Bi-Sexual Wake County English Teacher Pushes Diversity and Privilege in her Classroom by Forcing Students to Disclose Private and Sensitive Information About Themselves and Others in Their Lives

 

by Diane Rufino, October 21, 2019

On their second day at school at Heritage High School in Wake County, students in Ms. Wilson’s 10th grade English class were handed a worksheet titled “Diversity Inventory,” and told to complete it. That worksheet asked each student such questions as: who their friends and doctors are, who their teachers were, who are the members of their family, and who their neighbors are. These questions may seem a bit intrusive, but so far, they don’t raise any red flags. But then the worksheet asks the student to answer the following questions about each of those individuals: their gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic status.

Why does an English teacher need to pry into her students’ lives and why does she need this information? And even more troubling, did she plan to force each student to share that private information with other students?

Apparently, according to the teacher, it was a checklist to help this teacher literally map out how to force more social justice ‘diversity’ lessons (ie, indoctrination) into her students’ lives. As if that isn’t highly offensive enough, the questionnaire worksheet has no nexus to her teaching of English. It has no relevance and should have no relevance. How does it impact her OBLIGATION to teach students about English literature, plots, and themes.

Needless to say, some students were offended and confused by the assignment. When some kids showed hesitation about answering, Ms. Wilson responded: “Hey, it’s OK because I used to be a Catholic and now I’m an atheist and I’m bi-sexual.”

When has it become acceptable for a teacher to share the details of her sex life?   And what possible relevance is it from an English teacher in an English class?

One parent, Dina Bartus, contacted the school’s principal to demand that her son be removed from the class. The principal did not respond, so she emailed him a second time. Only then did she hear back from him. As she explained: “It’s hard enough going to high school without having your teacher call you out and lump you into a category — and not a category like ‘do you like football or baseball?’ A category of, ‘who do you want to have sex with?’ She told the principal that the teachers’ worksheet, and the questions it asked, was it was unacceptable.

On Facebook, Bartus posted her disgust: “Now it gets better…. not only does she ask these questions, but she asks them stand under posters around the room representing the categories of questions she asks. For example: What makes you the most privileged? Needless to say there was an email sent. And it is only the second damn day of school.”

Luckily, and to the principal’s credit, as soon as Mrs. Bartus complained, he immediately reviewed the assignment and directed the teacher to discontinue it. The Wake County School System followed up by issuing a statement, which read: “While we value efforts to build a classroom community that is inclusive and respectful of all students and backgrounds, the Wake County Public School System also respects and values student privacy and their right to engage in discussion about personal identity when they are comfortable to do so.”

The response was dead on.

For those who believe the public school system has become the vehicle not of true education but of indoctrination by government and of social change, consider this reality. Wake County Public Schools created the Office of Equity Affairs (OEA) a few years ago to help guide the mission of Wake County’s public schools. A presentation by the OEA (accessible here: https://www.scribd.com/document/415005224/2019-06-05-NCSBE-06052019-WCPSS-OEA-Overview-v2) made clear that educators “will be the instruments for the infusion of raced-based and social justice training into schools and classrooms.” The presentation further states, and clearly so, that “Educators will work to socialize intelligence and effort among all students in every school, every classroom, every day…. Leaders will model and advance courageous conversations about special education status, family income, and race, and how these attributes shape teaching and learning experiences in schools and classrooms.”

Even more offensively, Wake County has promoted “professional development” training modules, which have been prepared by and are available on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website – under “Social Justice Standards.” The OEA has actively promoted the use of these “standards” in the classroom, directly frustrating parents’ legitimate expectations of teachers and of rightful expectations related to the rightful role of the public school (to educate and not to indoctrinate).

 

****  The clarifier “Bi-Sexual” was included in the title not to indicate any discrimination or mal intent against such individuals but only to suggest that someone who benefits so greatly from a very progressive social agenda (as the left and as the Southern Poverty Law Center pushes) may have had a reason for pushing the “Diversity Inventory” assignment and pushing a social agenda in her classroom – a classroom historically devoted to reading, analyzing, and appreciating outstanding works of English literature, studying plots and characters, looking for themes, tying the work into the time period, etc and NOT devoted to social change and government indoctrination.

Reference:  Thanks to Lady Liberty (A.P. Dillon) for addressing the Office of Equity Affairs (OEA) in her article “Diversity Inventory Worksheet Given to Heritage High Students Yanked After Parents’ Pushback,” August 29, 2019.   Referenced at: https://ladyliberty1885.com/2019/08/29/diversity-inventory-worksheet-given-to-heritage-high-students-yanked-after-parents-push-back/

Reject the Progressive Agenda! The Truth is that Strong Traditional Families Build Strong and Healthy Communities

by Diane Rufino, July 31, 2019

It is easier to raise strong children than to repair broken men and women. And it’s a whole lot less expensive on society and on our pocketbooks as well.   (modified quote from Frederick Douglass)

The most important job we have, and our most important contribution to society is to devote ourselves to our families, to keep then strong, and to raise our children well, with values and education so that that they will go on to contribute productively to their community and then serve as role models themselves for the next generation.

