I think it is fair to conclude at this point (if it was not already obvious) that the American Civil Liberties Union has abandoned its original mission of being a neutral and non-partisan guardian of individual rights to being one more activist political tool of the Left. Its hostility toward transparency for school curricula marks a 180 decree turnaround for the ACLU, which has traditionally argued for government transparency in all its activities, including public school education.
One more time, the corrupting influence here is race and “social justice,” which increasingly are regarded as taking priority over all else. Enacting the racial agenda of Black Lives Matters and its allies (like the Democratic Party) now justifies tactics and activities that the ACLU once opposed consistently. Government indoctrination is no longer an offense to freedom of speech and thought, apparently. The ends justify the means.
Once upon a time, Nevada’s ACLU fought fought for transparency when The Silver State’s schools were establishing their sex education lesson plans. Staci Pratt, Legal Director of the ACLU of Nevada, said at the time, “The days of back door decision making are over. Compliance with the open meetings law is meant to secure the opportunity of parents, students, and community members to have a meaningful impact on the development of policy. We are all well served when decisions on the appointment of sex education advisory committee members is subject to public scrutiny, rather than the result of the presentation of a narrow range of interests.” The ACLU of Kentucky used records requests to uncover curriculum plans in all of Kentucky’s 173 school districts, seeking to find evidence of religious instruction:
The ACLU-KY sent requests to all of Kentucky’s 173 school districts seeking policies and curriculum for “Bible Literacy” courses. While most districts are not offering these courses, the ACLU-KY found many of the courses that are being offered do not fall within constitutional strictures, which require any use of religious text in the classroom to be secular, objective, nondevotional, and must not promote any specific religious view.
The investigation uncovered public school teachers using the Bible to impart religious life lessons (Barren, McCracken, and Letcher Counties), use of online Sunday School lessons and worksheets for course source material and assignments (Letcher and Wayne Counties), and rote memorization of Biblical text (McCracken County) — practices which fall far short of academic and objective study of the Bible and its historical context or literary value.
But that was baaad indoctrination, you see. Teaching Critical Race Theory-ish interpretations of American history that tar whites as intrinsically racist, blacks as handicapped by intransigent systemic racism, and, as a special bonus, that a person is whatever gender they decide to be are all good indoctrination, and if overly conservative, contrarian or controlling parents are inclined to interfere, well, the ACLU holds that schools are justified in making sure the Neanderthals don’t find out what’s being taught.
I blame Darwin for all of this—well, Darwin and the lack of integrity in the ACLU. The Theory of Evolution was viewed by some rigid religious sects as hostile to a literal reading of the Bible, and families in those sects did not approve of their children being taught that their parents were wrong and their religion was bunk. Thus laws were passed to ban the teaching of Darwin’s theories (which are more than theories, forming the basis of a large portion of modern science). Those laws couldn’t stand constitutional scrutiny, but the alternative religious argument, so-called “intelligent design,” was problematically declared a taboo topic in public schools, which cannot, it has been decided, “promote religion.” Darwin himself mused about intelligent design, wondering, in one famous example, how natural selection could explain the Venus Flytrap. But the Courts ruled that such subversive ideas weren’t allowed in the classroom.
However, there is a crucial distinction between teaching science as it is understood at a given time and teaching political and social theories involving race and gender. There is no reason for the public schools to be teaching about race and gender at all, except regarding historical events and legal principles. Opinions and theories regarding the influence of race and gender on American society are beyond the expertise of public school teachers to explore, and beyond the maturity of 1-12 grade students to assess. If a school or a teacher proposes to venture into such metaphorical landmine littered grounds, parents certainly have the right to be fully aware of what will be taught. They should also have a veto.
The ACLU’s tweet is a clarion call for the government to decide what America’s children should think as determined by the government’s agents. The education establishment’s obsession with race and gender propaganda should be chilled, if students’ parents choose to chill it. The ACLU is now on the side that embraces government indoctrination in areas previously reserved for responsible parenting.
That means that it is the ACLU is name only. At this point, the U.S. has no guardian of its civil liberties, at least no trustworthy one.
