One New York Times columnist argues that parents who vote for legislators that temper the cultural Marxist agenda in schools are engaging in a “state-sanctioned heckler’s veto.” So much for “democracy,” I guess. It is true that leftists, who run virtually every major school district in the nation, don’t need any laws or vetoes to dictate curriculums. How else are parents supposed to initiate change? Well, they aren’t, right? That’s the point.īut, of course, most schools are run by the state. The contemporary Left doesn’t believe that parents have any say in which state-run school their children attend or what they are taught in them. Teacher-union types like to argue that parental rights bills are tantamount to telling a doctor how to operate on a patient. A more apt analogy is to say that Democrats want to force patients to undergo elective surgeries performed by untrained quacks. Then again, even if parents who don’t want their prepubescent kids indoctrinated with these ideas are in the minority, why should they be forced to accept instruction or books that have nothing to do with genuine civics or a well-rounded education? Parental rights bills don’t instruct teachers on methods, they only stop strangers from exposing kids to revisionist histories and ideas about sexuality and ideologies that conflict with their beliefs.
When the government restricts free association in the marketplace, or giant tech companies are engaged in a concerted effort to censor ideas and news, we have a reason to worry about the state of free speech. When a heckler’s veto that dominates universities makes it virtually impossible to have an open discourse on campuses, we have reason to worry. “Book bans,” however, are just curriculum choices leftists don’t like. It is certainly true that sometimes priggish moralists are overzealous in their targeting of books, sometimes the bans are plain stupid, sometimes they are political, and sometimes they are initiated by left-wing administrations (as has been the case for years).
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