They didn't know she wasn't one of them.
When Benita*, a board member for a local community theater, was asked by her director to attend a Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion meeting in the director’s place, Benita agreed. She assumed the monthly meeting would address ethnic diversity.
She couldn’t have been more mistaken.
Attendees of the virtual meeting on October 1 (2020) came from all around the District of Columbia and the states of Virginia and Maryland, for trainings and conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Diversity/Equity/Inclusion is now a euphemism for gender and sexuality indoctrination.
“The title of the program,” Benita told me, “was Diversity in Children’s Theater and Educational Theater. The first part of the training was a conversation among the head of the drama department from a Catholic school in Baltimore, the Montgomery county arts education director for elementary schools, and the director of a local theater company.” A question-and-answer session followed.
“The entire evening revolved around developing strategies not just to recruit kids into theater arts, but to make theater arts a safe space for sex and gender issues,” Benita said. “The Black Lives Matter movement was at its zenith at the time, and someone suggested piggybacking on the momentum from BLM to talk about issues of sexuality and gender.”
A major focus of the training centered on coaching attendees about how to recruit kids, not to consider the theater, but to consider their sexuality and gender identity. “'Walk the hallways of the school',” Benita quoted one of the trainers. “'If you see kids who are alone at their lockers or by themselves in the lunchrooms, approach them to talk about their sexuality and gender'.” (This is predatory grooming behavior.)
Benita continued. “There were so many assumptions. Lots of assumptions. They assumed that kids who struggle socially have alternate sexualities or gender identities. They expressed directly that our role as educators is to help kids explore sex and gender.”
A key topic of the evening revolved around developing materials heavy in sex and gender messages. “There was a lot of encouragement to write your own material, and to have at least three LGBTQ characters represented in each script. We were supposed to share scripts with each other, so we all had at our disposal lots of material dealing with sex and gender. We were told to make that standard in all of our departments.”
A teacher dialed in late to the meeting and was crying as she came online. She explained her despondency.
She had written a script, held auditions, and cast a particular girl in the lead role. “The girl just called me,” the teacher said, “and quit the part. She said she couldn’t do it because she was uncomfortable with the role. She said her family and community would not feel comfortable with her performing that character.”
The role in question was that of a girl who was exploring her gender identity. The character developed a crush on another girl who had transitioned to being a boy.
Did the teacher or any of the other meeting attendees consider whether such a role—or such a topic—was appropriate for high school?
“Not even one,” Benita reported.
“The teacher described the girl who quit the play as African-American, and said, ‘African-Americans are pretty conservative and very religious. I feel sorry for her. She doesn’t have a safe space to explore her sexuality and gender’.”
The other attendees counseled the teacher: “Try to speak to her offline. Continue to pursue this with her.”
In other words, they recommended that the teacher go behind the backs of this girl’s family and community, to try to bring her in line with the school’s perspective on sex and gender, without her parents’ knowledge.
“An elementary school teacher shared about making one of her first lessons of the school year be about gender,” Benita continued. “She tells her students that although there are boys and girls in a lot of stories they read, it’s not necessary to focus on whether someone is a boy or a girl. She tells them, ‘You can be whatever you want.’ And whenever they do reader’s theater or perform plays she casts all the boy parts with girls and all the girl parts with boys.”
Benita said the elementary school teachers talked about coaching kids at school. “They tell the kids that they can change clothes at school, to present as the gender they want to, without telling their parents. These teachers coach kids how to successfully deceive their own parents.”
“I am very familiar with the art world,” Benita told me. Anything goes in theatre arts. Throughout the years I have seen just about everything you can imagine. But today, this—I've never seen anything like this.” She paused. “This is very ‘extra’. There's an agenda. This was very organized, and very much a strategic agenda, a corporate grooming.”
Benita called the evening, “Extremely disturbing.”
“Parents have to wake up,” Benita said. “They have to know what’s happening to their kids. ‘Safe space’ no longer means ‘safe space’. There’s nothing safe about what’s being done to kids now.”
This monthly training exercise involved educators from the District of Columbia and two states.
Sexuality and gender indoctrination is not on the fringe, it’s not happening only in extreme left-wing schools, and it’s not limited to high schools and colleges.
This is everywhere. This is every day.
This isn’t coming for our kids—it already has them.
*Not her real name. Benita is a parent and educator in Washington, D.C. She has asked to remain anonymous because of her position in the community.
Maria Keffler is a co-founder of Partners for Ethical Care. Contact Ms Keffler via support@partnersforethicalcare.com.
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