Conservative parents and far-right groups are leveraging school curriculums as a political battleground to gain support in traditionally Democratic suburbs in the United States. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the Chicago suburbs, where tens of thousands of dollars have been spent on the issue ahead of the upcoming April 4 ballot, a new report says.
Diane Canada, founder of the Lady Up America movement, which aims to empower Christian conservative mothers, explains that many conservative parents across the country are unhappy with what they see as a decline in morality in the education system. According to Canada, parents feel that the values being taught in schools are not in line with their own beliefs, and that there appears to be an intentional agenda from the United Nations and Planned Parenthood to sexualize children, which is being passed down into schools through layers of hierarchy.
Canada claims that “potentially well-meaning school board members are being deceived into insidious classroom ideology that appears reasonable and harmless on the surface. Unfortunately, it is anything but harmless, especially in the eyes of American parents who want to shield the innocence of their children.”
A recent report by the Chicago Tribune highlighted resident Donna Marino’s story of being pushed to resign from a local school board in Oswego, Illinois, after being met with threats from some parents who opposed the district’s continued masking mandates and how race and sex education were being addressed in the classroom.
Canada acknowledges that the outrage conservative parents feel “does not entitle them to a pass for bad or harmful behavior” when it comes to addressing school administrators and board members. She urges conservative parents to learn to channel their protective instincts more productively to avoid appearing in the media as “unhinged.”
“All it does is further feed the well-spun narrative of the left and we lose even more ground in the court of public opinion,” the author of “Lady Up + Don’t Quit!” says.
“We used to have common ground on what was appropriate for our children to be exposed to, and we had teachers/administrators that upheld that value system. That is no longer the case,” Canada says. “Conservative parents are enraged at how far we have drifted from the shore of morality in our school system.”
TMX contributed to this story.
