The cultural gulf between the media, Democrats and wokesters in one corner and everyone else in the other has never been wider, Save Jerseyans. We have another example hot off the presses from the New Jersey gubernatorial contest.
On Tuesday night, a Gothamist/WNYC “gotchya” story dropped featuring two June 2021 clips of Jack Ciattarelli addressing a small group at a Flemington, New Jersey gun range. In clip #1, the GOP nominee gave his candid opinion on Murphy-era changes to your child’s public school curriculum.
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“I feel lucky [our kids] are in their 20s and I don’t have to be dealing with what you’re dealing with right now,” Ciattarelli opined. “You won’t have to deal with it when I’m governor, but we’re not teaching gender ID and sexual orientation to kindergarteners. We’re not teaching sodomy in sixth grade. And we’re going to roll back the LGBTQ curriculum. It goes too far.”
The second clip features Ciattarelli criticizing a decision by the Randolph (Morris County) school board (since reversed) to scrub all holiday names from its calendar. He also related a recent experience while visiting a bank in which he saw “a new LGBTQ bank card” advertised to customers.
“I’m sitting there saying, ‘The more we cater to each special interest, the more you remind us about how different we all are from each other.’ Right?”
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The most likely source of the video (the article’s author Matt Katz doesn’t say) is a “tracker,” someone who is sent by the other side in a campaign to catch the candidate saying something that can be used in an ad or shopped to journalists.
“The Republican nominee for governor in New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli, is vowing to roll back school curricula that centers LGTBQ inclusivity, falsely claiming that ‘sexual orientation’ is being taught to kindergarteners and sixth graders are learning ‘sodomy,'” Katz declares in the lede paragraph.
Okay, but is any of that actually false?
Back in March 2021, Governor Murphy signed a bill into law providing that “[b]eginning in the 2021-2022 school year, each school district shall incorporate instruction on diversity and inclusion [into] in an appropriate place in the curriculum [for] of students in grades kindergarten through 12 as part of the district’s implementation of the New Jersey Student Learning Standards [in Comprehensive Health and Physical Education].” The bill went on to provides that “[t]he instruction shall highlight and promote diversity, including economic diversity, equity, inclusion, tolerance, and belonging [on topics including:] in connection with gender and sexual orientation.”
It was a widely covered development at the time.
So Jack is 100% correct about his first allegation regardless of whether you agree with him or not. It’s now the law to work this stuff into your 6-year-old’s curriculum.
What about the “sodomy” line I don’t know if anal sex is taught to 6th graders, but New Jersey did update its curriculum standards in spring 2020 to provide that anal sex would be a part of your 8th grader’s education. That makes Ciattarelli at least partially right on point #2. He might’ve been off by two grades, but the point remains that your junior high student is probably getting more of an “education” than you imagined!
We get that the media is biased. They have an agenda, and the facts are formatted to fit the narrative. Most people know that in 2021 and control for it when consuming news.
Here’s the deal, folks:
New Jersey Democrats are going to focus on the word “sodomy” because – even though Jack’s usage was consistent with the classic dictionary definition of the word – we also know anti-sodomy laws are no longer in vogue in the United States. Nor should they be. With few exceptions, government should play no role in telling consenting adults how to conduct their private lives.
But that goes both ways. Jack should square up and articulate what he was clearly driving at:
Our kids are being over-sexualized by the culture, and we don’t need Phil Murphy doubling down on the problem.
Kids have rights. There’s a time and a place to learn this stuff. A taxpayer-funded kindergarten isn’t it. I think the Murphy Democrats will be unpleasantly surprised to learn that there are a lot of 2020 Joe Biden voters in the burbs who actually agree with Jack on this one, and – this one is really going to blow their minds – some gay residents don’t appreciate the all-important American imperative of tolerating individual choices and lifestyles (provided they don’t violate anyone else’s rights) lumped in with a far-Left, over-sexualized K-12 curriculum.
Parents have rights, too. I would like the opportunity to explain certain topics to my kid before the NJEA gets their hooks into him. Public schools exist to educate children in the fundamental academic and civic subjects necessary to be a citizen. They’re not supposed to advance any one particular worldview. How many New Jersey parents are aware of the Murphy-era regulation declaring that parents don’t have a right to be notified of their K-12 student’s gender decision at school? Again, I think Phil and company would be distressed to see how many swing voters see this the same way.
“Leave our kids alone, let them be kids, and let their own parents parent them.” Jack never said he didn’t want school kids to know non-straight people exist by the way; he said, simply, that the current Democrat-imposed curriculum standards “goes too far.” Love it or lump it, that’s a winning message with many, many non-Republican voters. Maybe not at in most media newsrooms or in the Murphy Administration front office, but in most neighborhoods in N.J? Ab-so-lute-ly. Red, purple and blue alike.
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