It was only a matter of time before the Colorado Republicans (GOP) found something else to rail against. Call it the latest salvo in the hard-right culture war attack on Americans, which has grown to include the freedoms of public libraries, a play to control public school boards, attacks on the rights of minorities, and LGBTQ+ queer and transgender people, particularly on youth.
Yesterday, the state GOP issued an eblast to its members calling for all children to be pulled from public schools. Their reason? An official claim that public schools are actively working to recruit children to become transgender. Culture war issues, especially involving attacks on gay and transgender people, especially school-age children, have become a focus of Republicans nationwide in 2024.
“All Colorado parents should be aiming to remove their kids from public education,” read the directive from the director of special initiatives for the Colorado GOP Darcy Schoening. He is a former leader of the El Paso County chapter of the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty.
State GOP Chair Dave Williams. Image courtesy of 9News.
Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams who is an avid Trump supporter and 2020 election denier, has pulled and pushed the Colorado Republican Party focusing on cultural issues, while at the same time, from a historical perspective, it has less actual electoral power in this state over the past seven decades. His stance isn’t surprising, given his personal history.
According to Media Matters: “The Republican official also has a history of anti-LGBTQ bigotry. He supported anti-LGBTQ legislation as a state representative and, as a college student, he was impeached as the student body president at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs after attacking LGBTQ students.”
This time what appears to have set off Colorado GOP leadership is a new measure (House Bill 24-1039 passed by the Democratic majority party at the State Capitol and recently signed by Governor Jared Polis) that would require schools to use children’s preferred names, even if they have not gone through a legal name change.
One section of the email reads: “If your child decides he identifies as a girl because he is angry with you, or all of his friends are doing it, the Colorado government will actively encourage his new fetish by allowing him to identify as “she,” “they,” or whatever nonsensical terms your son’s teachers and peers may dream up.”
Williams might also be trying to curry favor with the GOP’s most recent candidate for Governor, Heidi Ganahl. She made a similar announcement against the state’s public school system last year. As first reported by 9News, when “speaking to the Truth and Liberty Conference in Woodland Park, which mixed anti-LGBTQ rhetoric with calls for Christian dominance of government, Ganahl said children should be removed from public schools and placed in church-run schools.”
Exactly how our overworked and underpaid public school teachers could possibly have the time to “indoctrinate students in LGBTQ+ philosophy, or how on earth whatever nonsensical terms your son’s teachers and peers may dream up is a thing, hasn’t been set out.
But the letter from the Colorado Republican Party in an email to members orders them to start paying tuition at Christian private schools. Portions of it were reposted by National Zero today, so readers are welcome to review it.
The invasion of politics into school board policy making is indeed a lamentable process. Unfortunately, the GOP has no real-world solutions to real-world problems like price-wage inflation or what to do when kids use artificial intelligence (A.I.) to write their term papers.
So, they turn to making up problems that they can appear to be solving and they find fertile ground in the board rooms of local school boards by exploiting social issues like gender identity.
Speaking as a long-past member and president of the Buena Vista School Board 1989-1995, BVSD’s school board has far more difficult problems to solve. The censoring of specific library books and outlawing discussions of gender identity problems aren’t items I, as a board president, would casually insert into a meeting agenda.
Far more important are teacher pay schedules and many other budgeting issues, not to mention the curricular issues associated with career technical and college-bound education. And then there are the looming effects of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and its potential effects on curricular activity.
Turning a boardroom into a political arena is not the way we should be educating our kids. To the contrary, we should be leaving our political identities at the door and instead get on with solving real-world problems standing in the way of our kids succeeding in a complex and sometimes hostile real-world setting.
Gary E. Goms
Buena Vista, CO
Let them leave.
Everyone who remains will be better off for their absence. Less kids means more funds to be spent on the kids who remain. Given the demographic in question, it would also mean less time spent listening to obnoxious MAGA loudmouths at school board meetings. Sounds like a win-win to me.
We should also set to work finding legal ways to separate religious schools and private schools from any public funding. If these snowflakes want to send their precious angels to a special school because the think that public school are such awful places, let them pay for it themselves instead of forcing taxpayers to subsidize them.
Let’s be serious, tho. These kids are going nowhere, regardless of GOP bloviating, because most of these angry MAGA people couldn’t afford to pull their kids from public school. This is just more culture war idiocy for the rubes and suckers.
Slight correction Jeff: less children enrolled in public schools decreases public school funding; it is based on a per-child enrollment number for a school district.
I did not know that, but as the GOP hates funding public schools, school teachers, and school libraries, cutting funding to public schools via withdrawing children from public schools is probably part of the plan.
A more appropriate title to this article would be : “THE RADICAL LEFT WING HIGHLY EXAGGERATED POINT OF VIEW OF THE GOP”
Jeez, what a bunch of taken out of context drivel.
A shocked reader
Shawnee, CO
Hi Ron,
Thank you for your comment. In this case the actual words are from the Colorado GOP: “All Colorado parents should be aiming to remove their kids from public education,” read the directive from the director of special initiatives for the Colorado GOP Darcy Schoening.
Should anyone of us really cares what a kid wants to be called? When I was a kid attending a one room country school with eight grades (yes, folks, in Wisconsin). It was a conservative country neighborhood. One of the other children decided he wanted to be called Ralph, when his name was Terry. Another kiddo had an imaginary friend named Sheila who tagged along with him for a few weeks. We just went along with it. Perhpas today’s cu;lture wars are getting out of hand, and we should all take a deep breath.
Where do you get off, directly quoting the words of the Colorado GOP? The nerve! Next thing we know, you’ll be expecting MAGA to accept objective facts like reasonable people!
The GOP is DOA. The wackos referred to in this article are not representative of the republican party or this country. The current GOP seeks not to lead or accomplish anything, but to tear down everything and lie about what they cannot destroy and as I have stated for 3 or 4 decades, If you wish to indoctrinate your children into a bleached world far apart from the real world they will grow up and live in then you are crippling those children. This is not a Christian nation. It is not the business or right of a small group of extremists who will not listen to science, reason or the majority to impose their will on this country. It is unfortunate that those left of the actual republican party sold out to kills the tail of a life long, drug crazed, power hungry imbecile willing to trade our democracy for his personal power. It is a shame that those left on the GOP who can actually read do not have any sense and can do nothing but attack with no argument whatsoever but a bunch of drivel.