Saturday, July 29, 2023
Alabama: White Arrogance and Bigotry Writ Large
Supreme Court rulings are meant to be the law of the land, but Alabama is taking its recent opinion on the Voting Rights Act as a mere recommendation. In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district.
Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.
More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, but the state’s Republican majority has racially gerrymandered that population into a single district out of seven because it fears those voters might elect Democrats. The partisan motive is no excuse for racial discrimination—1870s Democrats also had a partisan interest in disenfranchising Black voters, who were then reliably Republican. After failing to get the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2, Alabama decided that following the law was optional.
Alabama’s open rejection of a Supreme Court ruling comes in the midst of a conservative campaign accusing liberals of “delegitimizing” the Court by criticizing its lurch to the right and the coziness of the Republican-appointed justices with billionaire political donors who have interests before the Court.
Whatever else this Court may be, it can now be fairly described as a backstop legislature for conservatives to impose policies they cannot get through Congress. Also, the Court hasn’t had a liberal majority since the Nixon era, so conservative complaints that the Court was a “backstop legislature for progressives” are not an expression of opposition to “political control” over the Court, but a lament that Republican appointees possessed only a slim one-vote majority for most of that time, which meant they didn’t get their preferred outcomes as often as they wanted. And the way that the conservative movement seized the Court was precisely by “tarnishing its rulings” for more than a half century. . . . In the right’s view, the judiciary was an “imperial judiciary,” an “out of control branch of government.”
Indeed, although it now accuses the Court’s liberal critics of “delegitimization,” the Journal defends the current Court by saying it is merely undoing the “legal mistakes of recent decades.” What the Roberts Court’s defenders truly fear is the political strength of a critique of the Court as overreaching and out of touch with the majority of the electorate, because as conservatives well understand, that is a critique that has the power to influence elections and ultimately shape the Court itself.
The fear is clearly not that rogue actors will ignore the Court’s rulings. If the pervasive right-wing alarm over liberal criticism of the Court as “delegitimizing” has been deafening, the conservative response to Alabama openly flouting the Court’s ruling has been muted. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, for example, so protective of the Court’s “legitimacy,” when it comes to substantive public criticism, did not view Alabama’s refusal to obey the justices as an event worthy of comment. . . . . But Alabama is defying the rule of law in pursuit of conservative causes—more Republicans in Congress; voiding constitutional prohibitions on racial discrimination—and so it’s fine.
All of this renders the Journal’s hand-wringing rather ironic: It is clear the right that views the Court as a political instrument for imposing conservative policy, and when the Court fails to heed its obligation to do so, they can simply ignore it. This is consistent with the movement’s Trumpist turn toward the belief that the legitimacy of any practice or institution—elections, fundamental freedoms, the state itself—is conferred not by the consent of the governed but by the consent of the right. You have an inalienable access to the franchise as long as you vote Republican. You have free speech as long as you say conservative things. The free market is free only when it leads to conservative outcomes. The Supreme Court’s rulings are the law of the land, except if those rulings are not what conservatives want.
Alabama’s maps will likely be challenged in court. But one reason the state’s Republican leadership may feel comfortable with ignoring the justices in the first place is that Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts were so clearly holding their noses in overturning a clear act of racial discrimination in voting that they might not be inclined to do it a second time.
As Matt Ford reminds us, in striking down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Roberts argued that “things have changed dramatically” in the South, and so those protections could be disregarded. That was naive at best then; Alabama is intent on illustrating why now.
Maybe Alabama is bluffing. Or maybe it simply doesn’t believe that someone like Roberts, who has been dreaming of gutting the Voting Rights Act since he was in his 20s, really means it. Or perhaps Alabama is reminding the Republican-appointed justices that the Court’s legitimacy depends on its obedience to the conservative movement, whose view is that the only legitimate outcomes—or laws, or governments, or presidents, or Supreme Court rulings—are conservative ones.
It is that position, and the Court’s reliable adherence to it, that has precipitated its loss of legitimacy. No liberal criticism could be as devastating to the Court’s credibility as the justices’ own actions, or the expectations of their defenders.
