I know. Sounds like a Jimmy Hoffa “alternative lifestyle” porno flick. But it’s actually even worse. From the WSJ:
Here’s a pop quiz: Who’s donated the most money to an effort in California to defeat Proposition 8, an initiative on the November 4 ballot that would define marriage as between a man and a woman in the state?
A) Gay-advocacy organizations
B) Civil-rights groups
C) The California Teachers Association
If you guessed “C,” you understand the nature of modern liberal politics. And if you didn’t, perhaps you’re wondering what exactly gay marriage has to do with K-12 public education. The high school dropout rate is 1-in-4 in California and 1-in-3 in the Los Angeles public school system, odds that worsen considerably among black and Hispanic children. So you might think the CTA, the state’s largest teachers’ union, would have other priorities.
Yet last week the union donated $1 million to the “No on Proposition 8” campaign. Of the roughly $3 million raised by opponents of the measure so far, $1.25 million has come from the teachers’ union. “What does this cause have to do with education?” said Randy Peart, a public school teacher in San Juan who was contacted by a local television station. “Why not put that money into classrooms, into making a better place for these kids?”
In fact, the CTA and its parent organization, the National Education Association, have used tens of millions of dollars in mandatory teachers’ dues to advance all manner of left-wing political causes. And members like Ms. Peart are right to ask questions. In some years barely a third of the NEA’s budget has gone toward improving the lot of teachers themselves.
In addition to vigorously fighting school choice and other reforms that benefit underprivileged children but threaten the public education monopoly, the NEA has directly (or via state affiliates) bankrolled Acorn, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and, naturally, the Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights.”
Public school teachers of America, take note. This is your dues money at work.
B-but — who can be against “equal rights”? And how dare the WJS question educators who are using their money to fight hate!
Why, they must be RACISTHOMOPHOBES! BURN THEM!
— Or, and here’s another (racist, homophobic) way of looking at it: why would the CTA and NEA presume to “speak” — and make no mistake: this is in effect what they are doing by requiring mandatory dues, and then using those dues to fight political policy battles — for the entirety of their rank and file as if that rank and file was politically homogeneous?
And the answer is, quite simply, that part of the requirements for membership in the fraternity of teachers is an acquiescence to the ascendant group narrative as defined by the union “leadership”. In this sense, heretical teachers are much like gays or blacks or women who wander off the liberal plantation and express individual ideas at odds with the sanctioned positions of their representatives — with the added indignity that they must continue to pay for the privilege of being misrepresented.
And then there are the parents, who in many instances have little choice but to take advantage of the public school system. Which means more and more these days, sending your child off to a left-liberal indoctrination camp dedicated to the politicizing of anything and everything in the curriculum (with some schools even mandating that each field of inquiry dedicate a portion of its time examining its precepts through the smudged lens of race and gender — making for some interesting lessons, no doubt, on the systemic oppression of fruit flies by an institutionalized white patriarchal logic). The personal being the political, it makes sense that the child under the charge of those who believe such a cheap bumpersticker attempt at mass contextualization be primed for his or her necessary political consciousness raising.
Notes Terry H, who sent along the article:
What does gay marriage have to do with the California Teachers Association?
Everything, if the the CTA is run by the likes of Bill Ayers and dedicated to his vision of social justice. Joe Sixpack probably sees this differently, which just proves how racist, sexist, and homophobic he really is.
Therefore his vote does not count. Joe: just shutup and pay your goddamn taxes. The CTA may not be able to influence you, but they can program your kid so that he will be one with the hive mind.
Oh well.
It will be cool watching classical liberalism and the re-ascendancy of rugged individualism become the new counter culture.
Maybe Tom Robbins will write a book.
A friend of mine has a boss what has advocated for the marriage for years and years. Yay now he can get married. Uh-oh. His partner comes from money and he ain’t having it. It’s a lot heartbreaking and really too funny I think. Mostly cause this guy I think is a tool.
Voting? You mean that quaint custom where people were allowed to
make their choicesindulge their prejudices in private. There’ll be none of that. You don’t think this union card check business will stop there, do you?In California, parents have very little (if any) voice in the curriculum. That’s set by the state department of Education.
One of the commercials inundating the radio these days (paid for by the CTA) says that there’s no requirement to teach k-12 about homosexuality as a “life choice”, which is true. For now, anyway. But the Ed Dept. can change that at it’s whim.
We need to nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
We can start over. With the bees, probably.
(NAME THOSE FILMS!)
waitasec – I thought it wasn’t a choice?
