Future dim for California schools

— I heard a discussion between the three leading candidates for California School Superintendent on the radio yesterday, and quickly reached the conclusion that things aren’t going to get better any time soon in this state. The leading candidate is state senator Jack O’Connell, and his chief rival is my assemblymember, Lynne Leach. Leach has her heart (and her head) in the right place, but she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of winning owing to the fact that she’s a Reep in a one-party Dem state. O’Connell has $2M in union money on his side, and legions ready to walk precincts, drive on election day, and work phone banks. The reason that we need to keep the money in politics, by the way, is to keep the scales balanced between the parties here.

The Dems can always count on the unemployed and underemployed to do campaign grunt work for them, and they only use the cash to bump Reeps off TV (as Don Novey’s Prison Guards’ Union did Dan Lungren in the last governor’s race.) Reeps can only contribute to campaigns financially, and they’re too depressed to even do that in California.

O’Connell is a CTA stooge through and through; they gave him his start in politics, and he’s always done their bidding on charter schools, vouchers, and imposing their loony curriculum on the children. The experiences I had with him in Sacramento didn’t show a man of principle or integrity, but a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy who’s just supremely happy to have a job that keeps him out of the classroom.

Speaking of loony curricula, Fox News Special Report ran a William Lajeneusse segment on the gay life curriculum that’s being taught to second-graders in some parts of California. This stuff was snuck into the schools under the guise of gay anti-discrimination and violence prevention by the oily Sheila Kuehl, state senator representing the gated communities of West Hollywood formerly represented by Tom Hayden.

This stuff is so graphic, and it goes so far, that it’s hard not to conclude that its purpose is to drive children toward a gay lifestyle before they know where they’re going. I don’t have a problem with adults being as gay as three dollar bills if that’s going to make them happy, but lifestyle should be a free choice, and when you start indoctrinating children at the age of eight, you rob them of choice.

Kuehl used the same script – ostensible anti-violence – to sneak provisions into the child custody code that effectively rob fathers of custodial rights and make them pay and pay and pay for the privilege of being barred from raising their children. When Bush says “axis of evil,” I think about Kuehl. One of the great showdowns with her was over a bill that would have established joint custody as the default in divorce cases except where violence was an ongoing threat, or some other mitigating factor was present. Kuehl’s argument boils down to the notion that every woman forced to make a case for sole custody is already a victim of violence simply by virtue of having to go to court. On this bill, O’Connell was supposed to vote on the side of the angels, but he took a powder at the last minute and didn’t show up at the hearing. Every absent member effectively votes no, so we went down to defeat on a 4-4 tie and Kuehl was overjoyed.

These are not the kind of people I want educating my children and grandchildren; if political lying were a crime, they’d be doing time. Incidentally, check out Wendy McElroy’s column on lying with numbers on the Fox News site. It’s recycled, but still relevent.