Friday, July 28, 2023
Tennessee Teachers Revolt Over GOP "Anti-Woke" Hysteria
Proponents of GOP state laws restricting classroom discussion of race sometimes fall back on a seductive-sounding line of defense: These directives, they proclaim, allow for the “impartial” discussion of difficult historical topics, merely restricting teachers from foisting “biased” views of history on kids to protect them from “woke indoctrination.”. . . . But this idea is deeply flawed. An outbreak of resistance to anti-woke hysteria in Tennessee shows how.
This week, a group of teachers filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate Tennessee’s law limiting the teaching of race and gender. The statute, signed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in 2021, is absurdly vague: It prohibits pedagogy that includes allegedly divisive concepts without defining what that means, leaving teachers fearful that even neutral mentions of such concepts could violate the law.
The lawsuit claims that the Tennessee law violates the 14th Amendment, which requires laws to issue clear, explicit commands. Because of the law’s fuzziness, teachers are left feeling like potential outlaws whenever they voice an idea that a parent might deem unacceptable.
“It’s this thing hanging over you all the time,” said Rebecca Dickenson, an elementary school librarian in east Tennessee and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, which is spearheaded by the Tennessee Education Association. Dickenson said her colleagues wonder whether the state values their profession: “Do they want teachers, or not?”
The concepts that teachers must not “include” or “promote” in K-12 education are also preposterously vague. Among them are the notion that an individual should feel “discomfort” or “guilt” solely due to her race and the idea that one race is superior to another. The promotion of “division,” whatever that means, is also banned.
[T]he lawsuit takes a novel tack developed by the law firms behind the lawsuit, including the Free and Fair Litigation Group. It attacks the underlying idea that the exception for “impartial” discussions — another word the statute doesn’t define — has real significance.
That’s because topics such as slavery and Jim Crow laws inherently require a teacher to “include” discussion of seemingly prohibited concepts of racial superiority. Yet there’s no single and obvious way to teach those topics that everyone would agree is “impartial,” either. That puts teachers in a quandary created by the state.
If a teacher chooses to emphasize the brutally violent nature of slavery, for instance, a parent could say that choice of emphasis needlessly inspired guilt. Parents can complain that a teacher’s decision to merely select particularly uncomfortable historical facts for discussion is itself biased and made students uncomfortable or promoted division.
Faced with that possibility — and the fact that a parental complaint could mean months of bureaucratic penalties — teachers might reasonably avoid mentioning certain historical facts or controversial figures entirely. TEA’s complaint argues that something like this is already happening:
In Tipton County, for example, one school has replaced an annual field trip to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis with a trip to a baseball game. In Shelby County, a choir director fears that his decades-long practice of teaching his students to sing and understand the history behind spirituals sung by enslaved people will be perceived as “divisive” or otherwise violative of the ban.
“A lot of teachers just packed up their books and took them home,” teacher and plaintiff Kathryn Vaughn told me.
The folly of all this was recently illustrated by the law’s sponsor, state Rep. John Ragan, a Republican who has raged that woke “seditious charlatans” are destroying our country. Pressed during a debate on how slavery might be taught impartially, Ragan equivocated, acknowledging slavery was abhorrent but counseling against including “personal opinion.”
All this goes to a deeper problem with laws like Tennessee’s, many of which have similarly flawed exception provisions as documented by PEN America. To show how, James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, posits a question for the Tennessee law’s drafters.
“Can I teach that in the state of Tennessee, for over a hundred years the textbooks said one race is superior to another?” Grossman asked. “It’s true.”
Concepts that purportedly cannot be “included” in lessons, Grossman added, were “part of Tennessee’s history.” Yet even presenting facts about that history “impartially” could subject teachers to challenge from parents who see the choice of material as overly provocative.
Grossman said. “It is utterly impossible to teach in a situation where every decision can be questioned by an uninformed parent with the force of law behind it.”
Declaring that teachers can discuss these topics impartially will do nothing to mitigate the chilling effect these laws are having, because this is, after all, what they’re designed to do in the first place. It’s an open question whether these Tennessee teachers will succeed, but they’ve already exposed an ugly truth embedded in the foundations of this law and many others like it.