Just take a look at what the “education schools” teach future teachers. Inside Higher Ed periodically has articles on the abominations that Ed schools have become. Virtually nothing that is taught has anything to do with the actual education of children, but rather their indoctrination. Most Ed schools have a policy requiring “activism’ for leftist causes, and actively reject conservative students. I’ll be voting for Prop. 8. A victory may cause a number of exploding heads here in Mexifornia.
Aliens
Wargames
It’s not surprising…
A few years ago, back in good ol’ PG county Maryland, where court enforced bussing costs a little over 1/2 the education budget, the NAACP challenged a group of citezens who were trying to end that practice in order to achieve the dual ends of keeping the budget from increasing, unnecissarily, and getting the most out of the education funding…
Despite the fact that the 1970’s court ruling that mandated the bussing, in the name of integration, was no longer necessary since the county was 80% African-American, the NAACP said their reason for the challenge was necessary; so that the precedent of bussing and enforced integration would not be overturned-the fear was that it might set a precedent that could be used in other places…
Talk about circular logic…
And, at a local magnet school in that same county, Elenor Roosevelt in Greenbelt, 500 seats were held vacant in the TAG program owing to concerns for racial balance-even though there were not enough white kids in that region qualified to fill the slots!
So a number of talented minority kids were made to suffer in the name of phony diversity, and silly quotas…
All brought to you by the steadfastly Democratic, Peoples Republic of Maryland…
there’s alot of that, ginsocal. certain fields only require that you swallow the kool-aid and that you won’t get credentialed otherwise. nothing to do with ability or talent
Wait another second and teh Narrative™ will evolve to counter any logical question posed about normative human behavior.
And, of course, I denounce myself.
The CTA affects my votes every election. As surely as every SEIU endorsement does. If they’re for it, I’m agin’ it! Voting becomes so easy with their help!
“Peoples Republic of Maryland…”
People’s Republic of Baltimore and Surrounding Areas, Bob. The rest of us are fucking serfs.
The funny part is that the most effective ads for the Yes on 8 side have been the ones that involve gay marriage being mandated to be taught to kids.
So of course, they start running ads in favor of gay marriage — funded by the public school teachers’ unions.
A few more years of this and Schwarzenegger’s amendment to require union members to opt IN to make political contributions (right now, they have to opt out in order to have their money not be used for political contributions, which is to say the least not publicized or made easy for them) will win in a walk.
Every once in a while i wish that politics was my beat, simply because i could do investigative reporting on the stuff that big labor does in the name of progressiveism.
i mean that.
Business enterprise, which is my beat, sees nothing like that. What i mean is that when Big biz wades into a subject, they stay miles away from the hot button stuff and focus on arcana, like legal remedies and recoveries.
I bet there are at least some teachers and admins. who want to know why their dues are going to this stuff.
Andrew,
You’re absolutely right; I lived that misery for nearly 30 years…
All of the Gub-mint workers that line the 95 corrdor between DC and Balmer, mostly Dems, select putzes like Sarbanes, Mikulski, and Hoyer for the national office; folks that only seved as an embarrasment to me…
And, I was completely stunned when PG county, where I lived, went overwhelmingly for Ben Cardin over Michael Steel, in the election for the seat that Sarbanes vacated…
For those not familiar with Maryland demographics, PG county is roughly 80% black and another 6% “other” minority; and they voted for a white guy instead of the former lieutenant governor, who is a black man!
But I concede your point, that small geographic area holds the rest of the states politics hostage…
Best Wishes…
Sigh. And I want to be a high school history teacher.
I don’t know where you want to teach, but I wouldn’t do it in CA. My sister is a substitute teacher in Southern CA and she will not sub for the upper grades. The students are openly disrespectful; for instance, they are allowed to call her “bitch” and she is supposed to shrug it off. She prefers the little ones, but even they sometimes have problems.
California and Texas are the two biggies. They’re both large, populous, and have state-wide textbook committees.
That means that if you’re a textbook publisher you have to somehow come up with a book that’s inoffensive to both states (i.e., watered-down pablum) or write off one or the other state.
It is a problem.
As a union member and former union executive, it’s this kind of left wing crap that permeates all unions that make me and many others sick. Believe me, no one asks the rank and file if they are pro-life or choice or pro-gay marriage before the official position is struck. Here in Canada with the Canadian Human Rights Commission standing by, anyone brave enough, especially at the executive level, to question the undemocratic nature of such decisions is lucky to only be branded “old-fashioned” and not hit with some kind of human rights charge. Ask Mark Steyn.
