Scenes from the Class Struggle

, Malcolm A. Kline, Leave a comment

The class struggle is alive and well on campus from kindergarten through college, in so many ways.

Republicans Need Not Apply

President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel will deliver the commencement address at George Washington University. The commander-in-chief himself and his attorney general Eric Holder already spoke at GWU in March.

You have to go back a long way to find a Bush Administration official given such easy access to the northwest Washington, D. C. campus. The neighborhood that the university is in is named, appropriately enough, Foggy Bottom.

By the way, the faculty at GWU voted to cut the course requirement for graduation in half. That should increase the turnout for speakers like Rahm Emanuel.

Cratering Economy’s Silver Lining

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on April 3, 2009 that donations to universities are down 32% from the last school year.

Gender-Bending Grade Schools

Gone are the days of boys and girls clubs, apparently, at least the innocuous types some of us remember. “In Colorado last year, an 8-year-old boy said he wanted to become a girl,” Jeff Johnston of Focus on the Family said in an interview that appears this month. “His parents and school administrators were coached by ‘Trans-Youth Family Advocates.’”

“They told his fellow students that ‘John’ was now ‘Jane,’ and ‘Jane’ would have separate bathroom facilities.” Focus on the Family is based in Colorado.

“I was working and living in Baltimore, and I learned that the local school district used the book Beyond the Binary: A Toolkit for Gender Identity Activism in Schools to train teachers in ‘diversity,’” Johnston remembers of his first encounter with this peculiar branch of public education. “Gender is changeable from one day to the next, they’re told, and comes in an infinite number of varieties.”

Nor is this effort confined to the classroom. “There’s a serious effort to discredit ‘Gender Identity Disorder (GID)—the traditional diagnosis of someone who rejects his or her birth biological sex and ‘feels’ he or she is the other gender,” Johnston claimed in an interview with Focus on the Family’s monthly magazine, Citizen. “Activists want to strike GID from the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

“If that happens, we can expect more children’s hospitals to do what the one in Boston has done since 2007—giving GID children as young as 7 puberty-blocking hormones, prescribing opposite-sex hormones as they grow and then performing what’s called ‘sexual reassignment surgery’ as they reach adulthood.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.