There is a movement called ESG (which stands for environmental, social and governance) that was not widely known when I moved away from the East Coast.
While the ESG lobby was laying out its plans and gaining traction, very few of us new settlers suspected that many small towns in the countryside here in Washington could get sucked into the ESG paradigm, especially so in the Northwest where people seem warmer, happier and more independent than those back East.
Now, we have a more serious problem where a sizable minority of citizens in our own backyard think ESG and its public school offshoot, social emotional learning (SEL), which is also known as CRT or critical race theory, are good ideas.
While ESG is essentially a totalitarian incentive program designed to force behaviors on the public by using an individual’s social credit score, SEL and CRT are clearly indoctrination programs meant to reshape the outlook of children based on the criteria of race and gender, and gender fluidity.
The COVID pandemic gave the public plenty of reasons not to trust federal, state and local government, including professionals within the medical establishment, with any life altering decisions. These ranged from making untested vaccinations mandatory to the suspension of constitutional norms around election transparency and certification, to radicalized de-funding of law enforcement because of Marxist ideology.
These same aligned actors in government, who lack the humility, honesty and integrity to admit when they are wrong, are now literally going after altering our children both physically and mentally with the use of SEL and CRT programs in the public schools.
Children are very impressionable, so any subject matter that goes in their minds while in school should be something that compliments and enhances the child’s life outside of school. Sadly, SEL and CRT do the opposite. They create division.
A child’s foundation comes from their life at home. The family unit and the way it self organizes (or self governs), and self prioritizes is universal. The father and mother team up to be providers, comforters, disciplinarians and mentors to their children. Communities grow from families, not government authority.
HR 5, the Parents Bill of Rights Act recently passed by Congress, is a step in the right direction. Some of the notable highlights range from parents and guardians having access to the curriculum of their child’s school to meeting with each teacher and their child at least twice each school year, reviewing the budget, including all revenues and expenditures of their child’s school, inspecting the books and other reading materials in the library of their child’s school, addressing the school board, receiving information about the violent activity in their child’s school, and knowing if their child is not grade-level proficient in reading or language arts at the end of third grade.
The bill also requires that schools consisting of only grades five to eight obtain parental consent before changing a minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name on school forms; or allowing a child to change their sex-based accommodations.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voted nay on this legislation.
Matt Garland,
Olympia
