Rocky Horror Department of Education

Posted on | May 13, 2016 | 55 Comments

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
— Barack Obama, Oct. 30, 2008

Whatever you say, you can’t say America had no warning about this:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

(Never mind whether their “gender identity” matches their genitalia or their chromosomes. Ignore what you learn in biology class, kids.)

A letter to school districts will go out Friday, adding to a highly charged debate over transgender rights in the middle of the administration’s legal fight with North Carolina over the issue. The declaration — signed by Justice and Education department officials — will describe what schools should do to ensure that none of their students are discriminated against.
It does not have the force of law, but it contains an implicit threat: Schools that do not abide by the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law could face lawsuits or a loss of federal aid.

(Transgender totalitarianism, in other words.)

The move is certain to draw fresh criticism, particularly from Republicans, that the federal government is wading into local matters and imposing its own values on communities across the country that may not agree. It represents the latest example of the Obama administration using a combination of policies, lawsuits and public statements to change the civil rights landscape for gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people.
After supporting the rights of gay people to marry, allowing them to serve openly in the military and prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against them, the administration is wading into the battle over bathrooms and siding with transgender people.
“No student should ever have to go through the experience of feeling unwelcome at school or on a college campus,” John B. King Jr., the secretary of the Department of Education, said in a statement. “We must ensure that our young people know that whoever they are or wherever they come from, they have the opportunity to get a great education in an environment free from discrimination, harassment and violence.”

(Via Memeorandum.) How did we get here? You have to go back to 1977, when the city of Miami passed an ordinance forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and Anita Bryant publicly opposed it. Bryant was a popular singer (her song “Paper Roses” hit No. 5 on the charts in 1960) who subsequently became famous as the celebrity spokeswoman for the Florida citrus industry. Her opposition to gay rights resulted in Bryant being demonized by the Left, but her Save Our Children campaign was prescient in recognizing that activists were using dishonest claims of “discrimination” to normalize abnormal behavior.

The question, viewed from a legal and political standpoint, exposed a widespread confusion between tolerance (most people don’t want to be bullies or bigots) and the far more radical concept of sexual “rights” advanced by gay activists. This parallels a confusion, which I note in the introduction of my book Sex Trouble, over the meaning of the word “equality.” Most people think of “equality” in terms of basic fairness, which is a much different idea than what feminists mean by “equality.”

Modern feminism, a movement originating in the radical New Left of the 1960s, advances a totalitarian notion of “equality” derived from Marxist-Leninist ideology. Many of the early leaders of Second Wave feminism (i.e., the Women’s Liberation movement) were so-called “Red Diaper babies,” the children of Communist Party members, and brought to the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s the conceptual framework of Marxism (historical materialism and class struggle) which were adapted to create what Shulamith Firestone famously called The Dialectic of Sex.

In the crypto-Marxist analysis of Firestone and her radical comrades, men were an oppressive “sex class” (analogous to the capitalist bourgeoisie in Marxist thought), women were victims of oppression (analogous to the proletariat), and feminists were the revolutionary vanguard, the sexual Bolsheviks who would overthrow the unjust tyranny of male supremacy.

This was dangerous insanity, of course, and was widely ridiculed at the time. How could such preposterous ideas ever succeed? Yet radical feminists had influential allies in the news media, academia and the entertainment industry, but more importantly in the Democrat Party. During the 1972 presidential campaign, George McGovern had won the Democrat nomination with the support of the New Left, and one of the things the McGovernites did at the 1972 Democrat convention was to change the party rules and platform to reflect a feminist agenda. After Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he was expected to advance this agenda, and in 1977 — the same year Anita Bryant began her Save Our Children campaign, and also the year I graduated high school — the “National Women’s Conference” controversy erupted.

The chairwoman of this taxpayer-funded event was Democrat Rep. Bella Abzug, a radical leftist from New York, and the pro-abortion agenda of the conference in Houston sparked protests from Catholics and other conservative Christians. Among other controversies emerging from this 1977 event were reports from the handful of conservative women delegates in Houston about the disproportionate number of lesbian feminists among the 20,000 or so attendees. Lesbian rights were on the conference agenda, a strategy that had been planned from the very outset, with the approval of the Carter administration. In an interview with Anahi Russo Garrido, included in a recent anthology on the history of gay activism, radical lesbian Charlotte Bunch explained how this happened:

I participated in the first White House meeting with LGBT groups in 1977 . . . where I spoke about the immigration problems faced by LGBT couples from different countries. . . .
One of the most important projects we organized was a lesbian caucus for the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977. Houston was the national event forr the UN International Women’s Year — the only one ever sponsored by the US Government. . . . We coordinated a national network of lesbians, who attended their state events and sought to be elected as delegates to Houston, as well as to get lesbian rights on the agenda. We built alliances with feminist organizations like NOW and worked with mainstream groups like the YWCA and the AAUW . . .
This broad feminist coalition was successful in getting agreement on a 26-point platform that included planks on sexual preference, reproductive rights, poverty, minority women, etc. It was a turning point for me in seeing that the future of sexual rights lay in building coalitions.

