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The culture wars keep coming in Texas, and the latest one involves sex, textbooks, and the LGBTQ experience.

On Tuesday the State Board of Education will decide whether proposed textbooks that include content on gender identity and sexual orientation will make their way into the backpacks and laptops of children in Texas and across the country.

Both sides are gearing up, the latest in a series of polarizing fights in Texas schools, which recently included school mask mandates, teaching about systemic racism and library books with sexual content. Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott wanted charges brought against educators offering pornographic books to students after pointing out two LGBTQ memoirs as examples.

Now, after last years approval of new state standards for health classes, the board must approve new textbooksand thats where the new battlefront is.

Gay people can get married today; you cant fire LGBTQ people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning social justice group.

While much has changed in the last few decades, he fears, textbook adoptions in Texas have not.

Conservative activists and parents have issues with all five of the health textbooks the board must approve, but are particularly focused on two for middle schoolers, saying they go too far by normalizing sexual activity, questioning gender identity and going beyond the new state standards.

State law now requires parents to opt-in their children to lessons on sex education. Parents groups, like the Tarrant County Chapter of Moms for Liberty,a right-leaning organization focused on preserving parental rights, argue they want to be the ones instilling morals about sex to their children. They say the new textbooks would rob them of that right.

The attitude of devaluing family and oversexualizing education is detrimental to children, even adults, as well as harmful to society, said Mary Lowe, Moms for Liberty Tarrant County chair.

This base has been galvanized. Loud groups of parents are fuming about what their children are being taught about systemic racism and, using that frustration as a road map, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governors race by making critical race theory and schools key issues in his campaign.

Red meat topics like inappropriate sexual content in schools are ripe for conservative Texas Republican politics ahead of the crowded March 1 GOP primary elections, said Rice University political science professor Mark Jones.

In addition, political attacks like Abbotts fit the narrative that liberal school boards are dropping the ball when it comes to educating the country, he added. And those are the people Abbott wants to show up at the primary election, he said.

Its not what do average Texans think. Its what does the average Republican primary voter think, said Jones. When it comes to teaching about sex, he said, its that nothing should be taught or the bare minimum.

Up until last year, the states teaching standards for health and sex ed hadnt changed since 1997. After more than a year of public hearings and panels, the State Board of Education updated the standards in 2020, with the most significant change requiring seventh and eighth-grade students to learn about birth control, including condoms and other forms of contraception. The new standards go into effect in August 2022.

Progressive advocates urged board members to add topics like abortion, consent, gender identity and sexual orientation to the mandatory curriculum, but the heavily conservative 15-member board declined.

When it comes to high school, sex education is optional. Many schools dont offer sex ed at all. State law requires those that do teach sex ed present abstinence as the preferred choice to all sexual activity, encouraging abstinence until marriage.

A teacher can go further and offer an abstinence plus curriculum, but must devote more attention to abstinence from sexual activity than any other behavior.

On Tuesday, the elected board will take an initial vote to recommend textbooks school districts could buy that cover the new standards. A final vote is expected Friday.

How the final vote will play out is unclear. Several conservative members of the board who voted on the standards in 2020 have since left the policy-making body, replaced by Republicans who skew toward the center. Advocates for comprehensive sex education hope the shift will mean the two textbooks that teach beyond the standards will be approved as is.

Textbook publishers are not bound to those standards and will try to provide content they believe makes their books attractive to school districts in Texas and across the country. While waning, with more than five million students in Texas public schools, the lone star state makes up a giant share of the national textbook market and continues to have outsize influence on content.

But parents like Lowe and advocates like Mary Elizabeth Castle believe the books violate the standards.

The fact that so much public input and agreement among the board went into the standards, it would be transparent and the right thing to do to have the books aligned with the standards, said Castle, senior policy advisor for Texas Values, an organization dedicated to preserving conservative family values.

While parents can yank their students out of sex ed instruction, groups like Texas Values last year convinced the board to keep LGBTQ content out of the standards and is frustrated its still showing up in textbooks.

In the textbook by Human Kinetics, Castle said the text uses two students engaging in sexual activity as an example in a lesson, and in another case has students question whether their gender identity is similar to the one they are assigned at birth. The other textbook, by LessonBee, Inc., includes a text message conversation about ejaculation and arousal.

Advocates for stronger sex ed say the textbooks are needed because students want medically accurate and age-appropriate information about sex.

We want young people to be able to engage in sexual activity if and when they feel comfortable to do so, when they feel they have all the information they need to make that decision for themselves and for their future, said Gabrielle Doyle, state partnership coordinator for Sex Ed for Social Change, a group in favor of the textbooks.

