Sexual Orientation Being Taught In Private Schools With Ryan Foley And Mike Farris – Private schools are not immune to the teaching of sexual orientation for kids. How can parents find out if their schools are teaching this? How can you protect your children from this? Does your children belong to the Government, or to you? Tune in to hear the answers to these questions and more!

Air Date: 04/13/2022

Guest: Ryan Foley and Mike Farris

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

 

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders Live. And I’m Rick Green, former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach, joining you with David Barton, he’s America’s premier historian and our founder of WallBuilders, and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders.

You can learn more about us at our website, wallbuilderslive.com. Or you can just come hang out with us for the weekend, April 22nd and 23rd, we’re going to be doing a Biblical Citizenship in modern America live and in-person at the American Journey experience in Dallas, Fort Worth. This is going to be an amazing weekend. It is not too late for you to register. There are a few seats left. Check it out today at patriotacademy.com. That’s patriotacademy.com to join us for the live and in-person biblical citizenship course. Not only David Barton and Tim Barton and myself Rick Green, but also pastor Rob McCoy, Mark Meckler, Brad Stein, Allen West, Kirk Cameron, the list goes on and on and on. I’m forgetting some people.

But we’re going to have a great time and you will get to tour the American Journey experience which is a combination of the Barton’s incredible library museum along with Glenn Beck’s, just an amazing, amazing weekend. We hope to see you there.

Alright, guys, we’ve got a couple of great interviews set up for today in this program. We’re kind of really following up on yesterday, we had Ken Ivory on the program yesterday, state rep from Utah. Folks, if you missed it, it’s available at our website wallbuilderslive.com. And Tim, you mentioned yesterday that this issue of the sexualization of the children through so many of these books and things that are being done is not just public schools, it’s private schools as well?

Tim:

Yeah, the reality is that bad philosophy in education is not something that just permeates public schools. There are a lot of private schools and a lot of Christian schools, that the teachers in these schools, unfortunately, went to a lot of the same secular institutions, bought into the same secular pedagogy and ideology of education. And a lot of even the curriculum being used are things that is a very secular, worldly, ungodly curriculum. And so even some of these Christian schools, there is stuff being promoted that should be appalling to parents, if parents knew about it.

Now, unfortunately, most parents, especially if their kids are going to a private school, or even more so a Christian school, you would feel hey, my kids are safe. You know, it’s a Christian school and so we generally know the values that are being taught there. Unfortunately, at a lot of these Christian schools, it’s not the values and the principles of the Bible Christianity that’s being taught there. And actually, guys, there was an article which kind of led us to say, hey, we maybe we should have this person on to have an interview. But there was an article we read that even highlighted some of the craziness of what is being taught in some of these Christian schools and exposing some what was happening for parents to even be aware of what was going on.

Rick:

Yeah, Tim, Ryan Foley is the author of that article and investigated a lot of this and revealed some things, I think, should have our listeners’ concern because you often think get kids out of public school, get them into private school, everything’s going to be fine. But Tim, you nailed it. It’s really across the board in education. So Ryan Foley is actually with us now. Ryan, thanks for joining the program and being on WallBuilders Live today.

Ryan:

Good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Rick:

Hey, well, thanks for your article revealing, I got to point out, folks that are listening, we’re talking private schools, these are not public schools we’re about to talk about. These are private schools that are teaching all kinds of gender craziness and LGBTQI, whatever the letters are, now activism in the schools. And Ryan, you had an article on Christian Post about this. I’m assuming most people assume if it’s private school, you’re not having to deal with all this stuff, that’s apparently not what’s happening?

Ryan:

Yeah, the National Association of Independent Schools had a workshop in 2020 and it talked about one particular school that’s part of its network, which has over 900 schools nationwide, it’s Belmont Day School in Belmont, Massachusetts was promoting its comprehensive, dynamic, responsive health and wellness curriculum with a developmentally appropriate pre-K-8 gender identity and sexuality strand.

And in pre-K, they asked students, what do they feel like inside, do they feel like a boy or girl? What does their head say? Does their head and their heart and their body match up? And everybody tool appeared as a screen where a woman was speaking talking about how there was a diagram featuring a human body with icons representing the brain, heart and DNA. And key on the side of streaming and the phrase gender identity next to the brain icon, the phrase sexual orientation besides the heart icon and the word sex alongside the DNA icon. So this is children as young as pre-K that are learning about gender identity in the school.

