Playing Make-Believe with Students’ Biological Sexes

Bishop Thomas Daly: “We Are Playing Make-Believe with Students’ Biological Sexes” by Kevin Wells at Crisis Magazine. Bishop Daly stated: “The Catholic school’s mission is suffering terribly because we are playing make-believe with students’ biological sexes. I’ve found myself thinking more and more about Truth. Is there Truth in that [IAAM] policy? No. We are created man and woman in the image and likeness of God—the notion that we assign it to us is a falsehood. This notion has ripped us apart in our culture, and especially hit hard [are] our young people. When we in the Church deny the youth a clear understanding of our Christian anthropology, we have deeply harmed them. And it is something we will answer for from God.” Read Bishop Earl Boyea: We Need to “Form the Culture, Rather than Have it Form Us” by Jim Graves at Catholic World Report. CWR: “Enrollment in your diocesan schools increased 6% last year at a time when other dioceses are closing schools. What has been key to your success?” Bishop Boyea: “We insist that our Catholic schools are fully Catholic, and we’ve had some wonderful superintendents. I think our schools have been a draw to many parents because [parents] are disenchanted with the way things are going in our culture. They are looking for a solid Catholic formation and education.” Read This Year, Bring the First Friday Devotion to Your Catholic School by John Grondelski at National Catholic Register. Catholic schools exist to educate, but they also exist to form their students. They exist to bear witness to Christ, bringing students closer to him. For Catholic students—who should be the first concern of our schools—that closeness rightly finds sacramental expression. Restoring First Friday Communion, apart from its lifelong spiritual benefit according to the Lord’s Promise, can play critical concrete as well as pedagogical roles in shaping students’ sacramental praxis. Pastors—why not raise it with your teachers? Teachers and principals—how about it? Parents—if neither the pastor nor the school staff has talked about it, how about raising it with them? What’s holding us back? Read Phonics Is Back; Did It Ever Leave Catholic Schools? by Joan Frawley Desmond at National Catholic Register. “All of these misdirected education philosophies come out of schools of higher learning,” [Mary Pat] Donoghue reported, noting that these problematic theories have influenced teachers and administrators in Catholic schools, as well. Yet the most frustrating part of the current national debate over phonics and the science of reading for experts like Donoghue is the fact that the discussion isn’t new. Indeed, it was supposed to be settled more than two decades ago, when a government-commissioned panel of literacy experts issued a report in 2000 that endorsed systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics, combined with vocabulary-rich readers that helped boost comprehension, as the most predictable path to literacy. Read NY Court’s Ruling Against Yeshiva University Should Concern Religious Schools Everywhere by Andrea Picciotti-Bayer at National Catholic Register. The court brushed aside Yeshiva’s Free Speech and Freedom of Association arguments, asserting that by giving Pride Alliance formal recognition, Yeshiva would not “make a statement” or be “inconsistent with the purpose of Yeshiva’s mission.” Yeshiva’s requests for interim or emergency relief in the New York courts have since been denied. This is a scandal, and it’s clear that the Supreme Court must now review the case against Yeshiva in order to vindicate the autonomy of religious institutions like Yeshiva and to clarify how lower courts should evaluate religious objections to local laws. Read Neo-Marxing the College Board with AP African American Studies by Stanley Kurtz at National Review. A new and sweeping effort to infuse leftist radicalism into America’s K–12 curriculum has begun. The College Board—the group that runs the SAT test and the Advanced Placement (AP) program—is pilot-testing an AP African American Studies course…. The College Board’s monopoly over Advanced Placement testing gives it the ability to act as an unelected national school board, effectively nullifying state and local control over course content by imposing what amounts to a national curriculum. Creating a series of AP ethnic- and gender-studies courses would be a clever way of introducing leftist identity politics to the very states currently resisting such curricula. Something like this has already happened with the College Board’s AP U.S. History, AP European History, and AP World History courses. AP African American Studies, however, takes leftist indoctrination to a whole new level. Read DeSantis: Purpose of Education is to Educate, Not ‘Indoctrinate’ Kids by Douglas Blair at The Stream. The governor targeted teachers unions as a negative influence in achieving better school choice policies in Florida, and said his state was planning on reforming how families could use state scholarship funds to choose where to send their kids to school. “There’s an opportunity for some innovation with [scholarships] if it’s an account that the parents can control that can be tuition, but could also be for tutoring or for other services,” DeSantis said. “The parent will be able to make a whole host of other choices to give their kids the most opportunity possible.” Read Harvard Students Could be Punished for Not Using Preferred Pronouns: Report by Jeremiah Poff at Washington Examiner. A Title IX training at Harvard University reportedly told students that failing to use a person's preferred pronoun could be a violation of university policy…. In May, a school district in Wisconsin initiated disciplinary proceedings against three male students who refused to address another student by his or her preferred pronouns. In June, Fairfax County Public Schools strengthened district policies that could see students punished for the same infraction. The Department of Education has proposed an updated regulation to Title IX that would…. include gender identity and sexual orientation as protected classes under the definition of "sex" in the law. Read Notre Dame Requires Gender Ideology Training Session by Ellie Gardey at The American Spectator. The University of Notre Dame required incoming students to engage in a video-based gender ideology training session last month before they could move into one of the university’s dormitories, all of which have their own Catholic chapel and celebrate Sunday Mass…. A priest who is the vice president for student affairs, the Rev. Gerard Olinger, says in the introductory video that the teachings of the Catholic Church are “at the heart” of how the university approaches “differences in sexual orientation and gender identity.” Another video teaches students the central tenets of gender ideology, including “transgender,” “cisgender,” “questioning,” “gender expression,” “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” and “sexual orientation,” presenting them as established fact. It tells students that a “transgender” person is “someone whose internal gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex.” Read Throwback Thursday Clinging to God and Grammar by Carl R. Trueman at First Things on September 23, 2021. The battle over pronouns on social media and in public spaces, as trivial as it seems, is actually of great importance. The abandonment of reality that queer ideology demands may be marketed as nothing more than sensitivity toward the feelings of others, but in fact it is imposing a view of the relationship between language and reality that makes the latter nothing more than a function of the former. And the reason it is being pressed with such force is because it is a bid for power by those who deem any and all categories oppressive except those they invent themselves. They hate reality. And they hate the God who made that reality and the grammar and syntax by which it is expressed. Read