Conservatives like Katie just love it when they run across a minority group member who is just as flat-ass bigoted as they are. Spotty supposes it gives them a sense of validation. Katie must have positively glowed while writing her column in the Star Tribune today: Parents say school undermines their authority over kids.
Apparently some black mothers (no really, mothers) are upset because the Interdistrict Downtown School in Minneapolis – a magnet school (so that parents have to apply to get their kids in) by the way – is teaching their kids about, are you ready for this boys and girls, diversity. Jeebus, you can't make this stuff up! Here's Katie's lede:
The scene last Saturday at the Interdistrict Downtown School in Minneapolis was straight out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. A group of black mothers and their supporters stood shoulder to shoulder, demanding what they called a decent education for their kids.
No Katie, not true. In the 60s the blacks were the bigotees, not the bigotors.
Here's the beef: a teacher at the school had been reading "Asha's Mums" to their second graders. This is, apparently, a book about a girl that has lesbian parents, and it's part of a curriculum called "Families All Matter." One mother, Gena Bounds, expresses it this way:
I teach my children about family matters myself, and this isn't what we believe.
Mommy also said that her daughter had learned that people who believe that "a mother and father are best are discriminatory." This must be the undermining of parental authority that Katie is talking about! Why if a parent wants to raise a little bigot in her own image, she shouldn't have to brook any interference!
According to 'nuther muther:
FeLicia McCorvey Preyer, who has second-grade twins at the school, was also incensed about "Families All Matter." Before the school year began, she told Sage [a gay teacher at the school who read Asha's Mums to his students] and school officials that she didn't want her children reading books with homosexual themes, she says. "They knew my wishes and they defied them," she adds.
Well, the nerve! Failing to give a parent complete control over curriculum! It's just the kind of thing that Nathan Bedford Forrest would have condemned! Katie continues:
After Sage read "Asha's Mums," he "told the class that his grandfather had believed that black people are stupid," she says. "He said that other adults had helped him see that his grandfather was a bigot." The implication? That parents who don't share Sage's views on family matters are bigots too.
Sage touched a nerve by claiming the mantle of the fight against racism for his own agenda, says Preyer. "I'm appalled that he, a white man, would use that tactic to push his views on African-American children."
But Bounds and Preyer are most upset at the school's message that kids don't need to listen to their parents when the school and the parents disagree. "The school is undermining my authority as a parent, at a critical, formative stage of my daughter's life," says Bounds.
Hey! We're black and therefore own the franchise on who gets to decide what bigotry is! "Parental authority" is just code for "don't expose my kids to ideas that are contrary to my own bigoted view of the world."
Spot has a hunch that the mothers quoted by Katie in her column are emblematic of some of the black parents in the charter and private school movements. That's what Katie's "decent education" is about: not offending the sense of decency of the parents. There are studies that show that charter and private schools are no better, and usually worse, that public schools, so there must be something else driving the parents.
The only thing that Katie likes better than blacks bigoted against gays is blacks bigoted against blacks.
Tag: Katherine Kersten
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