Recently, my 12-year-old grandson came home from school and asked his mother, “Mom, what’s a trance?”
She paused before asking, “Do you mean trance or trans?”
“Trance,” he said.
“Well, a trance is when you fall under some sort of spell. Like when someone hypnotizes you.”
He looked a little stunned, then said indignantly, “That’s not what my friends said!”
I never heard exactly what his friends said, other than that a boy can become a girl. Apparently, the sexual agenda of our schools the last few years had passed right over this youngster’s head.
After my daughter reported this conversation to me, it struck me that several lessons might be drawn from my grandson’s encounter with the mess our society is making of sex.
First is his use of “trance.” That he confused the words trance and trans struck me as both hilariously funny and insightful. Many Americans do seem in a trance these past few years, hypnotized by the politically correct into acceptance of transgender transitions among the very young, the substitution of pronouns—like “them” or “they” for “he,” “she,” “him,” or “her,”—and the bending of all sexual traditions and taboos of the last three millennia.
Then there’s the issue of my grandson’s innocence. He’s an adolescent with one foot on the platform of childhood and one foot on the train that will carry him to adulthood. So, who should be his primary guide on that journey: the state, or his parents? Should teachers and schools serve as the transmitters of sexual knowledge, or should we follow the time-honored custom of allowing parents to teach him the facts of life, leaving to the state traditional academic subjects, like math, English, and history?
To me, the answer seems clear as glass. In the classroom of life, which includes an understanding of sex, parents should be the primary educators of their children. Period.
We might ask, then, how our elementary and secondary schools have become so heavily involved in teaching not only the biological facts of life but also sex and gender theory to children under 18-years-old. Here again the answer to that question is apparent. Several decades ago, the state got its foot in the door of sex ed when we were told that public schools needed to teach birth control because of rising teenage pregnancies. Then along came AIDS, and we were told that schools must offer instruction in safe sex.
And today? Here we are, with many of our teachers indoctrinating students, some of them in elementary school, with amoral ideas about various sexual practices, choices, and lifestyles.
But pushback and common sense are now stepping up to confront this insanity.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, forbidding the teaching of sexual and gender identification to students in grades K-3. Falsely labeled the “don’t say gay” bill by its opponents, this attempt to preserve the innocence of children produced a firestorm of protest from the radical left, as Sister Toldjah (aka Stacey Matthews) tells us at Red State.
She then gives us Tulsi Gabbard’s take on this subject. Gabbard, a former member of Congress and a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, leans left on many political issues, ranging from health care to climate change. Yet she not only supports the Florida parental rights bill but has stated publicly, “I gotta tell you I was shocked to learn it only protects kids from kindergarten until third grade. Third grade? What about 12th grade or not at all? Government has no place in personal lives. Government has no place in our bedrooms. Parents are the ones responsible for raising their kids and instilling in them a moral foundation, not the government.”
Gabbard then reminded her audience, “The reality that we are facing in our country is our schools are failing. Nationally, 34 percent of students are below basic reading level in the fourth grade. 25 percent of high school graduates are functionally illiterate.” She expressed her confidence that if schools would focus on “educating our kids, teaching them the fundamentals … we would see our literacy rates improve and set our young people up for success to be thinking logically, to be thinking critically, and thinking for themselves. This is what our public schools should focus on.”
If politicians as different as DeSantis and Gabbard can agree that our schools need to stop indoctrinating our children about sex and gender, then parents of all political stripes can demand the same.
It’s time to end the trance.