Battle in Colts Neck BOE

Attend your BOE meetings.

Takeaways from Colts Neck BOE meeting 06/28/2023

From the mouths of babes and their allies:

1. Parents are hostile and they'll never understand.

2. Children know better.

All human history and experience prove the contrary, has any child ever thought these two before?

Parents understand more than the kid knows until they grow up and become their parents and kids don't know everything. They make dumb decisions - that's why they're kids. Adults make dumb decisions too, but the expectation is that life teaches them to make less of them. 

The Board President laid out the evening’s game plan with 300 plus attendees - 2 minutes each, 90 minutes total, get in line.  I had to make my way back from the second row to number 40 in line, five from the presumably cut off with 2 minutes each and a max of 45 people.  Each side of the issue of Parental Notification had a cheering section, and the trans activists knew better how to work the system.  If one of their own spoke, they would show their appreciation with soft golf claps so as not to use up their champion’s precious two minutes.  When opposing viewpoints were presented, they cheered or booed raucously to use up the speaker’s time.  The Board President addressed the unruly, some, upon request, were removed by cops on the scene.

Spotlight News was there to portray one side as courageous under oppression and the other side as bigoted, hateful, and dangerous.  The oppressed trotted out the usual talking points about trans suicide, the danger of “outing” a child before they’re ready, exposing them to bullying and parental anger or denial. Insisting that kids know their gender identity, and it’s not just a phase.  Allies from the churches, that like to fly rainbow flags, spoke to God’s love for all his children, while professing their unconditional support of our children.

Moms, dads and advocates for sanity and reason spoke to the importance of including parents in any conversation about anything that affects their children’s well-being.  One parent cited the fact that you can’t dispense a Tylenol at school without parental consent but dispensing counsel on pathways to potentially permanent medicalization – no problem!  I heard many two-minute talks chock full of things I would have liked to say, because, let’s face it, I like to be validated as much as the next person. I need confirmation once in a while that I am a decent human being with a reasonable handle on truth and that the world around has gone nuts, not I!

I decided to go with a reading from a great read, “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier. The subtitle is The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and it features stories and testimonies of the transgendered and the detransitioned.  I chose “Helena” because her account implicates social media and the online community of affirmation that has driven a social contagion that has generated a transdemic. 

“Helena began to starve herself and experimented with other forms of self-harm, such as cutting and burning. She found Tumblr and its pro-eating disorder “pro-ana”…”these self-harm blogs were not simply the online diaries of depressed teenagers, but a thriving community in which mental illness became an identity”.

I was hoping that Helena’s story would ring familiar with some of the young ones there, the fragile, the brittle, the shrill, unconvincing in their claims to be enlightened beyond the capacity of those of us with contrary viewpoints or their own parents to understand.

More importantly, what about this Board of Ed who voted for Policy 5756- to inform parents of distress from anything material including the dysphoria arising from the government-protected class of gender identity? The same Board that had the fearlessness to vote for the modification of Policy 5756 even after Hanover Township was sued by the Governor’s appointee for resolving to put in place a similar policy?

After over two hours of testimonies and presumably closed session wrangling, the Board ended up flip-flopping, voting along ideological lines, 5 to 3 to table the proposal, to pause the enactment of Policy 5756 until the State AG lawsuit finds resolution. 

Somehow, rather than linger in disappointment, I found myself buoyed by the fact that so many people were willing to invest their time and get civilly engaged, get booed and cheered, get affirmed and inspired and get to keep the ersatz dialogue going at the next Board meeting and the next and the next.