I just saw a commercial during a football game that inspired me, and then irked me. A young black girl is shown growing up in the Civil Rights era, watching the achievements of African American athletes, political activists, and religious leaders. Believing she can become anything if she sets her mind to it, she fights for acceptance in financial firms, eventually graduates with an MBA, and becomes a Wall Street executive. “You may trod me in the very dirt,” she says, “but still, like dust, I rise.”

It’s a great message. But halfway through this ad for the University of Phoenix, alumna Gail Marquis is shown marching hand-in-hand with LGBT activists and waving a rainbow flag. The implication is crystal clear: The fight of African-Americans for equal rights is the same one LGBT Americans are fighting today.

Unbelievably, this conflation between skin color and sexual orientation surfaced during the recent unrest in Charlotte, North Carolina. In an interview with historian Brenda Tindal, Public Radio International’s John Hockenberry suggested that protesters and rioters who took to the street following the police shooting of Lamont Scott were actually angry about—get this—the new transgender bathroom law! Are you kidding me?

This kind of race-exploitation has infected even the highest levels of government. Back in May, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch filed a lawsuit against North Carolina to force accommodation on the transgender bathroom issue. “It was not so very long ago,” she then lectured the nation, “that states, including North Carolina, had other signs above restrooms, water fountains and public accommodations, keeping people out based on a distinction without a difference.”

It’s a line that has won the LGBT movement virtually endless mileage. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of today’s equivalent of the Civil Rights struggle, or to be viewed like racists by future generations.

But the fact remains, the two issues are just not the same. And black leaders—many of whom fought for the right to be treated as equal human beings decades ago—keep telling us this.

Writing at the Charlotte Observer last summer, Clarence Henderson, the chairman of the North Carolina Martin Luther King, Jr., Commission, called it “insulting to liken African Americans’ continuing struggle for equality” to the LGBT movement.

Continue reading BreakPoint – LGBT is Not a Color: Stop Hijacking Civil Rights →

Recently, US Secretary of Education John King, while speaking at a press conference, remarked that although some homeschool situations are just fine, in general, “Students who are homeschooled are not getting the kind of the rapid instructional experience they would get in school.”

King also said that part of the school experience is learning how to deal with and build relationships with peers and teachers—implying that homeschoolers don’t get this kind of experience.

Now, before I go on, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that my wife and I homeschool our three daughters. To be specific, we’re part of a community of homeschooling families with a hybrid model that shares resources and that journeys together. We think our daughters are receiving a first-rate education. I say that not just so you know I’ve got a horse in the race, but because my wife and I have personal experience. We know this world. We live in it.

But back to the Secretary’s comments. It’s not clear what he meant by “rapid instructional experience,” but that can mean a sort of checklist approach—plowing through the material, cramming for standardized tests, and hitting every mandated topic. In that sense, he’s right. Many homeschoolers don’t get “rapid instruction” of this sort, but that’s not really education in the first place.

But what has me most concerned about the Secretary’s remarks is the classic “we know better than you” attitude so endemic among governmental elites—whether it’s telling us what kind of healthcare we need, or how to teach our young ones about the most intimate of human relations.

Let me be clear: The federal government’s ever-growing reach into our children’s education is a bi-partisan effort. The Department of Education was established by Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush signed the disastrous “No Child Left Behind” initiative into law. And Common Core, which many argue will leave kids unprepared for college, has both Republican and Democratic support.

Continue reading BreakPoint – Homeschooling, the Feds, and You: Who Knows Best? →