Nothing else is as important to our society.

Over the years, we’ve seen this critical responsibility become eroded to make way for the “new progressive era” values – the breakdown of the nuclear family, single parenthood, same-sex parenting (denying the child or children they raise the benefit of learning key life lessons and role-modeling lessons from both sexes), alternative lifestyles, a genderless society, having children for the wrong reasons (for a welfare check) and killing children for the wrong reasons (the pregnancy is inconvenient; having a baby would be inconvenient), parents leaving the job of raising their children to the public schools and to government (the same institutions that reject religion in favor of immorality, that embrace progressive social change over conservative social values/norms, and that has no concern for effective outcomes), rejection of religious values and religious teachings, demonization of religious values and teachings, a focus on wealth distribution rather than good old fashion career-planning, learning important skills, ingenuity, hard-work, and risk-taking in the marketplace, the commonplace of recreational drugs, the lowering of standards in our school systems, the epidemic of teens who “graduated” from high school but are still not meaningfully competent in reading or writing or capable of doing simple math, etc.

Government is making it harder and harder and harder and harder for our young adults to be able to make the decisions and the plans to assume their important roles in society – to settle down, to buy a home, and then to have and raise good and productive children. Government fights them at every step – higher college costs, higher taxes, too much regulation in the marketplace, too much regulation over property, high daycare costs, and then the insidious indoctrination in the public school system.

Our right to raise our children according to OUR values and not government’s values (or minority group values) is worth fighting for. The health and vitality of our communities are worth fighting for. We only get one chance to raise our children, to invest in our legacy…. We need to do it right and we need to get government out of the way so we can do it right.

I am not taking a position opposing alternative lifestyles or denying anyone their rights to do what they want (within the confines of our laws); I’m just in favor of government policy putting in place laws and policies that favor conduct that furthers what our society needs most – strong families and well-raised children.

Author Gene Kizer, Jr. Defends the South to the Editor of a Charleston, SC Newspaper

  (Photo: Gene Kizer, Jr)

by Gene Kizer Jr, July 12, 2019, with an Intro by Diane Rufino

This post is to give you some FOOD FOR THOUGHT…….

And perhaps even to inspire you to action, which I hope will be to defend our nation’s history and to assert our American First Amendment rights.

We live in trying times… maybe even reminiscent of the years when our country was involved in a quasi-war with France (during John Adams’ administration), when Abraham Lincoln was building his case for the invasion of the Confederate States and then pursing the Civil War, during the Cold War (the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings), and during the Obama administration (government harassment of Tea Party and other conservative groups, control and politicization of the mainstream media, and illegal spying on the Trump campaign to effect the outcome of the 2016 election). In each of these examples, the American people had their rights to free speech and free press and their rights to conscience and political association violated by the government. These trying times are even reminiscent of the early years of Adolf Hitler, as he schemed to consolidate his power and his plans for a mighty Third Reich in Germany. Government control was all about controlling the message and about controlling how people thought and how they acted. It was mind-control (ie, indoctrination) and dissidents were punished. Germans were kept in line by the armed unit of the Nazi Party (the SS guards… not unlike our modern-day Antifa). Recognizing threats to our liberty and to the foundation of that liberty (ie, the conservative values and principles on which our country was founded, including the limited grants of authority to the federal government through the Constitution and the prohibitions outlined in the Bill of Rights) is the first step in assuming the role our Founders expected of us, which is one of resistance to such threats. Resisting the threats is the surest way to preserve our great country and to re-assert our alienable and other liberty rights.

