Good Morning!
The late Polly Williams of Wisconsin, known as the “Mother of School Choice,” once said:
“Choice empowers parents. It allows them to choose the best school for their children. It doesn’t say, as the educrats do, that poor people are too dumb (they use the word “uninformed”) to make choices. Poor people are the same as rich people. They may not have much money, but they have the same desires and the same needs.”
Years later, the debate rages on:
- Parents Want School Choice – Ohio’s ‘Backpack Bill’ Would Give It to Them
From The Daily Citizen:
A new poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly want school choice in education – by a margin of 72% to 18%, according to the American Federation for Children (AFC).
In Ohio, legislators have introduced legislation to give parents that educational choice for their children.
House Bill 290, known as the Backpack Bill, would create educational savings accounts (ESA) for students when their parents opt in to the program. According to the Ohio Christian Education Network, which supports the legislation,
The Backpack Bill takes away the monopoly from public schools and offers families a choice for the education that will best meet the needs of their children. This will also force the public schools to be more responsive to the needs and concerns of the parents and community.
The Ohio Christian Education Network is one of several associations sponsored by the Center for Christian Virtue (CCV), a Family Policy Council allied with Focus on the Family. CCV President Aaron Baer told us that even before the loss of time in school due to the COVID-19 shutdowns, many students were struggling.
He said, “The country is finally having an honest conversation about the public education system. In our inner cities, too many children are falling behind academically, and across the board, leftist political ideologies have infiltrated the classroom.”
RELATED:
Mitt Romney Just Voted To Keep Masking Two-Year-Olds
From The Federalist:
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah voted with a room filled with several bare-faced Democrats on Tuesday to keep the federal mask mandates for toddlers as young as two years old.
During a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing over the bipartisan PREVENT Pandemics Act, Romney voted no to lifting mask and jab mandates in the federal Head Start program.
The current U.S. Department of Health and Human Services standards for the Head Start program require “universal masking for all individuals two years of age and older” and Covid-19 jab proof for all adults involved in the program.
Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana introduced an amendment to the PREVENT Pandemics Act which was was designed to “prevent HHS from implementing or enforcing their regulations regarding mask or vaccination protections in the Head Start program again.”
- More Absurd Coverage of the UPenn Swimmer
From National Review:
Look at this absurd coverage of Lia Thomas — the male swimmer dominating the women’s Ivy League swimming championships. From Ellie Rushing’s piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Being a transgender woman is at the core of Thomas’ personal and athletic journey, she has said. It’s the reason people know her name — and why the 22-year-old University of Pennsylvania freestyler is at the center of a culture war on trans athletes’ rights to play sports.
You know what is also “at the core” of Thomas’ personal and athletic journey? Being male. That’s the real reason people know Thomas’s name — and why the athlete is attracting fierce criticism from defenders of women’s sports.
Rushing writes:
Because of this sport she loves — and her commitment to competing as her authentic self — she’s endured public vitriol.
Again, nobody cares about Thomas’s identity or sense of self or how much he loves swimming. What people care about is his sex, which is male and, in a sane world, would disqualify him from competing against females.
- Kansas teacher sues school officials for forcing her to use trans pronouns
From The Christian Post:
A middle school teacher in Kansas has filed a lawsuit against her school district after being suspended for refusing to use a trans-identified student’s preferred name and pronouns because doing so would violate her religious beliefs.
Pamela Ricard, a math teacher at Fort Riley Middle School, filed a suit last week against school officials in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas.
Defendants named in the lawsuit include the USD 475 Geary County School District Board Members, Superintendent Reginald Eggleston and Fort Riley Principal Kathleen Brennan.
According to the lawsuit, Ricard was suspended in April 2021 for three days and given a written reprimand because she called a biologically female student by her legal name and used female pronouns.
- Can states limit abortion and gender-affirming treatments outside their borders?
From NPR:
Conservative lawmakers across the U.S. have let loose a wave of state legislation attempting to restrict access to abortions and to gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth by allowing lawsuits to be filed against anyone who helps them.
But now there’s a new twist in a broader Republican strategy: Representatives in multiple states are pushing bills that would attempt to limit what residents can and can’t do beyond state lines.
Recently in Missouri, a state representative introduced a measure that would let people sue anyone they suspect of helping a resident get an abortion in another state.
More than 1,500 miles away, an Idaho bill seeking to ban gender-affirming care for youth would have made it a felony to help a child access care outside the state. While Idaho Senate leaders last week said they will not be taking up the bill — essentially killing it, for now — it was easily passed by the Republican-led Idaho House a day earlier.
