Parents are outraged after a California high school almost permitted a self-professed BDSM expert to address students as part of a LGBT “support” week.
RealClearPolitics reported that Sage Creek High School’s Gender Sexuality Alliance club invited Mita Beach of the gender “transition” clinic DAP to speak in the school cafeteria for “Ally Week.” Uproar quickly spread, however, upon review of Beach’s online presence, which turned up his expertise leading workshops named “Kink 101” and “Examining Self-Injurious Behavior, Erotic Play, and Body Modification”; photos of himself with pentagram chest tattoos and “appearing to hold up a much smaller person who is grasping his bare back as whips and chains are displayed in the background”; and “memes and cartoons (he shared on social media) with Satanic or anti-Christian themes.”
Parents knew about the general purpose of Ally Week but only discovered Beach’s invitation through the GSA’s Instagram posts. Days before the start of Ally Week, one parent wrote to Sage Creek principal Josh Way requesting to attend Beach’s talk. Way initially refused, suggesting a state law giving parents the right to observe on-campus activities did not apply because their student wasn’t a GSA member and was unlikely to attend. The parent responded that their child was planning to attend, and that the talk would be open to all students rather than just club members, adding that other parents were planning to attend as well.
Way responded that Beach’s appearance had been canceled, and that parents would only be allowed to attend if the GSA invited them.
On May 8, Assistant Superintendent Megan Arias wrote a response to parent objections claiming GSA chose to disinvite Beach with no influence from school officials, that the district could not reject club-selected guest speakers just because of “affiliation with or membership in an organization absent reasonable support that the guest speaker’s presentation will result in substantial interference with the operations of the school site”; and that “though the state education system has the awesome responsibility of inculcating moral and political values, that does not permit educators to act as ‘thought police’ inhibiting all discussion that is not approved by, and in accord with the official position of, that state.”
“Parents ought to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own child’s education,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Vincent Wagner responded to RCP. “They’re the ones who have the fundamental right to make decisions about how their kids are educated.”
The indoctrination of children with radical sexual ideologies and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental knowledge or consent. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas, regardless of their treatment of or rapport with gender-confused students. In recent years, such trends have provoked a backlash with the election of Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin in Virginia and Ron DeSantis in Florida.
More than 30 states have introduced legislation eliminating diversity programs from education as part of a broader push against so-called “woke ideology.”