Thursday, July 27, 2023
DeSantis’s White Christian Nationalist Quest
Last week, Florida approved an overhaul of its African American history standards, including guidance that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Outrage ensued, including from Vice President Kamala Harris, who blasted the standards, saying, “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us.” She’s right. But I think the project underway in Florida is far larger, and far more consequential than many comprehend. The insult to Black people — and to the country — is incidental.
In the same way that Donald Trump made his bones as America’s white nationalist in chief, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is trying to make his as the country’s chief Christian nationalist, a subset of white supremacy that holds that God has ordained America as a Christian nation, and that its ideals must be protected from the encroachment of pluralism — racial, religious or otherwise.
In February 2022, in a speech at Hillsdale College, a private Christian school in Michigan, DeSantis said: “Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes. You will face flaming arrows, but if you have the shield of faith, you will overcome them, and in Florida we walk the line here.”
In November, DeSantis released a political ad in which the voice-over announcer bellows: “On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’” The ad goes on to convey that DeSantis is that protector — that he’s the Christian warrior of American politics.
It almost seems like DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is banking on Christian nationalists being in a separate category of voters, but Trump has already captured them, particularly with his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices.
On top of that, the vocabulary of Christian nationalism often is too pedantic and distant, even among people who follow the philosophies in practice, to propel DeSantis ahead of Trump. . . . I suspect that many people just think of Christian nationalists as patriotic white people who go to church — akin to the definition of white nationalism that Senator Tommy Tuberville was recently trying to sell.
But Christian nationalism isn’t merely “patriotic Christians” and it’s not Christianity, but rather, as the University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry put it, can be understood as “an impostor Christianity that uses evangelical language to cloak ethnocentric and nationalist loyalties.”
And DeSantis is a paragon among the impostors. His anti-woke crusade is a manifestation of the intolerance and battle-thirst of Christian nationalism, and Florida’s distortion of Black history and its attempt to rehabilitate the image of slavery is part of it.
American textbooks, especially those published before the middle of 20th century, are notorious for being rife with the idea that “people of African descent were brought to America as a benevolent act on the part of whites.” . . . Slavery was missionary work that, in these distorted accounts, brought Black heathens into contact with white people’s Christianity and civilization.
Some of these books outrageously positioned the enslaved as the main beneficiaries of slavery while white people were cast as having been saddled with the burden of it. Some books even papered over the horrors and mass death of the Middle Passage.
This worldview never fully went away. A 2021 analysis of American textbooks by The Guardian found that “private schools, especially Christian schools, use textbooks that tell a version of history that is racially biased and often inaccurate” including those that “whitewash the legacy of slavery.”
This is a shadow educational approach that people like DeSantis want to reestablish as the dominant one. Florida’s standards recast slavery as a beneficial training ground, a school of sorts, and that is the way that many would refer to it.
DeSantis and other conservatives constantly complain about indoctrination, but indoctrination, political mythmaking, is precisely what Christian nationalism aims to do.
Insulting Black people may be an effect, but it’s not the ultimate aim. As Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” told me, Christian nationalists don’t care about insulting Black people; they’re on a mission to establish a “pretension of naïveté” to absolve whiteness of guilt.
As she put it, “We are just pawns to their narrative of how they want to make ‘greatness.’ ”
DeSantis and those like him - including Youngkin - must be stopped.
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
The Demographic Change That Threatens Trump and the GOP
Something is happening among young voters in America — even if, to paraphrase the old Bob Dylan song, we don’t know what it is.
Consider: Youth turnout exploded during the 2018 midterm elections under President Donald Trump. Then in 2020, energized opposition to Trump among young voters was critical to his defeat. And in the 2022 midterms, surging youth participation helped fend off the widely predicted “red wave.” Even some Republicans fear that expanding youth populations in swing states pose a long-term threat to the GOP.
New data supplied to me by the Harvard Youth Poll sheds light on the powerful undercurrents driving these developments. Young voters have shifted in a markedly progressive direction on multiple issues that are deeply important to them: Climate change, gun violence, economic inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
John Della Volpe, director of the poll, refers to those issues as the “big four.” They all speak to the sense of precarity that young voters feel about their physical safety, their economic future, their basic rights and even the ecological stability of the planet.