Rick:

Wow! In private school, so we’ve known this was a real problem in the public schools: the mama bears are up in arms all over the country, going to the school boards, these public schools, saying Enough of this nonsense, this has got to stop. But yet here we are private schools and this is not as you said a small little network of schools, they boast 1,900 schools across the United States, including more than 1,600 private K-12 schools. So 1,600 private schools, and clearly they’re showing these teachers in the schools and encouraging them to teach to little kids. I mean, we’re talking 5, 6, 7, 8 year old kids all of these questions about do you feel like a boy or a girl and all about sexuality? I mean, this has got to be shocking to parents that think they’re safe, you think you pull your kid out of public school, put them in private school, that you’re safe, and you find out the exact same thing is being taught. How do people find out if it’s happening at their particular private school?

Ryan:

You would have to ask. I mean, there’s a lot of parental involvement in education. Unfortunately, parents with children in private schools do not enjoy basic civil rights protections that are afforded in public institutions. And I talked to the Family Research Council, who gave me a statement saying that the recourse the parents have is to remove their child from the school since groups like NAIS are training private school teachers and administration to promote LGBT materials even to very young students. So parents who send their kids to private school should not have a false sense of security.

Rick:

And that’s exactly what it is, it’s a false sense of security. So that’s exactly right. I mean, you got to go to the administrators and say, I want to know if any of this stuff is being taught. And what you’re saying is you don’t have those same protections you have, or at least the right to get the information most states have with the public school. That’s not true at the private school. So if that private school administrator says, no, I’m not opening up the books for you, I’m not going to show you what’s being taught, you don’t really have any recourse other than to get your kid out of there?

So maybe the best instruction to parents is, don’t only have your kid in a school where they are completely transparent about what they’re teaching, and then review what they’re teaching. Take the time. If you don’t take the time to invest the energy and the time to review that and know for sure what your kids being taught, I mean, you’re essentially handing them over and just hoping for the best. I mean, that’s too often what parents do these days anyway.

Ryan:

Yeah, this is definitely a hot topic right now. That’s why states like Florida are passing a bill that would ban teachers from teaching students in grades kindergarten through third grade about topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity. I’ve written about this a lot as well for the Christian Post, as well as the backlash that the bill is faced; critics call, they don’t say gay bill. But Governor Ron DeSantis, so Republican governor of Florida certainly pushes back on that noting that that word ‘gay’ is needed in the bill. So this is going to be a hot button issue going forward for the foreseeable future.

Rick:

Yeah, that was a lot of criticism of Florida for that, but they’re doing exactly the right thing. And Ron DeSantis is doing exactly the right thing. And these people that are criticizing that and states that aren’t doing this, I don’t think they realize how mad parents are and that this position of thinking that you can sexualize little children with this kind of stuff is they must think it’s popular or they’re just so agenda oriented, they don’t care. But I think they’re in for a rude awakening as more and more parents get involved.

And Ryan, it takes education, it takes information, it takes discovering these things and uncovering these things. So thank you for being a reporter that’s willing to do that. And thanks to the Christian Post. We’ll have a link to your article today at our website or folks can go straight to christianposts.com and look up Brian Foley, and you can find that article. But we’ll have a link right now at wallbuilderslive.com. Ryan, we appreciate your time, man. Thanks for coming on today.

Ryan:

Thank you. I look forward to coming back.

Rick:

Thanks, Ryan, for joining us today. Back with David and Tim now. Alright, guys, so I mean, I don’t think you can be a parent anywhere and ignore this. You’ve got to pay attention. And you’ve got to investigate whether it’s happening in your community and whether or not it’s happening in your private school.

Tim:

Yeah, hopefully, parents in general are waking up to the notion that they need to have a more direct intentional interest in what is happening in their kid’s education. They need to be asking some very basic questions. In fact, I remember a couple years ago we had Ever Piper on and he said, even if you’re sending your kid to a Christian university, you need to meet with the President and you should ask the President, how do you determine truth? How do you define right and wrong? And if they’re not saying it’s based on the Word of God in the Bible, then you know that’s not a place you want to send your kids. This has to be the foundation we get back to and helping our kids in education.

And certainly, I think there are more parents waking up to the reality that there are problems in education, including inside of private and Christian schools. But just like parents are waking up to the reality of some of these challenges and education for their kids, there are some other challenges for parents where we’ve seen moves where literally government agencies were governors or people running for governor and school boards are saying parents really shouldn’t be involved in their kid’s education or parents really shouldn’t be the ones making decisions, even health decisions for their kids. There’s also a move to remove parents from the entire process, which is something that parents also need to be very aware of.