What to teach students in school, particularly when it comes to sex, is a touchy subject in Texas. The state has some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation. A baby is born to a teen mother every 23 minutes in Texas, according to Jen Biundo, director of policy and data at the Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. And Texas is the top state in the country for repeated teen births.

Texas has historically opted to promote abstinence among teenagers to reduce teen pregnancies.

Despite whether more in-depth teaching about sex ed could be beneficial, Jones, the political science professor, said Republicans have little political incentive to encourage it.

As a Republican, said Jones, youre not going to win any votes in an election by pushing a more progressive agenda on sex ed.

Read more:
The Latest Chapter in the Texas Culture Wars: Sex Education and Textbooks - The 74

The culture wars phenomenon may not be as widespread in the UK as in the US, but brands may still need to tread carefully. By Liam Kay.

At the Republican National Convention in 1992, Pat Buchanan spoke about a cultural war equating to a struggle for the soul ofAmerica.James Davison Hunters 1991 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, explained culture wars as a struggle to define American public life between progressives and the orthodox, while in the UK, many in the media have tried to import this definition from the US wholesale.

Culture wars today can be broadly seen asreferring to the battles between left and right wings of politics and society Democrats vs Republicans in the US or, increasingly, remain vs leave in the UK, according to the 2018 NatCen report, TheEmotional Legacy of Brexit.

Recent use of the term has surged. In 2015, there were 21 articles in mainstream UK newspapers that mentioned a UK culture war, while, by 2020, there were 534, according to Kings College London research.

Businesses are often caught in the middle. Last year, Coca-Cola condemned a voting law in ...

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Across the divide: Culture wars in the US and UK | Feature - Research Live

What to make of Republicans? Deep down they know the election was not stolen, yet they persist in the Big Lie. They know that true democracy allows all eligible citizens to vote, yet they pass voter suppression laws. They know elections should be conducted by impartial entities, yet they try to install their political stooges in charge of elections. They know the people should elect their representatives, but they gerrymander extremely so their politicians select their voters.

They know our country has fought against fascist, authoritarian dictators around the world, yet they worship at the feet of an ex-president who tried to turn the U.S. into a fascist, authoritarian dictatorship and who admires current authoritarians around the world. They say they are the party of law and order, yet they threaten violence against public officials with whom they disagree and staged the Jan. 6 insurrection.

They say they support education, yet they are anti-science and anti-facts. They say they are for individual freedom, yet they try to force their views in the culture wars down the throats of everybody. Most say they are Christians, but most also dont follow Jesus teachings. They say they are the party of fiscal sanity, yet the U.S. deficit always increases more when they are in charge. They say they are a populist party, but only the rich do better when they are in control.

What I make of Republicans is that they are the anti-party of democracy, freedom, fairness and average Americans.

Bill DunnYarmouth

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Letter to the editor: Republicans are anti-American - pressherald.com

Things Fell Apart (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds Doomsday Watch With Arthur Snell (Podmasters) | apple.comBreakfast (BBC 5 live) | BBC Sounds

A couple of new series to make you feel clever. First up, the inimitable author and broadcaster Jon Ronson is back on Radio 4 (and BBC Sounds) with Things Fell Apart, in which he considers todays culture wars. As hinted at by the title, which refers to WB Yeatss poem The Second Coming (things fall apart; the centre cannot hold), Ronson is looking at extremes of argument. Actually, hes searching for the source of those arguments: the event or idea that eventually resulted in the horribly polarised disputes that now rage across social media. QAnon, trans rights, cancel culture you get the idea. Political dog whistles. Dinner party bombs. Family-splitters.

Ronsons approach is non-confrontational hes a non-confrontational man and very similar to the one he used in his excellent The Butterfly Effect podcast. Essentially he looks at how a small act can have unforeseen ripple effects. In The Butterfly Effect, it was when a chap called Fabian decided to offer free online porn. Ronson traced that effect across the world, meeting people whose lives were utterly wrecked by the unexpected consequences.

In Things Fell Apart, his vision is more focused, covering a different topic in each of its eight episodes. The first concentrates on the argument between US pro-life anti-abortionists and those who favour women having easily accessible, legal abortion services. Ah, Roe v Wade, I hear you say. But the story is more unexpected than that. Ronson manages to pinpoint the start of the anti-abortion movement among American evangelicals to, of all places, 1960s Switzerland and a vaguely hippy young man, Frank Schaeffer, who wanted to become a film director. Without giving too much away, the programme traces a direct line from Schaeffers youthful filmic hopes right through to an abortion doctor in the US being shot and killed in his home. Ronson interviews Schaeffer, who thoroughly regrets everything that has happened since. Its quite astonishing.

