On Creating Victims

When concern for "parental rights" damages the community

Last week, the Religion News Service reported on a case in Montgomery County, Maryland where a group of parents had sued the local school district so that their students could opt-out of hearing LGBTQ books read in elementary language arts classes. In this instance, a federal judge ruled against the parents, arguing that exposure to LGBTQ information falls short of indoctrination.

The Becket Fund, one of the Christian Legal Organizations I often write about, promised to appeal the ruling.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the legal group representing the parents, said it would appeal the decision. “The School Board should let kids be kids and let parents decide how and when to best educate their own children consistent with their religious beliefs,” wrote Becket Vice President Eric Baxter in a statement.

While this particular case seems promising in stemming the tide on such challenges, it’s quite likely to remain an outlier.

Becket’s statement also raises the religious freedom questions I was wrestling with last week. Why is it that some families’ religious beliefs trump the views of public school teachers and administrators? Why should their views be more significant than those of all the other parents in the school, who also have an interest in “how and when to best educate their children”?

Far too often, these conservative critiques are meant to cower principals and school boards. To say that these groups are conflict avoidant is an understatement!¹

Consider another case, this one from Cobb County, Georgia. A little over a week ago, the Washington Post reported on a fifth grade teacher who was fired by her local school board for reading My Shadow Is Purple, a book for 4-9 year olds according to Amazon’s webpage. Fifth graders are older than the recommended age range.

The point of the book is that the dad’s shadow is blue and the mom’s is pink. The child’s shadow is purple. It does represent the ways that gender binaries are not rigid, especially moving into middle school years.

However, on Thursday the Cobb County School Board of Education voted along partisan lines to reject the tribunal’s decision [to reinstate her], with three Democrats opposing the decision to fire her and four Republican lawmakers upholding it.

This is the natural outgrowth of the “divisive topics” laws that have passed in a number of states. The school district spokesperson said that they were opposed to “one-sided viewpoints” (which seems as far from the books subject matter as one can get).

Here’s the kicker: the teacher bought My Shadow is Purple at THE SCHOOL BOOK FAIR! So now, I guess, Scholastic Books has joined the Woke Mob!

What prompted me to write this post, however, was not these two cases. It was a long story, also in the Washington Post², about a sex educator in the Holland, Michigan County Department of Health who has come under fire from the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners.

Heather Alberda (Washington Post)

Having lived in Michigan from 2011 to 2021, I know that the Holland area is more religious than most. But it is by no means homogeneous. The Association of Religion Data Archives pegs it as 21% Evangelical, 12% Mainline, 10% Catholic, and 1% Other Religions. That leaves about 56% non-religious.

Alberda has been with the health department in her current role of 21 years. The Post story reports on the impact that having sex information as part of public health has had.

In her 21 years at the health department, the county’s teen pregnancy rate had decreased by 76 percent and is the fourth-lowest among Michigan’s 83 counties. The abortion rate for Ottawa County during the same period fell by 18 percent, according to state data.

So what’s the problem now? Not surprisingly, the answer is that a group of religious conservatives organized by Ottawa Impact took control of the County Commission. One of their goals was to address the culture war topics of the day. One of the new commissioners, Sylvia Rhodea, was concerned about the LGBTQ flag.

To Rhodea, it meant something very different. It was, she announced, “time to define the plus” in the LGBTQ+ movement. “Over 50 different flags are flown under the LGBTQ+ flag,” Rhodea said. Their ranks, she continued, included pedophiles, polygamists and furries, which she described as “those who dress as furry animals and may use litter boxes.”

Alberda stared at her television, where Rhodea had begun talking about the health department’s role in pushing “radical” ideas, rooted in “pedophile-based studies,” on the county’s parents and children.

One could wonder where the commissioner got her information, but you don’t have to look for long. Ottawa Impact has been influenced by a conservative pastor in Wisconsin looking to take control of local governments. The story shows connections to Michael Flynn and Libs of Tic Toc.

So a two decade veteran of the health department, trying to positively impact the community she serves (even if using some innovative strategies that got shot down), has her reputation severely damaged by falsehood and innuendo.

“I have to go into the community, and people think I am a pedophile,” Alberda said. “They don’t think I stole a car or embezzled money. They think I’m a sexual predator.”

The actions taken by the Ottawa County Commission are reminiscent of Heather McGee’s The Sum of Us. When confronted with the issue of integrating public pools, communities simply filled them with concrete. To battle imagined culture wars, the Commission will simply inhibit the very services that created the public health gains described above.

Sidelined to a desk job and limited in her work as a sex educator, Alberda struggles to imagine what her fellow community members think. Here is the closing paragraph of the story.

The service had ended and people were drifting toward the doors. Alberda couldn’t stop thinking about the people in the county who had never met her but still seemed to hate her. The intrusive thoughts would lead her a few days later to take a leave from work and check herself into a faith-based, outpatient psychiatric facility. She had never felt more anxious and lost. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

Here’s the through-line for the story of the parents in Montgomery County, the Cobb County school board that fired the fifth grade teacher, and the Ottawa County Commission. They were willing to impute the worst possible motives to their adversaries. They didn’t just disagree with the Shadow is Purple book, they thought the teacher had an agenda to sexualize children. They didn’t just disagree with the Ottawa Health Department’s strategies, they called them pedophiles.

David French, writing at the same point last week as these other stories (but about the LGBTQ flag shooting in California), addressed the problem of supposed Christians engaging in this kind of culture war victimizing.

I consistently encounter even small-town citizens and public officials who tell their own stories of encountering hatred after defying Christian political or legal demands. Crossing the Christian right increasingly means facing threats, intimidation and, in rare cases, even deadly violence.

Threats, intimidation and violence aren’t exclusive to the right, of course. But there is something particularly painful and puzzling when such expressions of hatred come from people who claim to follow Jesus, the prince of peace. What is happening?

I’ll excuse the “both-sidesing” for the moment. But French raises an important critique. How can Christians make these outrageous claims against others also made in the image of God? What can possibly excuse making outrageous claims about other individuals?³

French goes on:

Political Christianity embodies the logic of religious war. It sees threats to American faith primarily outside the church, creating a sense of siege. It casts kindness as weakness, creating incentives for aggression. And since it casts conflicts in the most existential of terms — its political opponents are not misguided fellow citizens, but literally demonic — it raises the temperature to the boiling point.

He closes his piece by arguing that we need a recovery of Virtue. I would agree. Honest brokers recognize the good intentions of those with whom they disagree. They look to value the work done by the other, even while making good faith suggestions about alternative approaches.

This is true for all citizens, especially those in public service on boards and commissions. It especially true for those on boards and commissions who claim to be serving from a point of concern for Christian values.

Those folks need Matthew 15:11 written on their business cards: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”

1. And the school boards live in fear of conservatives saying that they are going after parents who disrupt board meetings, with right wing pundits and congresspeople claiming that they are labeling them “domestic terrorists” and threatening them with arrest (which hasn’t ever happened).

2. I have a daily digital subscription. Jeralynne has a digital NYT subscription. So we get our fill of Mainstream Media every day!

3. My first ever blog was called The Ninth Commandment and focused on Christians’ supposed comfort in lying about contemporary society.