We live in a dangerous era when progressives are trying to define what is acceptable speech and expression, what is acceptable conduct, and what history should be taught and even recognized in our country. We live in an era where the federal government had previously spent 8 years commandeering the full forces and instrumentalities of government to suppress political opposition, to exonerate political elites/favorites while punishing others, to illegally spy on a presidential campaign in order to find or manufacture ways to sink that campaign in favor of its preferred candidate, and to allow the Swamp to grow in DC to work insidiously day and night to undermine the will and wishes of the American people. We live in an era where political correctness is far more important than free speech, where the right to one’s conscience is non-existent, where those on the left think it’s proper to economically and reputationally destroy a person simply for holding a viewpoint that differs from theirs, where decent people are harassed, bullied, and beaten in public places by mental midgets and intolerants on the left, including Antifa simply for daring to be a conservative or for supporting our current president. We live in an era where history is actively being re-drafted and re-prioritized to align with the indoctrinational views of the progressive left. Confederate statues are being torn down or vandalized. The Confederate battle flag has been demonized and almost decreed a hate symbol. Names of historical figures (mostly Southern antebellum) are being scrubbed from public buildings, universities, and street signs. Even our great Southern Founding Fathers (such as Thomas Jefferson) are being vilified for living their lives in line with the custom of the time (ie, owning slaves – an institution recognized by the federal government and even protected by it). It is unconscionable that historians and professors teach students and our mushy-minded young adults that a man as revered and as important to our founding history as Thomas Jefferson is to be associated with slavery rather than with all the prolific contributions he made to our country and to the world – the Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man & of the Citizen (a civil rights document from the French Revolution written as a collaboration between he and the Marquis de Lafayette), the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (addressing both the natural right to one’s conscience and religious affiliation and exercise), the Northwest Ordinance, his influence on the state constitution of Virginia and its Declaration of Rights, his strong influence on James Madison to add a US Bill of Rights, his powerful defense of the “Necessary & Proper” Clause of the Constitution (to strictly confine what powers the government was delegated – going head-to-head with the nationalist/monarchist Alexander Hamilton), his defense of State’s Rights and his brilliant articulation of the doctrine of Nullification, the hundreds of letters he wrote explaining the meaning and intent of the Constitution and providing warnings and advice for future generations, and his creation of the US Library of Congress. While slavery was an (evil) institution practiced in our country, and in fact, was an institution that was firmly entrenched and embraced by almost all countries and colonies of the world at the time, it was NOT a contribution of Jefferson.

As any serious intellectual will tell you, you can’t view our past through the lens of our 21st century standards. The social norms of today are as far away from the social norms of our founding era as possible. The social norms of today are even as far away as possible from the social norms of our country when the great war between the states was fought. As Gene Kizer Jr. makes clear, when you apply current norms or when you view the past through the lens of 21^st century standards, you are being intellectually dishonest. You aren’t trying to understand or analyze the past at all. You are simply trying to advance a political or progressive agenda.

With this introduction, please read the article that Gene Kizer, Jr. wrote, which is copied and pasted below:

Defending the South to an editor of the Charleston, SC Post and Courier – by Gene Kizer, Jr., Charleston Athenaeum Press, July 12, 2019

I had some correspondence with an editor of the Post and Courier this week when I sent them a letter for publication in response to their July 6, 2019 editorial “Don’t Let Extremists Define our National Symbols.” As a result, I saw an opening to send some valuable Southern history to this newspaper and I jumped on it.

Their editorial is good in that they are alarmed at Nike removing the Betsy Ross flag, the Charlottesville city council ending a celebration of Thomas Jefferson, and the idiots on the San Francisco school board voting to paint over an 80-year-old work of art portraying the life of George Washington.

The Post and Courier does not want us to validate bad people who attempt to redefine patriotic symbols, but wait! THEY in the media have done exactly that for years ad nauseam! The media is the primary reason we have this politically correct hate and destruction of history in the body politic.

Here is the 250 word letter-to-the-editor that got this started:

START

Your editorial of July 6, “Don’t let extremists define our national symbols” shows that your heart is in the right place but, boy, you need to look in the mirror.

You let the KKK and Dylan Roof define the Confederate battle flag though neither of them has an iota of claim to it.

You put the Southern Poverty Law Center’s disgraceful campaign to remove Confederate monuments on your front page, and you agitate all the time against ancient monuments including the Calhoun monument on Marion Square, and even against the word “Dixie.”

And now you are surprised when Colin Kaepernick and others follow your lead and turn the Betsy Ross flag, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington into vile racists?

The foundation of our great nation was indeed set in 1776 as you write, but it was certainly not “reset in 1865.” It died a violent death in 1865.

In the republic of the Founding Fathers, states were supreme, but after 1865, the Federal Government and Northern majority were supreme, which was the North’s goal all along.

You quote the Gettysburg Address but here’s what the great H. L. Mencken wrote in May, 1920: “The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves….”.

END

The editor wrote back and asked who the “YOU” was and that gave me my opening:

Actually, the “you” is the Post and Courier, but also the news media in general because so much of the media is of the same political philosophy, which has utterly politicized history in recent decades.

As serious historians know, one can’t apply 21st century standards to the past. When you do that, you aren’t understanding the past at all. You are using it as a current-day political tool.

