Schoolchildren do need protected: from fearful, intolerant, bigoted bills pushed by lawmakers

“We’ve got to protect the children!”

You hear the refrain repeatedly from the gems trying to legislate banning and bullying in Ohio schools with bad to worse bills. “Save the innocents,” bray the right wingers angling for a break-out MAGA moment and the religious right on a mission from God. “From what?” you ask, as a befuddled parent happy with your local schoolteachers and administrators.

From “divisive concepts,” they intone with a straight face and conspiratorial certainty. From LGBTQ people. From trans athletes. From sex abuse prevention. (Sounds too much like sex education.)

Funny how Republican lawmakers and Christian conservatives — rushing to sanitize history, ban books, speech and tolerance in schools — miss the real peril schoolchildren are facing. But it’s the professional fearmongers who truly threaten our kids. Children need protection from exploitive adults primed to force their myopic beliefs and partisan agendas on the unsuspecting, impressionable young.

It is the righteous proselytizing about what ought to be done in schools — to fit an ultra-conservative (and minority) narrative — who pose the greatest risk to Ohio’s 1.8 million school-age children. Call the garbage pending in the Statehouse what it is; the worst kind of political and religious malpractice because it victimizes kids to score political points or win fundamentalist victories.

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https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/06/14/schoolchildren-do-need-protected-from-fearful-intolerant-bigoted-bills-pushed-by-lawmakers/