When teasing the roots out of a quartic function, I find it most useful to allow students to interpret the quadratic formula through the lens of the historic oppression of the hispanic subculture within the English speaking portions of the northern hemisphere. There’s really no alternative.
And Euclid was definitely down with the homies. Bitches.
Probably Tim Robbins will make a movie.
I bet there are at least some teachers and admins. who want to know why their dues are going to this stuff.
I was going to mention CWA v Beck, but then I remembered that Congressional Democrats have moved heaven and earth to make sure not so much as a whiff of legislate ever saw daylight if it meant implementing the decision.
That’s “legislation”
Every parent who opposes vouchers for private schools should have to sit two weeks of ed school classes.
Great…now I’m going to have to re-read that book. Which means I’m going to have an allergy attack. Because it’s in a box of paperbacks that used to be in my bedroom that I just rescued from my mother’s basement. Where it got covered in dust and mold and amoebas. Including, probably, the very first amoeba. Which is only interesting only in that the amoeba thing and the big thumbs are the only thing I remember from that book.
I’ll shut up now.
LMC – You should keep it next to your copy of Baseketball.
All you GLBT folks might rethink your position on 8. If I had that “gosh honey, I’d like to but society won’t let us” arrow in my quiver I’d be a free man today.
BTW, I like it when tom robbins does that walking on hot coals.
All you GLBT folks might rethink your position on 8. If I had that “gosh honey, I’d like to but society won’t let us†arrow in my quiver I’d be a free man today.
That’s why gays need marriage. So they can suffer like rest of us.
Let’s spread the wealth!
O!
So the teachers, the one’s who will be getting all the tax cuts after this election are pooling their money to go against the GLBT community and the liberal illuminati? It’s like they don’t know who is going to be feeding them for the next four years.
SGT Ted: That’s been Howard Stern’s argument for years. He’s in favor of gay marriage because he wants gays to suffer through divorce.
It’s only fair.
And of course, I denounce myself as a fascist homophobe…
I came for the Robbins’s O!merica book titling contest.
To win it.
But it’s not here.
We have a likely President with freakishly huge ears whose already crap-Pynchonian name rhymes with how the dimwits who love him pronounce “pyjama” — for starters.
Yet it’s not here.
This is not the whoever-the-fuck-y’all-are I knew.
waitasec – I thought it wasn’t a choice?
Homosexuality is not a choice, yet gender roles are social constructs. Keep the dogma simple, even when it’s contradictory.
It will be cool watching classical liberalism and the re-ascendancy of rugged individualism become the new counter culture.
It already is – ‘Bill Ayers’ is the man, he just doesn’t realize that yet. ‘He’ is the stodgy old establishment.
Stick it to the man. Down with the establishment.
And the wheel turns.
Happyfeet- I have friends in similar circumstances; one is old family, the other is new money and lots of it. Lots of humorous conversations. I understand the interest in being allowed to marry but honestly, my first response is, “terriffic, now we can experience the joys of divorce court and custody hearings. Good times!”
We are all teh GAY, now!
Hoist the rainbow flags, sound the horns!
Break out the rollerblades, bananas and faux fur capes! WOOT! Free at last free at…
Oh, shit! He’s kidding.
DOn’t forget the showtunes.
The No on Prop 8 commercial being aired re> marriage not being taught in schools is so mind-jarringly disconnected it’s hilarious. “Using kids to support a political position is WRONG. Also, women will somehow be harmed if you vote yes on prop 8. VOTE NO ON 8, IT IS A VOTE AGAINST DISCRIMINATION.”
Well, no, you don’t NEED to teach marriage in schools. However, if any school curriculum comes up in which you teach about marriage, if you REFUSE to teach about single-sex marriage being every bit as good as the old institution, you’ll be beaten to death by lawyers with hockey sticks. This is provided 8 passes.
Or something. There’ll be litigation, I’m sure, the first time Heather came home to her two mommies and said the nasty old Catholic schoolteacher said it was wrong for them to be married. And then they’d all smoke pot.
Sorry. Tired.
“For those not familiar with Maryland demographics, PG county is roughly 80% black and another 6% “other†minority; and they voted for a white guy instead of the former lieutenant governor, who is a black man!”
Ah, but he was an Oreo, Bob. Inauthentically black. Authentic Blacks vote the way Big Daddy Democrat tells them to.
[…] PROTEIN WISDOM: “Why, they must be RACISTHOMOPHOBES! BURN THEM!” …. […]