy, some pretty drastic changes, including restroom and locker room use, sports participation and more, must be implemented.

And here’s the clincher. Per the policy, the Superintendent gets to make whatever rules and regulations she wants to in order to implement the policy—and essentially the parents and the taxpayers are cut out from input on those rules and regulations. You can be sure very soon boys who claim to “identify as” a girl will be allowed access to the girls’ restrooms and locker rooms and vice versa.

Transgender stories are popping up everywhere—in news stories, on tv shows, in sports, and in our public schools.  With this push, I am sure that this year’s Day of Silence will prominently feature students who are confused about their gender. Unfortunately, Day of Silence and policies that promote and protect gender-confused young people are doing nothing to help them—and are actually complicit in hurting them.

Parents, grandparents—what will you say to your sons and daughters this week about “day of silence”? About “day of dialogue”? What will you do next year about where you send your children to school? Now’s the time to answer those questions.

This is Julaine Appling for Wisconsin Family Council reminding you the prophet Hosea said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”