Your own writer, Robert Behre explained to us on the front page on May 16th why we should hate the word “Dixie” after the College of Charleston in a disgusting fit of political correctness changed the 175-year-old name of Dixie Plantation (“C of C Dumps ‘Dixie’ Name for Plantation”). Behre then implied why we should also hate the song “Dixie” and word “plantation.”

Do you not find it odd that four weeks later on June 15th, the Antifa vandalizers of the Defenders Monument at the Battery also had a large sign that said “DIXIE IS DEAD.”

Maybe they were inspired by Behre and maybe it was just a coincidence, but the Post and Courier is really not fair or accurate with Southern history at all.

You let the KKK and Dylan Roof define the Confederate battle flag though neither of them has an iota of claim to it. The battle flag is, arguably, the greatest symbol of pure American valor our nation has ever produced because it was a soldier’s flag, not a national flag. It flew over the bloodiest battlefields of a war in which 800,000 died and over a million were wounded. It never flew over a slave ship like the US and British flags did for over two centuries. The largest Klan groups of the early 20th century carried the American flag.

Your editorial had mentioned the Declaration of Independence so I wanted to tell you that when Southerners debated seceding in the months before they actually did, the most widely quoted phrase of the secession debate came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government. . .

And please don’t quote that garbage about States’ Rights being the right to own another person. The Confederate Constitution allowed free or slave states to join.

Five slave states fought for the North throughout the entire war, and the Emancipation Proclamation deliberately exempted them all as well as slaves in most Confederate territory already captured by the Union army.

The one thing that can be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They went to war to preserve the Union, as Lincoln said over and over, because all their wealth and power were tied to the Union. They manufactured for the South and shipped Southern cotton and they made obscene amounts of money with tariffs, bounties, subsidies, monopolies and such, which caused three-fourths of the treasury to flow continually into the North, though most of the money in the treasury came from the South.

When the Cotton States seceded, the Northern economy began a dramatic collapse and by war time, there were hundreds of thousands of people unemployed and a dire situation in the North.

Southerners seceded because they were fed up with Northern hate and support for terrorism such as John Brown and Hinton Helper that Republicans had used to rally their votes in the election of 1860 in which over 60% of voters nationwide voted against Abraham Lincoln.

The War Between the States was one of the most unnecessary wars in all of history but then, from Lincoln’s standpoint, it was necessary for him and his new political party to establish their control over the rest of the country, though 800,000 had to die and over a million be wounded for them to do it.

To Southerners, 1861 was 1776 all over, and we in Charleston can be especially proud because we were never beaten by the Union army or navy. Charleston was unconquered militarily and never surrendered in the War Between the States. It was the only place besieged that did not give way to the besieger. When Confederate troops were ordered to evacuate in February, 1865 to continue the war elsewhere, the city, which had endured one of the longest sieges in history, was turned over to the Union army by a city alderman.

Slavery was dying out and would not have lasted another generation.

It is unconscionable that you maintain this politically correct hatefulness toward Southern history. Maybe you should go back and read your own archives which tell a different story.

Good and decent people are SO fed up with idiotic political correctness. They are fed up with decisions by snowflakes and indoctrinated and otherwise ignorant progressives to, for example, remove the Kate Smith’s monument (she helped win WWII with God Bless America), to have Thomas Jefferson’s birthday cancelled as a paid holiday in his hometown of Charlottesville, to allow a beautiful 80-year-old mural of the life of George Washington to be painted over in San Francisco, and most recently, the Kaepernick/Nike thing over the Betsy Ross flag.

It is disgusting and alarming, as your editorial pointed out. It is like a cancer. It ain’t gonna stop. It needs to be opposed and defeated, which will be hard because one political party is heavily invested in it.

I wish the Post and Courier would give me a chance to write long articles on history as you do with others. Everything I write is solidly argued and documented. It would definitely add to the debate.

Regardless, thank you for letting me send this to you.

Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

***   Gene Kizer, Jr. is the author of the book “Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States.” It’s an excellent, excellent book and I recommend it most highly. I also recommend going to his website – https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/ – and signing up to read his articles. His most recent articles include: “Why the Cotton States Seceded and Formed the Confederate States of America” (July 2, 2019), “Obliterate the Sophism that Confederates Were Traitors” (June 30, 2019), “We Are in a Political Fight and Not a History Debate”(June 29, 2019), “The Absurdity of Slavery as the Cause of the War Between the States” (June 25, 2019), and “Satirical Letter-to-Editor Defending Confederate Monuments” (June 22, 2019).

 

Reference: Gene Kizer, Jr, “Defending the South to an editor of the Charleston, SC, Post and Courier,” Charleston Athenaeum Press, July 12, 2019. Referenced at: https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/defending-the-south-to-an-editor-of-the-charleston-sc-post-and-courier/