“Loudoun County school board has become ground zero in an escalating culture war”

“Loudoun County school board has become ground zero in an escalating culture war”

This is why so many people are paying attention to the governor race in Virginia. It has taken on a bigger meaning.

Mark Pulliam writes at American Greatness:

Do Parents Have Rights?

Loudoun County, Virginia, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., represents the contentious zeitgeist bedeviling the body politic. As I reported elsewhere last year, the Loudoun County school board has become ground zero in an escalating culture war in which concerned parents oppose leftist indoctrination posing as curriculum.

The latest salvo—launched in the heat of a dead-even gubernatorial race in Virginia, and in the wake of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s much-criticized memo suggesting that disgruntled parents opposing school boards pose a national security threat—is captured in a Washington Post column with the provocative headline “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.”

The Washington Post is the local paper widely read in the populous Northern Virginia suburbs that often determine the outcome of statewide elections in the Old Dominion. The column seemingly was written to buttress the statement made by Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in a debate with his opponent, Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin, that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they teach.”

McAuliffe’s statement, regarded by many as a Kinsley gaffe—i.e., a controversial statement that inadvertently reveals the speaker’s true feelings—has been relentlessly exploited by Youngkin in the campaign, in the belief that Virginia parents are fed up with school boards pushing woke ideology. Youngkin counters, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”

Recent polling confirms that Virginians overall—and especially Republicans and independents—favor greater parental influence over school curriculum. (Among Democrats, however, a stunning 70 percent of those polled wanted school boards to have more influence on school curriculum than parents.) The only poll that matters, however, is the Virginia gubernatorial election on Tuesday, November 2. Voters will decide whether McAuliffe’s arrogant disdain for parents will carry the day.

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