Parents Rally Behind Virginia Teacher Suspended Over Objection to Pronoun Policy
Suburban DC school district has come under fire for 'woke' ideology
LEESBURG, Va.—A group of Loudoun County parents rallied on Friday evening in support of elementary school P.E. teacher Tanner Cross, who was put on leave following his remarks at a school board meeting about a proposed transgender policy.
The rally for Cross followed his hearing at Loudoun County Court, where he had hoped to secure an emergency injunction allowing him to return to teaching as soon as possible. Cross, who has taught in Loudoun County Public Schools for eight years, voiced his opposition to proposed policies that would require teachers to use student’s preferred pronouns at a school board meeting on May 25. Two days later, he was placed on administrative leave.
"When I spoke I was thinking about my values, my students, my parents, and my fellow teachers," Cross said at the rally. "The truth is I am not alone. Many of us are concerned that proposed policies would harm students and require us to violate our beliefs by saying things that are not true."
Several parents told the Washington Free Beacon that they attended the rally to support Cross and voice their disgust for the school board.
"We believe that Tanner took a stand for what the Bible says, that God made them male and female. And it doesn’t get any more complicated than that," Jim Supp, a pastor at Reston Bible Church, said. "To tell an elementary student that if you’re in a boy’s body, you can be a girl, or if you’re in a girl’s body, you can be a boy, that’s just not true."
Stacy Hani, the county’s representative for the case, said that Cross’s actions had caused a major disruption, warranting the suspension. She presented several emails in court from parents who said they did not want their children interacting with Cross anymore. The county also banned Cross from LCPS property. Furthermore, Hani pointed to new Virginia legislation passed last year that mandates public schools to implement policies for transgender students.
A district spokesman said the school system does not comment on pending litigation.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a pro bono religious liberty firm, said the county is violating Cross’s rights as an American and a Virginian and that he spoke at the school board meeting as a private citizen.
"When Loudoun County Public Schools suspended Tanner they crossed a line, and that’s why we took LCPS to court," Tyson Langhofer, Cross’s attorney, said. "Tanner’s case is about the right of every American to speak freely without the fear of punishment. Public schools have no business compelling teachers to express beliefs that they don’t hold."
"If we win, this will continue to reinforce the law that has been there for a long time. But if we lose, it means something: it’s a sea change in the law," Langhofer told the Free Beacon. "It would say to school districts across the country that you can punish teachers who simply voice their opinions in a public forum, and that’s completely contrary to everything the First Amendment stands for."
Shawntel Cooper, who went viral for likening critical race theory to Nazism earlier this year, and Phuong S. are mothers who moved to Loudoun County for their kids. Phuong, who left Maryland because of its Common Core initiatives, said that Loudoun’s education system was quickly becoming a "façade." Both want to stay in Virginia, but Phuong has already pulled her kids out of the school system.
"Last year really sped it up," Phuong said, referring to the district's increasing adoption of woke ideology. "It’s always been in the works, I’m sure."
"If you would have asked me five years ago how I felt about Loudoun County, raising kids here, sending them to school here, I would have said it was the most amazing place in the U.S. to raise a kid and send them to school," Sharon Supp, a lawyer and mother of two LCPS students said.
Cooper faces a similar challenge. "Right now my kids are virtual. I don’t even know if I’m going to let them go back to hybrid because I can hear what’s going on," she said.
Judge James Plowman said he expects to issue a decision on Cross's case Monday.
The Single Best Thing Americans Can Do to Retake America
The most frequent question people pose to me is: What can I/we do to fight back against the nihilistic anti-American destruction of virtually all the country's major institutions?
There is an answer.
The single best thing Americans can do to counter the left-wing attack on America -- against its freedoms, its schools, its families, its children, its governmental institutions, its sports, its news and entertainment media, its medical establishment, the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the military -- is to take their children out of America's schools.