“This generation has never felt secure — personally, physically, financially,” Della Volpe told me. . . . . the Harvard Youth Poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released each spring — all suggest that today’s young voters are substantially more progressive on these issues than young voters were even five or 10 years ago. Sizable majorities now reject the idea that same-sex relationships are morally wrong (53 percent), support stricter gun laws (63 percent) and want government to provide basic necessities (62 percent).
Meanwhile, support for government doing more to curb climate change soared to 57 percent in 2020 before subsiding to 50 percent this year. That small dip may reflect preoccupation with economic doldrums unleashed by covid-19. While that 50 percent could be higher, the issue has seen a 21-point shift, and the polling question asks if respondents want action on climate “even at the expense of economic growth.”
Many of today’s 18-to-29-year-olds, who are mostly older Gen Z Americans plus the tail end of the Millennial generation, lived their formative years during the Great Recession and the election of Trump. What’s more, these new voters are politically coming of age during a remarkable confluence of events that appear to be conspiring in an improbable way to push them to the left.
Mass shootings have been on the rise, with the 2018 massacre at a school in Parkland, Fla., acting as a galvanizing moment. Heat waves and wildfire smog have driven home the realities of climate change with new urgency and vividness.
Meanwhile, the pandemic likely drove home the vulnerability of millions to economic shocks as well as the woefully patchy social safety net in the United States. And red states are escalating their assault on LGBTQ+ rights, a national movement that appears to threaten big gains in this area that for these voters are likely typified by the Supreme Court’s finding of a right to marriage equality in 2015.
Then there’s the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, which underscores the tenuousness of Americans’ social rights in the face of a determined reactionary movement to roll them back. Data provided by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that while 54 percent of young voters believed in 2010 that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, that’s up to 69 percent this year.
Demographer William Frey and his colleagues calculate that by the 2036 presidential race, Gen Z will represent 35 percent of eligible voters. “They’re growing up in a 21st century America that’s far more diverse, inclusive and globally connected than the 1950s and 1960s America of the GOP base,” Frey told me. “They’re going to shun the Republican Party as they get older.”
This might help explain why, as Politico reports, Republicans have grown alarmed by the growth of college towns in swing states. They fear the profusion of young voters in these states and the possibility that they’re tilting more Democratic due to the GOP’s rightward cultural lurch.
Yet national developments could continue exerting a powerful pull on these voters. For example, the chart above suggests that Trump’s rise to the presidency might have accelerated their progressive evolution. The former president continues looming over our politics and will likely be the GOP nominee.
“That data clearly shows a Zoomer Trump effect,” Della Volpe, the author of a book about Gen Z, told me. “Every single variable has gotten more progressive.”
Republicans, Della Volpe concluded, should “take a step back and listen to what this generation is telling them.”
Of course, the GOP will not listen as candidates and GOP politicians continue to focus on pleasing the deplorable primary voter pool that wants more racism, more attacks on LGBT citizens, no gun control, and a continued pretense that climate change is not real.
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Are Republicans Hurtling Towards Defeat in 2024?
For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses. Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic and unfit Donald Trump, right?
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump. They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump.
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. . . . . “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
Monday, July 24, 2023
Trump's Arguments Keep Losing in Court
The twice-indicted Donald Trump has a perfect record: He has lost every important challenge in the multiple, major legal cases swirling around him.
Sometimes, this has happened at the trial court level; sometimes, it’s been on appeal. But eventually, he has lost on every significant issue, civil or criminal, to come up. That ought to tell us something about the former president’s ability to navigate the rough legal waters ahead of him — and how dramatically the excuses his team serves up for the right-wing media zombies fall short in courts of law.
Let’s take E. Jean Carroll’s civil claims against Trump. In the so-called E. Jean Carroll I case concerning his defamation of her while president, Trump initially persuaded the Justice Department to follow former attorney general William P. Barr’s position that his statements during his presidency were within the scope of his official duties. This would have obliged the department to defend him. But a federal court judge rejected that position.