In the next episode, Ronson talks to Alice Moore, a US pastors wife who manoeuvred herself on to a local schools board in the 1970s because she wasnt happy about the text books on the curriculum. Somehow this leads to a Roger McGough poem, which Moore misinterpreted as being more permissive than it is (Ronson talks to McGough). Her campaign also led to important black writers being excluded from the school libraries. All in the name of protecting children.

So, great research. But Ronson is also a brilliant interviewer, asking the toughest of questions in an amiable, amused way, disarming his interviewees and allowing them to put their own point of view. Because Things Fell Apart is a radio show, there are time restrictions, and each episode is cut and polished to perfection; carved and crafted, like a teeny Japanese netsuke sculpture. Every element matters, and this is a thoroughly satisfying listen.

Doomsday Watch enlightens as it scares the living doo-dah out of you. From indie company Podmasters, this has former diplomat and counter-terrorism operative Arthur Snell talking to experts about which of todays rocky world situations might trigger the apocalypse. Yay!

First up: civil war in America. Or: Trump supporters go fully tonto. No time restrictions on this show, so each expert is allowed to speak freely, which is great. But theyre so erudite that I found I needed an occasional breather from their relentless brilliance and logic. Also, casually delivered sentences such as there are more guns than people in America and Trumps Republican party has decided to ignore any election result that doesnt suit them do have an effect. Excuse me while I breathe into a paper bag.

The next two episodes consider China and Putin and are equally fascinating. Interestingly, each involves a powerful man wanting to return his country to what seems like better times: Make America/China/Russia Great Again. All that potential devastation because middle-aged men tend to believe that life was better when they were young and virile.

On 5 live, Rick Edwards has started his new breakfast gig, presenting alongside veteran Rachel Burden. Hes doing very well, actually: holding his own, whether chatting to listeners or grilling sporting greats. Weirdly, ex-host Nicky Campbell has been popping up on Breakfast every day, in order to promote his new phone-in show, which now runs from 9-11am. Campbell can never resist a little alpha-male-ing, saying on Monday that he was answering Burden as though he was still hosting alongside her.

Edwards is up to the challenge though. On Tuesday, he made a quip about fake bonhomie, and Campbell was reduced to God, hes good, isnt he? Campbell shouldnt worry about leaving Breakfast: his phone-in show is as excellent as youd imagine, and 5 live seems to have managed this important transition very smoothly indeed.

Original post:
The week in audio: Things Fell Apart; Doomsday Watch; 5 live Breakfast - The Guardian

A Black principal who resigned after critics accused him of teaching critical race theory to students said educators are "dealing with people that are delusional" as school district culture wars rage on.

"They're not grounded in any sort of reality," the principal, James Whitfield, told Insider."It is important that we meet that delusion with what's real and we speak truth, and we're unapologetic in our stance to stand firmly in what is true and right."

Whitfield announced his resignation as principal of Colleyville Heritage High School near Fort Worth, Texas, last week after a saga that dates back to summer 2020, which was sparked after sent a letter to the school community saying that systemic racism is "alive and well" as racial justice protests swept the nation.

In the letter, which was reviewed by Insider, Whitfield urged the community to "commit to being an anti-racist."

Whitfield, 43, told Insider that he initially received positive responses to the letter, but that changed in July 2021.

During a July 31 Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board meeting, a former school board candidate alleged that Whitfield was teaching and promoting "critical race theory," a learning approach that examines racial bias in US laws and institutions.

The academic theory, which is mostly taught at the university level and doesn't feature in Colleyville Heritage High School's curriculum, has become a target in the last year for conservative leaders and parents concerned by baseless claims of students being indoctrinated.

The man said Whitfield has "extreme views" and called for his contract to be terminated as other attendees at the meeting applauded and cheered in the background.

Whitfield denied promoting critical race theory and told Insider that it has been eye-opening to see non-partisan school boards turn into "political battlegrounds."

Whitfield was placed on leave paid leave on August 30, though the district told CNN at the time that it was not related to the critical race theory accusations.

According to a settlement document reviewed by Insider, Whitfield agreed to resign last week and will remain on paid leave until August 15, 2023.

In a joint statement, the school district and Whitfield said they "have mutually agreed to resolve their disputes."

Whitfield told Insider he's "devastated" and that he misses his students and staff.

He said he's gotten mostly positive support and encouragement since the backlash, but has also been called harsh names and received racist messages in the mail.

Whitfield isn't quite sure what his next chapter will look like, but he said he wants to continue having an impact in young people's lives.

"I just want to be part of something that helps bring people together helps just make the world a better place," he said.

Read more from the original source:
Black principal who faced CRT accusations: 'We're dealing with people that are delusional' - Insider