Other than in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), the vast majority of America's elementary schools, high schools, colleges and universities teach your child or grandchild almost nothing important; prematurely sexualize them, thereby robbing them of their innocence; and harm them intellectually and morally. They rarely teach them, for example, art or music because they are too busy teaching them race-centered hatred of whites, of America and of America's values. Sending your child(ren) to most American schools is playing Russian roulette with their values -- but unlike the gun in Russian roulette, which has a bullet in only one of its six chambers, the schools' guns hold four or five bullets.
In many elementary schools, your child is taught that gender is chosen and that there is no difference between boys and girls (in a growing number of schools, the teachers are told not to call their students "boys and girls"); they are taught about masturbation; and many children from first grade on attend "Drag Queen Story Hour," wherein an obvious man wearing women's clothing, garish makeup and a wig entertains them.
Given that all this is well-known, why do any nonleft -- meaning, liberal or conservative -- parents send their children to an American school?
One reason is they are in denial. Many parents do not want to know what their children are being taught and the consequent damage done to them. They don't really believe school(s) will ruin their child, let alone their child's relationship with them.
These parents should speak to any of the millions -- yes, millions -- of Americans whose children have contempt for America, for free speech and for their parents as a result of attending an American college or even high school. I meet such people at every speech I give, and I speak to them regularly on my radio show. Ask these parents, if they could redo their lives, whether they would keep their child in school.
A second reason is they feel they have no choice. If they remove their child from the local public or private school (most private schools are just as committed to anti-American indoctrination over education as public schools), what will they do with their child? They often cannot find a local school that does not harm their child. They cannot necessarily even rely on Christian or Jewish schools. Most of them are as "woke" as most secular schools. And if they do find a school that teaches rather than poisons, they may not be able to afford the tuition.
The only other option, then, is to home-school one's child. The problem is that many parents assume this is essentially impossible. For one thing, they assume that one of the parents would have to leave his or her work, which would mean a serious reduction in the family's income. In addition, home-schooling strikes most people as simply too daunting a task, even if they could afford to take it on.
Neither fear is entirely justified. It is true that, at least at the outset, a working parent may have to cut back from full-time work, and it is true that no matter what the family's financial condition, there are challenges to taking one's children out of school and home-schooling them.
But given the low intellectual state of most American schools, the damage they do to young children's innocence and the anti-American, anti-white, anti-Western indoctrination in most schools, if you are a parent of school-age children, what is your choice?
Other than a) finding a good school that b) you can afford, you have no other choice. You are fooling yourself if you think the odds are that after attending American schools from kindergarten through college (not to mention through graduate school), your child will turn out well-educated, intellectually alive, rational, kind, happy, well-adjusted, grateful to be American and respectful of you and your values.
While there are some wonderful young Americans who recently attended American schools, and there are some lost souls who were home-schooled, American schools are largely producing the following:
Poorly educated students. Ask your college son or daughter to diagram a sentence; identify Joseph Stalin, "The Gulag Archipelago" or the Soviet Union; name the branches of the American government; identify -- or just spell -- Beethoven; date the Civil War; identify the Holocaust; and name which sentence is correct -- "He gave the book to my friend and me" or, "He gave the book to my friend and I."
Angry young people. Why wouldn't they be? First, they graduate college with a huge load of debt, having received almost nothing useful for their money. Second, if they are anything other than a white heterosexual Christian male, they have been taught to regard themselves as victims of oppression. Third, their future is so bleak they may not even have one: They are threatened with extinction by climate change.
The single best thing Americans can do to fight the left-wing destruction of the country is to withdraw from the "educational" system that is actively, deliberately miseducating them by the tens of millions. If millions of American parents did so, the country would turn around as fast as you could say "teachers unions." If they don't, their children will continue being used as guinea pigs in the left's sick and dystopian experiment.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is "The Rational Bible," a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, "No Safe Spaces," was released to home entertainment nationwide on September 15, 2020. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
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