Meanwhile, Trump lost all attempts to stall and dismiss what’s known as E. Jean Carroll II, the case brought for defamation after Trump’s presidency and for sexual assault under the Adult Survivors Act. The jury decided that Trump defamed Carroll and sexually assaulted her, awarding her $5 million. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied a new trial, finding Trump’s claims “frivolous.”
Moreover, as NBC News reported on July 19: Trump has filed a counterclaim alleging Carroll defamed him by continuing to say he raped her in public statements following the jury verdict.
In his ruling Wednesday, Judge Kaplan indicated that may be a losing argument. He noted that rape in New York criminal law “applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis,” a definition that is “far narrower than the meaning of ‘rape’ in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.”
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that,” he wrote.
Trump is an adjudicated liar and sexual batterer.
Consider then the New York criminal indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleging falsification of business documents. Trump has tried everything — e.g., demanding the judge recuse himself; trying to remove the case to federal court — to no avail.
Trump also faces a state civil case from New York Attorney General Letitia James alleging that Trump operated a massive scheme to inflate property values. He again failed to get the case dismissed. . . . In his written order, Justice Engoron said that some of the arguments repeatedly made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers were ‘frivolous,’ and had been ‘borderline frivolous even the first time defendants made them.’”
Now let’s turn to Georgia’s criminal investigation of the phony elector scheme and the effort to cajole Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to flip the state to Trump. The former president and his allies have failed in every attempt . . . . Trump’s recent motion to dismiss the entire matter failed in Georgia’s state Supreme Court. In a unanimous ruling, the court found that “even if the petition were procedurally appropriate, Petitioner has not shown that he would be entitled to the relief he seeks. . . . . He can rail against Willis, baselessly calling her “racist,” but that does not help him in court.
Meanwhile, in the Mar-a-Lago documents matter . . . . In the underlying special counsel criminal investigation into alleged obstruction and violation of the Espionage Act, Trump’s claims that he magically declassified documents and that special counsel Jack Smith and the FBI are out to get him provided no protection. He lost a critical attorney-client privilege claim because of the crime-fraud exception, turning his lawyer Evan Corcoran into a witness for the government.
We now come to the main event: the federal case concerning Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Trump lost more than 60 cases challenging the result. No evidence of significant fraud was ever presented in these cases, and several attorneys involved in bringing them face disbarment.
Trump, meanwhile, has failed to keep top aides and advisers from testifying. His attorney-client privilege with lawyer John Eastman was pierced, again a result of the crime-fraud exception. Witnesses including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former vice president Mike Pence and former White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin have all been required to testify. Again, no privilege or immunity claim has prevailed.
Trump has already received a target letter, reportedly referencing charges for obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to deprive individuals of the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
For all of Trump’s crazed accusations, pleas of victimhood, conspiracies and outright lies, nothing has worked so far to shield him from civil liability or criminal prosecution. What passes for an argument on right-wing media or for MAGA cult members and lawmakers carries no weight in courts of law.
Trump is not exempt from the laws that others must follow. He cannot claim that his actions — many of which he has admitted to in speeches and interviews — are either too small or too big to trigger criminal liability. Soon, he will face juries of ordinary Americans who will decide whether he should be held accountable for his conduct. And none of his inane excuses, lies, conspiracies or delaying tactics should protect him.
Sunday, July 23, 2023
Youngkin Emulates DeSantis and Continues War on Transgender Virginians
Just a day after the state released its finalized model policies on the treatment of transgender students, it remains unclear how local school divisions will respond — but it is clear the document will be the latest catalyst for a debate that has gone on for months.
The Virginia Department of Education announced the new policies — named the “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools” — in a press release Tuesday. . . . Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Coons said. “We are elevating parents and giving them a seat at the table.”
The model policies replace those released in 2021 under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration, in response to 2020 legislation that called for the drafting of guidelines on how transgender students should be treated. The document directs local school boards to adopt policies that are consistent with the model policies.
[C]ritics say the policies ignore the majority of the 70,000 comments that were submitted about the 2022 proposal.