Ethics Alarms 
Yes, transparency in what the government is doing in the public sector… will chill government expression… so that the government won’t teach children things without their parents’ knowledge and consent. How are they equating this to chilling free private expression without their brains seizing up from the dishonesty? The government doesn’t have civil liberties or the right to free speech, and it doesn’t have the right to hide what children learn in school.
Civil liberties exist so the government stays accountable to the people and the people don’t find themselves under the government’s thumb. The whole point of a civil liberty is that even though it can be abused, it’s still too important to take away. If someone makes an excuse for revoking it in an emergency they’d better create and adhere to a timeline for restoring it. If we’re afraid of people abusing their civil liberties, we should do something more constructive to prevent that rather than just taking said liberties away.
If the ACLU doesn’t trust private citizens to make decisions about their children’s wellbeing, which I do understand and sympathize with, then they should make sure someone else handles that problem.
Nice take, EC!
“Civil liberties exist so the government stays accountable to the people and the people don’t find themselves under the government’s thumb.”
Reminded me of a quote from Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite flicks, mostly because of Robin Williams’ superb performance….and…um…Minnie Driver…
Anywho, Matt Damon’s Will Hunting: Now, liberty, in case you’ve forgotten, is the soul’s right to breath. And when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdered too tight.
I got an insight into the priorities of the ACLU and of a freedom of information center many years ago. As a graduate student in journalism some 40 years ago, writing a paper on societal controls of information, I researched and wrote about the ACLU’s efforts then to squelch information on the fees paid by public universities to guest speakers.
From the standpoint of the ACLU, making public the payment of high fees paid to speakers might adversely impact the willingness of public universities to continue paying those high fees. It might also cause some speakers to have second thoughts about speaking for such fees, lest they look like (or be revealed as) money-grubbers.
Worse, in my opinion, was the decision by the head of the freedom of information center, which, just as it sounds, claimed to stand for freedom of information. I was told that while my paper was researched and written well, and while it make a cogent argument, it would not be published because it might have a chilling effect on monetary contributions to the center from the ACLU.
I strongly believe, especially when it comes to the spending of taxpayer dollars, that information about the operation of our various governments should be readily available to the public to the maximum extent possible. No taxation without representation was a rallying call many years ago; concealing the use of tax dollars from the public is likewise a denial of representation.
Frankly, I think that the ACLU has gone even farther astray these days and no longer stands for civil liberties for all, as it supposedly once did. But, I suspect that money is the root cause, as it seemed to be back in my graduate school days; there simply is more money in supporting progressive causes than there is in supporting actual civil rights for all.
“I blame Darwin for all of this—well, Darwin and the lack of integrity in the ACLU. The Theory of Evolution was viewed by some rigid religious sects as hostile to a literal reading of the Bible, and families in those sects did not approve of their children being taught that their parents were wrong and their religion was bunk.”
I’m almost certain that this is tongue in cheek, and that I’m taking this far too seriously, but….
To be fair… That’s not Darwin’s problem. We can see evolution in real time; We can breed traits into or out of fruitflies in a matter of weeks because of their quick gestation periods. We can see how we as a species have evolved over the course of the last 300 years: We’re taller, and it’s not all attributable to nutrition. Even if our current understanding of evolution is not complete, something obviously exists, and the species are not locked into a God-created stasis. The problem was, and has always been, Catholicism’s raw-nerve approach to anything that didn’t conform to a plain reading of scripture. It’s not Darwin’s fault that he was right, it’s Catholicism’s fault for not adjusting to the best information we have.
This is why the gutting of church power was necessary. Astronomers had known for hundreds of years that the Earth revolved around the sun, before Copernicus put forth a “radical theory” of it in the early 1500’s. Strangely, the church only took offense with it 70 years later when Galileo was playing with the concepts. Galileo, for the great crime of ignoring the edicts of the church and insisting that Copernican Astrology was correct and the Earth did revolve around the Sun, was convicted of heresy and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life in 1633.
This is a cautionary tale, both for the church and government: Why put God’s credibility on the line for something that is measurable, and that you are wrong about? One ought to be loathe to put too much stock in the purity of their narratives, because reality has this awful habit of asserting itself.