Rick:

Yeah, and nobody better to talk to you about it than Mike Farris, he’s going to be with us when we come back from the break. Stay with us, folks, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

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Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Always good to have Mike Farris with us from Alliance Defending Freedom. Mike, thanks for coming on, sir.

Mike:

Hey, Rick, great to be with you.

Rick:

Well, listen, man, I consider you my constitutional expert on so many things and just appreciate all your teaching over the years, you’re fighting on the front lines in the courtroom, all that you’ve done for education. I mean, there’s so many areas you’ve been involved. And we just were thinking, look, on this issue of this debate really over, do the kids belong to the parents, or do they belong to the state? We had to get some perspective from you on this. Since you’ve been in this fight, you know the history on this. And I have made the assumption that for most of American history, we believe the kids belong to the parents and the parent should have the final say. Is that been a recent phenomenon in America? I know communism is all about state owning the kids, but when did it start becoming so prevalent in American government and education?

Mike:

Well, you’re right in thinking that kids, children belong to the family. But I wanted to find that before we kind of dive into the rest of it. But it’s belonging in the sense that you belong to a team, not in the sense that you are chattel property. So kids need a sense of belonging, like their sports teams, or whatever they belong to a church youth group or whatever. But it’s in that sense that they belong to the family, and they definitely under any definition, don’t belong to the government.

But it’s been changing over time somewhat gradually. But I was seeing evidence of this certainly by 1981, the first cases I ever worked on was in Washington State in 1980 where the state Supreme Court there ruled that parents, even when they had reasonable rules that were enforced reasonably could lose the control over the child because of conflict over those reasonable rules. So that was a case called anyway in a race Sheila Marie Sumi, and it was just a horrible decision. But that was a result of a law passed by Washington state that pretty much was modeled after the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. So we’ve been at this for a good generation now pretty steadily.

Rick:

Yeah, that’s what 42 years. And in your experience in fighting this battle, where does that philosophy come from? When they decide that they know better than the parent and especially I think that’s it medical decisions and education, that seems to be the two big areas. But yeah, go ahead.

Mike:

Yeah, it is. Those two are the big two. There are some others from time to time. But those are the biggies. And it comes from a general philosophy coming from the elite that are in our society. I went to Gonzaga law school, but we had a visiting professor who was from Harvard, who taught my constitutional law class, Paul Freud, he was one of the most famous come up professors of the 70s and before that as well. And I visited in his office one day, and he said, Mike, you know, it’s too bad that we make so many decisions in this country by counting heads, rather than by weighing heads, which meant the elites should rule us and we shouldn’t have a republican form of government where people elect legislators and have a lot of say in our government.

And that’s the philosophy of the Left, is they believe that they know better than the rest of us and that if we just listen to them and let them make the decisions for us in every area of life, but including in family, they want to make our economic decisions, they want to make our family decision, they want to make our healthcare decisions as we’ve seen so grotesquely in the whole COVID episode, but people believe that government is the savior of mankind, and they are the agents of government that should be ruling our lives.

Rick:

That’s a great point. It’s not just on this issue. It’s just a leftist philosophy that government is essentially their god, their religion. So naturally, they would want to look that direction for all solutions. Mike, before I let you go, what are ways to push back on this? Or what parents can do in terms of in their state in their local entities? I know people are upset about what’s been going on, but they’re really kind of struggling with what they can do to make a difference?

Mike:

Well, there’s three main things they can do. One is just to be alert, what’s going on around them and make sure that you actually know what is happening with your kids, particularly in schools. And don’t take no for an answer, go find out what’s really going on with your kids. The second thing is you need to connect up with your State Family Policy Council groups. There’s one in almost every state and they’re the best legislative watchdogs on this issue overall, although the homeschool organizations that I’ve had a long history with are really good on the education issues per se especially homeschooling obviously.

Rick:

Yeah, it varies state to state. Some of those groups have really good lobbying organization, others don’t. But typically one of those two, at least the family policy or the school group will be good on this. Yeah.

Mike:

And the third is if your rights are violated, contact somebody who knows what they’re doing and see if there’s a lawsuit there that would make a precedent for not only for your family, but for others. And ADF is in the business of doing that, Homeschool Legal Defense Association is in the business of doing that. There’s an auxiliary group HSLDA, called parentalrights.org that does a few lawsuits, but more policy kinds of things.

