PUBLIC FUNDING OF EDUCATION IS CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Last week, it was the Utah legislature injecting itself into its state universities' core curricula.  But the fun goes on in the common schools as well.

To a naïve view, the local government school ought to be the canonical manifestation of Governance by Wise Experts: people knowledgeable in the ways kids develop would design suitable curricula, and the kids would learn, and voters could rest assured that their kids were developing their social and cultural capital.  "If there's broad consensus on what the common schools ought be teaching, the school board election is probably no big deal, and it doesn't much matter who runs, or who turns out to vote." That might not be what parents are seeing, particularly through the telescreens their kids have been chained to for much of the past two years.

That post also observed, "Might state operation of schools be even more dangerous to intellectual development than state operation of churches or mosques?"

Dear reader, it can always get more interesting.

A group of Somali Muslim families in the Minneapolis area has won a tremendous victory for themselves and for all parents: they’ve secured the right to keep their children out of the local school district’s LGBTQ propaganda. For that, all parents, both in the Minneapolis area and elsewhere around the country, owe them a debt of gratitude. The only people who could possibly find this disturbing are the propagandists themselves — oh, and Old Joe Biden, as it spells extremely bad news for the already fraying leftist/Islamic alliance.

The Daily Wire reported Thursday that the St. Louis Park Public School District west of Minneapolis “says it will let families opt out of LGBT curriculum materials after several Muslim families threatened to sue.” The Muslim families asserted that “not allowing families to opt out potentially violates the Constitution and state law,” and apparently the school district thought that they had a strong enough case that it folded, rather than fight them in court.

Of course, school district officials in Minneapolis, which has a significant Somali Muslim population, may not have wanted to appear so “Islamophobic” as to fight Muslim families in court. This was especially true because the families based their case on Islam: “on November 2, the families’ attorneys sent the district a letter explaining Islamic teachings around gender and sexuality and outlining the timeline of parents’ complaints about the LGBT books.”

The real pity here is that Christian parents and those from other faith groups didn’t join the legal case as well. The Muslim families acted after “some of the families’ elementary school children had been exposed to LGBT characters in picture books, which caused ‘significant confusion and distress,’” according to the letter the families sent to the school district. Christian and other parents have also experienced “significant confusion and distress” over this propaganda being forced onto their children, and they should have protested.

Leave the culture-wars editorializing out of it.  Leave also the possibility that the Christian parents most likely to be put off by the new sexual dispensation in the government schools have homeschooling and Christian academy options they are probably already exercising.  It is interesting, though, watching people who claim to be about "inclusive and welcoming spaces" having to contort themselves to play Oppression Olympics.  It's interesting, also, watching populist pundits score political points rather than build coalitions.

Yet that alliance ultimately cannot hold together. There is no way that the Biden regime, which has already showcased Rachel Levine and Sam Brinton, is going to abandon its LGBTQ base, but Biden’s handlers are going to discover, if they don’t know already, that there are many more Muslims than just those in Minneapolis and Dearborn who find all that intolerable, particularly when it is pushed on their children in a school setting. As the 2024 election approaches, Old Joe and those who are really running his tragicomic opera in the White House will do their best to keep the coalition together, but it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.

Where are the conservative, libertarian, and populist campaigners working with Moslem citizens to sell the merits of school choice, of protecting productive citizens from criminals and tax collectors alike, of living your best life without the orthodoxies of the culture-studies seminar or of the madrassa?