- Diocese Tells Pro-Abortion Catholic Politicians They Cannot Receive Communion, Become Godparents
From Daily Wire:
Catholic politicians in the Mexican state of Sinaloa who voted for a pro-abortion law will reportedly not be allowed to receive Holy Communion or be named godparents.
Sinaloa’s legislature has voted to legalize aborting unborn babies who are up to 13 weeks old, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported, noting that Sinaloa, part of the Culiacán Diocese, is the seventh Mexican state to legalize abortion.
Father Miguel Ángel Soto Gaxiola, who serves as director of the Culiacán Commission for Life, Family, Youth and Laity spoke out in condemnation of these pro-abortion Catholic politicians.
Denying these politicians Holy Communion is “the recognition of the objectively unworthy state of a person to receive the Body of Christ,” said the priest, according to CNA.
“Today we have many people scandalized by the public betrayal of the Church’s teaching on faith and morals by those legislators who call themselves ‘Catholic,’” wrote Gaxiola in a letter to politicians, according to CNA.
- We Need to Talk About Assisted Reproduction
From The Daily Citizen:
It’s not easy or comfortable to talk about the ethics of assisted reproduction. But too much is at stake not to.
Artificial reproductive technologies are fraught with moral, ethical, and practical dilemmas. This includes technologies already widely accepted and practiced in our culture (and even our churches), technologies such as surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and sperm donation. How these technologies are increasingly employed also goes largely unquestioned. For example, much of the demand for both international commercial surrogacy and for legalizing commercial surrogacy in the United States is now coming from same-sex couples who, having chosen a sterile relationship, demand the right to have children. There’s also been a number of social adjustments made in order to reimagine reproduction and family life, such as changing the legal definition of the word “parent.”
All of this demonstrates just how much our technological abilities have outpaced our ethics. For the most part, the extent of our ethical deliberation has been reduced to two questions: Can we do this? And, do we want to do this? If the answers to these questions are “yes,” the ethical case is closed, and the conclusion is that we should do this.
- Child Tax Credit expansion creates refund roller coaster
From Politico:
Democrats’ expansion of the Child Tax Credit may have expired but it’s not gone completely. More than 40 million Americans now must contend with it on their annual tax returns.
And it’s proving a curveball for many.
People who received the monthly Child Tax Credit checks lawmakers created last year may be surprised to see those payments are now reducing or even eliminating their tax refunds.
Some divorced people could be upset to learn they weren’t actually eligible for checks they received and now have to pay the money back.
At the same time, some will see fatter refunds, particularly the several million who opted out of the monthly payments.
So too will people who’ve had babies in the past year. And thanks to a loophole in the law, it’s possible for some to claim bigger child credits than lawmakers intended.
- Journalists in Ukraine pay the ultimate price for revealing the atrocities of war
From the NY Post:
Veteran Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski, 55, has paid the ultimate price of a journalist covering combat. He was slain by shelling Monday in Horenka, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, along with Ukrainian producer and fixer Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, 24, who was working with Fox News as a consultant.
Also injured (and hospitalized) was Fox correspondent Benjamin Hall.
Zakrzewski, a seasoned conflict photographer, had worked for Fox in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan; he even helped Afghans who worked for Fox there escape after the Taliban took control.
“He was profoundly committed to telling the story and his bravery, professionalism and work ethic were renowned among journalists at every media outlet,” Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott said. “He was wildly popular — everyone in the media industry who has covered a foreign story knew and respected Pierre.” She hailed Kuvshynova as “incredibly talented” and “operating around the clock to make sure the world knew what was happening in her country.”
- U.S. Senate approves bill to make daylight saving time permanent
From Reuters:
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent starting in 2023, ending the twice-annual changing of clocks in a move promoted by supporters advocating brighter afternoons and more economic activity.
The Senate approved the measure, called the Sunshine Protection Act, unanimously by voice vote. The House of Representatives, which has held a committee hearing on the matter, still must pass the bill before it can go to President Joe Biden to sign. The White House has not said whether Biden supports it.
Senator Marco Rubio, one of the bill’s sponsors, said after input from airlines and broadcasters that supporters agreed that the change would not take place until November 2023.
The change would help enable children to play outdoors later and reduce seasonal depression, according to supporters.
- Tom Brady Realizes It’s Easier To Be Hit By 300-Pound Linemen Than Stay Home All Day With Young Kids
From The Babylon Bee:
The headline says it all.
