Photo courtesy of NatZero special correspondent for reproductive health OfJack
Monday morning. You’re going to work, getting ready to turn into the office complex with a line of cars behind you, when you spot them: Protesters carrying signs demonstrating against something or another.
But you’re not just any worker. You’re a teacher. And it’s not an office complex; it’s a school campus. Coming in behind you are the buses carrying your students, not commuters into work, and across the street are protesters picketing signs with aborted fetuses on them.
The guy in the photo above is what Mrs. Jack faced this morning as she started her workweek, with buses of students expected minutes later. But the guy–and two of his colleagues–didn’t understand what they were getting into.
Republicans are fond of saying we must shield children from the realities of the world; in fact, they don’t want to protect children from anything they don’t agree with because they don’t want their kids to dare think differently than them. And the only way to ensure they don’t hear anything when they’re away from Mom or Dad (or Stepmom or Stepdad or Sister-mom or Uncle-dad) is to make sure no one is allowed to talk to them about anything without their permission.
But conservatives like these “demonstrators” will tell you that their tactics are not only reasonable, but necessary. Shock people with the grotesque images, they say, because that will prompt change.
The big problem with these demonstrators is that they didn’t do their homework. The public school where Mrs. Jack teaches is humorous known as the “baby magnet” school for the district: pregnant students and the fathers of the developing child are transferred to this school where they can take courses on parenting. After the child is born, the school has a daycare so the student-parents can continue their studies through to graduation while having child care.
The demonstrators obviously didn’t know this. They were protesting at a school, in a school system, that actively assists teenage mothers who choose NOT to abort their pregnancies. Team NatZero–(cough cough, Spartan)–reached out to the organization featured on the protesters’ placards to see if they approved of protesting at a school that supports young parents, but they have not yet responded.
The demonstrators made another mistake: after getting booted from the grounds around the high school, they decided to show these images to middle schoolers. Somehow, parents of middle schoolers found out, and planned their counter. When the demonstrators arrived at the middle school, parents surrounded them, holding up sheets to block the grotesque images from the children’s view as they exited the school after their day.
This from the Party that wants everyone to believe that because a book (on a subject they don’t agree with) is on the library shelves in a school, it means the entire school is indoctrinating their students in LGBTQ, CRT, and all the other letters that scare them. The Right makes a similar weak argument about these books: they’re literally burning books to save America, they claim.
This is the hypocrisy of the Right, who feels that anything they do–from bombing abortion clinics to traumatizing pre-teens–is completely not “grooming” or “indoctrination” because it meets their needs; they accuse their opponents of doing what they themselves are doing. And they’re breaking their own rules–whether legal, moral or Biblical–to get their way.