But I’d connect up with somebody and contact ADF through our website. And if you’ve got a parent’s rights case, we’re interested in looking at. We stood up a new division of we have teams that litigate on subject matters and parent’s rights is our newest team that we’ve put about seven people on. And so we’re ready to go take on a bunch of cases, we’re filing cases now. We’ve done critical race theory cases. We’re representing another division actually doing a lot of the cases about transgender sports issues. And so, let us know we can’t take every case. But we certainly would like to hear from people. And if we can’t, we can often send you in another direction somebody might be able to look at it.

Rick:

Oh, brother, you just made my day. I didn’t realize you all were opening that division or whatever the right word is. That’s tremendous. I mean, you all are the 800 pound gorilla out there and you win. So I’m thrilled to hear you all are taking that on. And let’s give out the websites for folks that may be in that situation, adflegal.org, adflegal.org. And if you’re not in that situation, go to website, make a donation today and help those that are. Mike and his team. I mean, you’ll have what, thousands of attorneys around the country that are affiliated with you.

Mike:

Yeah, we have about 80 full time staff attorneys and we have about 3,500 volunteers who take cases from time to time.

Rick:

Wow. Yeah. So folks, this is a way that you can be involved. You can also get on their email list. That way, you can pay attention to the cases that are out there, Mike, we sure appreciate you, brother. Keep up the great work. And thanks for coming on and keeping us informed on this.

Mike:

Thank you, Rick. God bless.

Rick:

That was Mike Farris from Alliance Defending Freedom, appreciate him coming on the program and all the good work they’re doing. Back with David and Tim, guys, I’m really excited that they obviously realize how big a deal this is to put that many attorneys on it and make this a major focus for ADF. That’s a very good thing.

David:

Well, given their track record and how much they win even at the US Supreme Court, I think there’s going to be a lot of wins here, because they take a very aggressive strategy. And they’re very informed both on law and history. And just as a Foundation, if you go back to the Founding Fathers, there were natural rights and then there were statutory rights. There were things that law allowed you to do. But there were things that God allowed you to do that the law was not to restrict. And those went to inalienable rights or natural rights or natural law rights. And it had long been recognized by the courts all the way deep into the 20th century.

And this is the quote from the court, this came out, I think, in 1925, and what was called Pierce vs. Society of the Sisters. The Supreme Court said it again in 1943 in Meyer versus Nebraska. But they said this is so obvious, but this is a quote. They said, “It’s the fundamental right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.” So that’s a natural right. Government doesn’t give you that. God gave you that. And the government’s not going to interfere with that. And so that was the position.

But then as Mike pointed out, he had that case that he remember as being part of back in 1980, where the Washington Supreme Court said, well, yeah, but here the state can trump parents in this area, this area, this area. So this is really more of a new thing in America and the more secular it become, the less you recognize inalienable rights or natural rights, the more they’re government granted rights.

But we’re seeing the courts now. And this is what I like about ADF is they really go back to that natural rights argument, they go back to the precedents, to the history and they’re winning cases on that. And so I think that they’ll be very good at recovering some of the things that we’ve really seen taken in recent years. But what’s happening right now, because of what schools are doing, you’re seeing parents stand up and saying, hey, we want to be involved in education for our kids because we didn’t know you were doing this and teaching this and reprogramming our kids for this or whatever. So I think it’s going to be really good for them be out there in aggressive manner.

Rick:

Yeah. And as Mike said, I mean, it’s medical, it’s educational, it’s obviously, other issues as well. But I think sometimes if this hasn’t happened to you or to your family, you don’t realize how aggressive government can be and how painful it can be for a family. I mean, it is devastating when it happens to you. We’ve had friends that this happened to. Back when I was a state rep, I had constituents that it had happened to. This is a very destructive thing when government steps into a family, takes a child for a medical reason, or educational reason when there was not justification for it. And so to have good attorneys that can step into that fray, that can be aggressive, whether it’s legislation to prevent it from happening, or just fighting that particular case, we need more and more of that and I’m thankful they’re willing to do it.

David:

Yeah. And it’s interesting too, as you mentioned, Mike pointed out the two big areas of attack are education and health care. And those are the two big responsibilities to as parents, is to train, which is education and to nourish, which is healthcare. And that’s what parents are supposed to do. And now the government is going to take over the role of parents, and we’re going to do the nourishing, and we’re going to do the training. We’re going to train them the way we want. We’re going to nourish them the way we want. And so it’s government becoming the parent.