So, here in 1977, you have “mainstream groups like the YWCA and the AAUW” forming a coalition with Bunch, who had divorced her husband, formed a lesbian collective known as The Furies and authored the 1972 radical manifesto “Lesbians in Revolt.” What became apparent at the Houston conference was that feminists were not only determined to destroy the marriage-based family, but that in pursuit of that goal, they welcomed as allies radicals like Charlotte Bunch who were opposed to heterosexuality, per se. As early as 1977, it was apparent that the official feminist agenda was not about “equality” in the sense of basic fairness, nor was “the future of sexual rights,” as Bunch saw it, about mere tolerance toward “alternative lifestyles.” By 1977, feminists already had been saying this for years, and they have continued saying it.

“Sexism is the root of all other oppressions … Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.”
— Ginny Berson, “The Furies,” 1972, in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, edited by Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (1975)

“Gay revolution addresses itself to the total elimination of the sexual caste system around which our oppressive society is organized. . . . The lesbian is the key figure in the social revolution to end the sexual caste system, or heterosexual institution.”
— Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (1973)

“The lesbian liberation movement has made possibly the most important contribution to a future sexual liberation. . . . What the women’s liberation movement did create was a homosexual liberation movement that politically challenged male supremacy in one of its most deeply institutionalized aspects — the tyranny of heterosexuality.”
— Linda Gordon, “The Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Three Stages of Feminism,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein (1978)

“To the extent that women harbor negative attitudes toward lesbians and lesbianism, we demonstrate identification with men. To the extent that women express negative attitudes toward lesbians in our words and deeds, we strengthen patriarchy.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

“Because sexism is the root of all oppression and heterosexuality upholds sexism, feminists must become lesbians and lesbians must become feminists if we are to effect a revolution. . . . To state that feminists must become lesbians assumes that lesbianism is a matter of choice and conviction, not biological conditioning or sexual behavior. Moreover, lesbians must also become feminists, that is, they must ground their sexuality in a political discourse if any social change is to occur. . . .
“I believe it can be shown that, historically, lesbianism and feminism have been coterminous if not identical social phenomena.”
— Bonnie Zimmerman, “Confessions of a Lesbian Feminist,” in Cross Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, edited by Dana Heller (1997)

“Heterosexuality is a category divided by gender and which also depends for its meaning on gender divisions. . . .
“The view that heterosexuality is a key site of male power is widely accepted within feminism. Within most feminist accounts, heterosexuality is seen not as an individual preference . . . but as a socially constructed institution which structures and maintains male domination.”
— Dianne Richardson, “Theorizing Heterosexuality,” in Rethinking Sexuality (2000)

“From the beginning of second-wave feminism, sexuality was identified as a key site of patriarchal domination and women’s resistance to it. . . .
“While heterosexual desires, practices, and relations are socially defined as ‘normal’ and normative, serving to marginalize other sexualities as abnormal and deviant, the coercive power of compulsory heterosexuality derives from its institutionalization as more than merely a sexual relation.”
— Stevi Jackson, “Sexuality, Heterosexuality, and Gender Hierarchy: Getting Our Priorities Straight,” in Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality, edited by Chrys Ingraham (2005)

“Heterosexism is maintained by the illusion that heterosexuality is the norm.”
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

“Heterosexuality and masculinity . . . are made manifest through patriarchy, which normalizes men as dominant over women. . . .
“This tenet of patriarchy is thus deeply connected to acts of sexual violence, which have been theorized as a physical reaffirmation of patriarchal power by men over women.”
— Sara Carrigan Wooten, 2015

Rationalizing and justifying this radical agenda required the development of feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — which in turn leads to the idea that it is “discrimination” to keep boys out of the girls’ restroom:

“Equal rights” sounds so wonderful. Who can be against equality?
Yet as Richard Weaver warned us long ago, Ideas Have Consequences, and the sledgehammer logic of “equal rights” brutally dismantles every common-sense objection. Even the most obvious facts — e.g., boys and girls are different — must therefore be suppressed to conform with The Equality Principle.

Because this radical conception of “equality” has become such an intrinsic component of the Democrat agenda, it is promoted by the liberal media and is also taught in public schools, because the schools are controlled by teachers unions that donate millions of dollars annually to Democrats. You will be accused of “hate” if you oppose this agenda.

“As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.”
— Anita Bryant, 1978

People called her crazy for saying that. However, when the Democrat Party owes its success to the support of gay activists, feminists, and teachers unions, and when everyone in the education system is required to support this bizarre anti-heterosexual agenda, is it any wonder that Democrats are imposing transgender cult ideology in public schools?

“Fundamentally transformed,” just like Obama promised.

 

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