Love Makes a Family

But boundaries make a river

Official Complaint Filed

It has been a while since the SDMA (School District of the Menomonie Area) convened their “Reconsideration Committee” in response to a citizen complaint. If there is a book you want to see removed from the schools, apparently the process is described in the district’s "Guidelines for Reconsideration of Educational Materials – Rule 361."

Josie Pillman has asked for the removal of two books which she found in the Knapp Elementary School library. She will be bringing her case to the committee at the SDMA administrative office at 215 Pine Street East in Menomonie on Thursday, September 29th at 4 PM. (Here is the officially posted agenda.)The public is welcome to attend. It sounds like the committee gets to decide a lot of things about how the meeting is run. For example, they decide if they are going to let the public speak or not at the meeting.

The books to be discussed are:

1) It Feels Good to Be Yourself - A Book About Gender Identity a picture book by Theresa Thorn

“[Ruthie is] a transgender girl. That means when she was born, everyone thought she was a boy. Until she grew a little older—old enough to tell everyone that she’s actually a girl. But not everyone feels like either a boy or a girl. This is Ruthie’s friend Alex. Alex is both a boy and a girl. JJ is neither a boy nor a girl. See, when you were born, you couldn’t tell people who you were and how you felt. They looked at you and made a guess. Maybe they got it right, maybe they got it wrong. What a baby’s body looks like when they’re born can be a clue to what the baby’s gender will be, but not always. Your feelings about your gender are real. Listen to your heart.” - an excerpt from It Feels Good to Be Yourself

2) Love Makes a Family by Sophie Beer – This is a BOARD book for those too young to even read yet. The main issue is pictures of same-sex parents as head of a family.

It is my opinion that the Reconsideration Committee should remove both books from the SDMA entirely.

Denying Science

An obvious problem with the gender identity book is that it simply denies science. In fact, it denies some of the most basic and time tested science we have. If a child FEELS like the earth is flat should you fill the elementary school libraries with books that affirm those personal beliefs?

The second book, however, is trickier to dismiss. Love is love, right? Here we have to go deeper.

Photo by Rosemary Ketchum

Denying Banks

All of us began our lives as two cells coming together. The process of becoming what we physically are now, though, was largely out of our control. Somehow from those two cells we got the hair on our heads, eyes, brains and blood. Those two cells contained all the information needed to develop into hearts that beat on their own and muscles that do our will without much thought at all. We are wonderfully, brilliantly made.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

We know that we, and the whole world, are CREATED and DESIGNED because of the complexity of everything around us.

Christians believe that we were created by a God that longs to have every one of us, even people we personally think are problematic or annoying, with Him. Deeply united to Him. To be children enjoying His infinite beauty, Truth and goodness.

And there are some rules given to us by the One who made us. Rules not meant to oppress us but to lead us safely on the road to deep joy.

In order to have a river, you have to have banks, AKA boundaries.

If you don’t have river banks, you get a swamp. Probably greener than Lake Menomin in August!

Science for all these years has told us the difference between male and female. In the Bible, God made one man and one woman, told them to be fruitful and multiply and established the concept of the traditional one man, one woman family which our whole civilization is built on.

People choose Menomonie as a place to live because it is a good place to raise a family. There is lots for children to do here and it is relatively calm and quiet. Parents expect the school system to be a safe place where traditional family values will be reinforced during the school day, or at least not subverted without the parents’ knowledge.

This is not about “banning” books.

Books like the two being considered today can be easily purchased by any family that wants them in their home library. They do not belong in our elementary schools.

The statement “Love makes a family” seems so unoffensive, but it is a river with no banks. That can end ANYWHERE. What if your parents don’t love each other any more? Will your family go away? What if your father loves four women? Is one man and four women a family? What if “love” is a 35 year old man and a 12 year old? What if love is the dog?

With no boundaries, our “families” can turn from a river into a swamp very quickly.

This may seem like a vast exaggeration, but 10 years ago could you have imagined we would be seeing these books in the schools and be having this conversation? What conversation will we be having next year? People warned us of a “slippery slope.” They were called wackos and conspiracy theorists.

A cry for help

An interesting thing about all this re-gendering of kids is that they are switching in both directions. In some cultures, parents prefer to have sons over daughters. In a society like that, I could see the girls wanting to take drastic measures to become boys. But in this culture, it isn’t about the end-point of actually being the other sex, it is about the journey. The boys want to be girls and the girls want to be boys. No one is satisfied with how God made them. Everyone is hurting.

If we look honestly at the situation, it seems that transgender in our children is perhaps not really about sex, but about emotional stress and trauma. First you have the very normal experience of being uncomfortable with your body as it develops. And the feeling of being weird and an outcast that many naturally experience as young people. My generation felt those feelings LONG before the idea of re-gendering came along.

Photo by RODNAE Productions

The stresses on children today are massive! We can barely endure them as adults! You have home situations where there is mental illness, addiction, abuse. Homes where there isn’t food in the kitchen. There are very few homes now with the luxury of a devoted father providing for and protecting his family in love. Few homes with a mother with time available to guide and nurture the children, doing the sometimes mundane but important tasks around the house, and being an available shoulder to cry on.

Add to this the stress of COVID and kids being told that they might die or kill those they love accidentally.

CRT, or as you might prefer to call it, SEL, teaches little kids that they are bad because of something that someone who looked like them did, possibly hundreds of years ago and the obvious conclusion the kids reach is that jumping the gender fence is the ONLY WAY they can join the club of the good oppressed victim-people instead of being one of those nasty oppressors who can never be redeemed.

This jumping back and forth over the gender fence is a cry for help. It is an expression of at least stress and often trauma. It is like “cutting.” In most cases it has nothing at all to do with a particular sexual orientation or desire to express that. If a student goes to a school counselor and says they have been cutting themselves, that warning sign and cry for help will hopefully be heard and underlying stressors will be looked at.

Why is this different?

Photo by Alexander Grey

It is different because for some reason, this is intentional. Someone(s) out there is benefiting from the trauma of our children and I will leave you to speculate on who and why.

What happens when a child jumps over the gender fence? People who would not otherwise eat a non-organic tomato encourage the child to put all manner of strong hormones in their young, developing bodies and possibly to surgically remove parts of their bodies that would enable them to have children of their own someday or experience the love and bonding that comes from nursing their babies. The chemicals and the surgery are sterilizing these children. Making them infertile. Even if they try to jump back over the fence later, as many do.

In ten to twenty years, who will be reading our library books? Who will be filling our school desks when today’s re-gendered students cannot have children. These two harmless looking books are stealing from us our future grandchildren, the next generation.

These books need to go, as do all books that encourage and glorify gender fence-jumping. And maybe we should ask who is giving these books to the children of the SDMA.

See you Thursday.

Photo by Michael Porter

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