“We are horrified that VDOE opted to move forward with proposed model policies that at best invite – and at worst, require – discrimination, that violate state and federal law, and that have no place in Virginia schools,” said Breanna Diaz, ACLU of Virginia Policy and Legislative Counsel. “This action ignores the voices of a clear majority of Virginians who submitted comments opposing the model policies when the department first proposed them.”
The Pride Liberation Project, a student group that organized statewide student walkouts in protest of the draft policies in September, has dubbed the model policies “Don’t Be Trans.”
The 2023 model policies largely reiterate the September draft, allowing school personnel to use pronouns that do not correspond to the student’s recorded sex only if a parent provides written permission and requiring that parents be notified of and allowed to refuse any “counseling services pertaining to gender.” The policies also state that teachers cannot be instructed or encouraged to conceal information about a student from a parent, including information related to gender.
Critics of the policies have said these guidelines can “out” students to their parents before they are ready.
The policies also state that teachers, staff and other students cannot be compelled to use a person’s preferred pronouns in “any manner that would violate their constitutionally protected rights.”
A spokesperson from Virginia Beach Public Schools said the division’s administration is reviewing the model policies, and the board will also need to review and discuss them, and “until that time, we are not able to provide further comment.”
Throughout the last school year, dozens of students came to each school board meeting to urge the board to reject the model policies for being discriminatory. They said the policies if implemented would be harmful to transgender students.
Board member Jessica Owens presented a resolution reaffirming the division’s commitment to “nondiscrimination and antiharassment” of LGBTQ youth in its schools as a response to the students and community members who had expressed their concerns. This resolution narrowly passed in a 6-5 vote last month. It is unclear how, if at all, the resolution will impact the board’s decisions regarding the model policies.
For now, school boards around the state will need to determine how they want to handle Youngkin’s finalized model policies.
LeBar said she and her other former classmates have already made plans to address the school board members about upcoming actions regarding the policies. However, she said that they could also be looking to start advocating at the state level as well.
The Pride Liberation Project said it is planning “ mass student mobilization” on the issue.
DeSantis Claims Some Blacks Benefited from Slavery
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters.
DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate who is lagging in polls against the front-runner, former president Donald Trump, and is trying to reset his campaign, quickly drew criticism from educators and even some in his party. He has built his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on attacking what he calls the radical liberal policies of President Biden and the Democratic Party, but the latest remarks could alienate Black voters just as the GOP tries to court them.
Former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, who announced last month that he was joining the race for the GOP nomination, blasted the idea that enslaved people were able to use slavery as some kind of training program.
“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
DeSantis, however, is continuing to defend Florida’s new curriculum, which covers a broad range of topics and includes the assertion for middle school instruction that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Civil rights leaders, educators and others have expressed revulsion at the idea that enslaved people benefited from the experience.
As Biden’s running mate, Vice President Harris has stepped up her attack-dog role, and on Friday traveled to Jacksonville to assail DeSantis’s policies in his home state. She emphasized that slavery involved rape, torture and “some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat who last year became the first Black woman to become House Democratic Leader, called DeSantis’s latest remarks a continuation of DeSantis’s “assault on Black history.”
“Let’s really dissect what he’s saying here,” she said. “He’s saying that to be ripped away from your homelands and brought to another country against your will, or to be born into the atrocity of the dehumanizing institution that was slavery, that those horrors are some way somehow outweighed by the benefit that you get a trade. Are you kidding me?”
Biden campaign co-chairman Cedric L. Richmond attacked DeSantis’s defense of the new Florida curriculum as “disgusting.” He added in a statement on Saturday that it was “a symptom of the extremism that’s infected the Republican candidates running for president. There’s no debate over slavery. It was utterly evil with zero redeeming qualities.”
Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University and author of “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes,” said DeSantis would gain no political advantage from his argument because “it is so outrageous that people are going to reject it.”
“These children know in their hearts and in their minds that slavery was evil,” he said.
“One of the main things about slavery, beyond the physical damage that it did to people of so many generations, was that it prevented people from becoming what they could have become,” he said.
“So what if you became a carpenter or a blacksmith or a good maid? Your chances of that were not determined by you, it was determined by somebody else. That’s not a rationalization for enslavement.”
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