And as you just mentioned, Rick, I think it’s really significant that that Mike said, he said, look, if your rights are violated, contact someone. Now, this is where I think the nation is starting to have a change of thought and attitude is we’ve been willing to just kind of turn the other cheek for a while. And Chad Conly, we have him on the program periodically. But Chad says, look, we all know about the turn the other cheek, Jesus, he said, but we’re going to have to rediscover the turn the tables over Jesus. And that’s the Jesus that stood up and was willing to fight for principles and fight for things. And no, my Father’s house is a house of prayer; you guys have made it a den of thieves. This is merchandise. And I’m not going to let you do that.

Somebody has to stand up. And it’s not just for you or your kids, because when you get a win and a case, like they’re going to do ADF, that’s a win for all parents across the nation, because other parents will take the precedent of what you stood and fought for and they’ll be able to stand and fight for their own kids and start turning the tide back in a different direction. So it really is significant that you be… John Jay had a statement about this concerning the Constitution. He said you need to know your rights, to be diligent to know your rights, because then you’ll be better prepared to defend and assert them. So you have to know what your rights are as a parent, but then you have to be willing to defend those rights. And that’s what Mike’s going to be great at. And then once you get to defend it, you got to go on the offense and attack the schools and say you cannot do this, I’ve won this case, or this state won this case, or whatever and we’re going to take it back.

Tim:

Well, guys, this is where we’ve talked about so much in the show going back to some foundational principles, where as Christians, first of all, we have to get back to where we can defend some basic notions like the fact that there was a God. Because the very idea of America was birth, the Declaration, our philosophy of government was we believe that there was a God, that God gave inalienable rights to man and government’s primary job was to protect those rights.

But we’ve come to the place where that the more secular we become in society, the natural outflow of secularism is bigger government. And if there is no God who gives you rights, then the only other natural option is that well, then it’s got to be government who gives you rights. And if the government gives, the government can also take away. And this is what we are seeing in our society as we’ve become increasingly secular that we are allowing the government to step in and take these things away.

And we have identified right now in America, there’s what, 65-66% of Americans that self-identify as Christian and yet most of America seems to be very secular. It’s a very small percentage of Americans that actually seem to hold on to the notion of biblical truth. Although, because of some of the government overreach over the last couple years, there are more people awakening to this idea that we should have some rights, we should have these inalienable rights and maybe even respect the Bill of Rights.

But the point is we have to get back to a culture and society as Christians, we have to get back to helping people understand that there is a God, that truth does exist, that God does exist because it’s on that foundation that America was built. And if there is no God, then there can be no God-given rights. And if there is no God who gives God-given rights, and government’s job certainly is to protect your God-given rights, the only other likely position for government if there is no God who gives you rights is therefore government becomes bigger and stronger and they are the ones that then dictate and micromanage your life.

And this is where it is certainly a threat to parents along the way if we don’t get involved. But part of getting involved means we have to go back to restoring those biblical foundations of recognizing there is a God and God has revealed truth to us in His Word, we have to defend those two thoughts in culture.

David:

And get really jealous about your parental rights. If you see a school infringing on your rights as a parent, get aggressive, call ADF, talk to them, see if you can put something together and be jealous to guard your rights. That’s going to be really important to keep in our rights as being willing to defend them.

Rick:

Well, thanks to our guests that joined us today. Both Mike Farris and Ryan Foley, thank you for listening today to WallBuilders Live. You can learn more at our website, wallbuilderslive.com. That’s where you can make that one-time or monthly contribution. Thank you for coming alongside us. And also, if you’d like to join us in-person, don’t forget, April 22nd, and 23rd. That is our big Biblical Citizenship in Modern America course in person. Now many of you have gone through the course, it’s an eight-week course, amazing. It’s got all these great people in it. And most of them are going to be with us in-person, April 22nd and 23rd. Come meet Pastor Rob McCoy, Colonel Allen West, Brad Stein, David Barton, Tim Barton, Kirk Cameron. It’s going to be an amazing, amazing weekend and we would love to see you there.

You can get signed up today at patriotacademy.com. If you go to that website and you scroll down, click on the Texas tour that we’re doing for the comedy and constitution events, and this particular weekend, we’ll be right in the middle of that tour. And it’s a great opportunity for you to come in and experience both the American Journey experience, but also get to meet all these great speakers and hear from them in-person and even to just kind of put a cherry on top, we’re going to have a constitution coach training that weekend as well. We’d love to see you there. Check it out today patriotacademy.com. Thanks for listening to WallBuilders Live.