OPINION:
On Friday, I picked up my 14-year-old twin boys from school, and both jumped into the car and asked whether I was voting yes on Virginia’s redistricting measure Tuesday.
“That’s a no,” I said flatly to the proposed map, which would create a 10-1 Democratic congressional delegation in a state Kamala Harris won by only 5 percentage points. However, my boys know exactly how I feel about this shameless power play by the liberals in Richmond, so why did they ask?
Turns out, in both of their civics classes that day, taught by two different teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools, they were urged to go home and persuade their parents to vote yes on the measure to make Virginia’s maps “as fair as they can be,” to “stop Donald Trump at all costs.” They used the same talking points being spewed by endless Democratic campaigns in the commonwealth to make Virginia come under one-party Democratic rule.
The ballot initiative is in blatant violation of Virginia’s Constitution. Democrats are trying to rig their congressional maps so they will represent 91% of the state’s districts, which are currently pretty evenly split with a 6-5 Democratic advantage (55%, similar to the way Virginia has voted federally). The proposed map concedes state control over the urban areas of Arlington, Falls Church and Fairfax, which cover only 5% to 10% of the commonwealth’s landmass.
As Republican strategist Brad Todd, of OnMessage Inc., questioned on social media: “Should Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay continue to be represented by a Ph.D. shellfish specialist who lives in Bay town? Or a wealthy Volvo dealer from Alexandria? That’s on the ballot. Vote NO.”
Mr. Todd was referring to Rep. Robert Wittman, a Republican who worked for 20 years with the Virginia Department of Health, serving as an environmental health specialist and a field director for the Division of Shellfish Sanitation, whose seat under the new map would be wiped out by Rep. Donald Beyer, a Democrat whose family owned several car dealerships in Northern Virginia, an area he now represents in Congress.
I asked my boys whether either of their “civics” teachers mentioned this. Each, of course, said no. That brings me back to the liberal indoctrination of our youths. Fairfax County Schools are acting like an arm of the Democratic Party, with its teachers brazenly spewing their propaganda and representing it to their pupils as “facts.”
I asked either one of my children whether they spoke up in class.
“No, mom, are you kidding me?!” my one boy replied. “I feel like a Jew in Nazi Germany. I just try to put my head down and stay quiet. I tried to hide.”
Now, that’s not the most artful explanation of his feelings, but he is 14, and the liberals love to use the Nazis and Germany as metaphors to deal with differences of opinion.
I turned to my other boy: “Did you?”
He ignominiously put his head down.
One of his friends in class is a reader and watcher of my columns and podcasts, and spoke up.
“What would your mom say about this?” the friend asked my son loudly in the civics classroom.
“I don’t know, she died two years ago,” my son replied. Ugh. He decided to kill me in front of his teacher and colleagues rather than take a contrarian stand. Yet he is still learning and growing, and there’s nothing friendly about middle school inside or outside the classroom.
“No, she didn’t. Here’s her latest podcast. Do you want to see?” my boy’s friend asked the teacher. My latest podcast is with Republican strategist and Washington Times columnist Tim Murtaugh, who assails the ballot measure.
The class watched for all of two minutes. The laptop was then closed, and the civics teacher directly addressed my boy: “No need to see more. Your mother seems to have very strong opinions on the matter, and opinions aren’t facts,” was how the response was relayed to me.
Then it was back to her originally programmed material.
It was the civics teachers who encouraged the walkout a few months ago during the school day to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I guess one teacher carries her identification papers with her at all times because she is worried she will be picked up by an ICE agent running errands around the city and illegally detained and “disappeared.”
My boys, who told me about the walkout in advance, did notify me that they would participate only because they hate the classroom and wanted to “fit in” with their friends. They also wondered whether the school would send me a tardy or absence notification, as I commonly get from them for goofing around in the hallways.
I did not. It seems the ICE walkout was sanctioned by the school, even though it wasn’t technically sanctioned. I didn’t get an email from Fairfax County saying it was going to happen, though flyers throughout the school building were promoting it.
This is what we as conservative parents are up against: Democrats, teaching in the classroom, demanding blind obedience from our children.
I would yank my kids out of the public school system, as many are doing, if I had the means to do so. I did move into a new, better district, with the hope of some improvements for the next school year.
Yet I can’t help but share this because the taxpayer-funded partisan indoctrination of children, with the explicit direction to influence their parents, is an abomination of what schooling should be for our youths (and maybe a campaign finance violation to boot).
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor with The Washington Times.
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