Florida, ‘Don’t Say Gay’, And A Parent Uprising Against Gulag Indoctrination In A Deep Blue State

‘Mommy, what am I?”, asked Tommy Handy when he came home from Bartlett Elementary.

“What do you mean, sweetheart?”

“Am I a boy or a girl?”

And from that moment on, Mrs. Elvira Handy went to the barricades.

Elvira had been brought in a properly liberal family in a wealthy suburb of Boston, all blue, never doubting its faith in progress, inclusivity, and diversity.  The city council of their town voted to increase taxes and spending every year, and she and her neighbors never complained.  The taxes paid for generous salaries to public employees, and provided a guaranteed income to the small number of minority families living in the east end.  

Environmentalism was not just an appeal but a practical program of bike lanes, recycling, stringent emissions testing over and above the Massachusetts  standard, ands a social conscience meant generous subsidies for local affiliates of Black Lives Matter, Abortion Matters, and Yes, Say Gay. 

Lawns were festooned with BLM, Rainbow, and Hate Has No Home Here signs, neighborly chats were uniformly head-shaking affairs over the state of the union, its homophobia, systemic racism, and capitalist greed.  Bartlett, Massachusetts was of one voice, one temperament, and one political philosophy.

So, Elvira Handy’s reaction to her son’s question and her angry, demanding, and accusatory role in the Bartlett PTA might have been looked at as a break in the ranks; but it was nothing more than a traditional, ordinary mother’s response to an absurdity. 

Tolerance was one thing, but the purposeful, deliberately disingenuous indoctrination of young children in the ways of the transgender elite was nothing less than tyranny; and she quickly found out that most mothers were of the same mind. 

If a survey had been taken of Bartlett families, one would have found the same, familiar pattern of child upbringing.  In homes with young boys, living rooms would be littered with trucks, racing cars, and dinosaurs.  In those with young girls, dolls, princess tiaras, ballet slippers, and cuddly soft lambs and bunny rabbits would be everywhere. 

Despite mothers’ political conviction to gender diversity, when it came to their own children, they were as defiantly traditional as mothers were generations ago.  A boy is a boy, and a girl is a girl, and never should they ever be confused.

The Bartlett school board and the school’s administrators were taken aback by the community’s outrage.  They were doing nothing more than putting political principles into action.  Their curriculum insertions – like those in Florida – were quietly but persuasively teaching children to anticipate their eventual sexual choice.  They might have been born boys and girls, but that by no means locked them in heterosexual prisons.

The gender spectrum offered limitless choices to children and adults, and sensitizing children to this generous possibility couldn’t start soon enough.  So, in what educators considered an age-appropriate curriculum, they simply asked pupils what it might be like to be the opposite sex and wouldn’t it be nice to become a boy or a girl. 

The children snickered and laughed at the prospect.  There was a lot of giggling from the girls about pee-pees, and choruses of ‘No way!’ from the boys; but the teachers had been trained to identify the in-betweens, boys who played gentle games on the playground and tomboys who picked fights. 

Of course Mrs. Finchley, Tommy Handy’s second grade teacher, knew that she was being just as gender insensitive as the residents of nearby, downscale Woburn. She knew that there are no such things as male or female behavioral signifiers, but her long experience as a teacher taught her that soft and pliable little boys often turned out gay, and that tomboys grew into tough, uncompromising, aggressive women.  

The ends justify the means she reasoned, and picking out the most likely to succeed at sexual re-orientation and using them as an example of her lesson would never be criticized.

The textbooks chosen for this social enterprise were far more explicit than any in Florida.  The publishers had gone so far as to include images of girls dressing as boys and vice-versa, and include comic book panels of these little transvestites emerging in a different sexual world.

When Elvira got her hands on these books, she went apoplectic, and in a frenzy of hot button activism, went from house to house displaying the offensive materials.  “How dare they?”, exclaimed Mrs. Handy; and to a woman, the mothers agreed, and the next PTA meeting overflowed with mothers and fathers demanding to be heard.

Ironically, and contrary to true liberal views, these enraged parents even suggested a book burning – a visible display of conformity to their demands and an assurance that these devilishly perverse books would no longer ever be seen in Bartlett, Massachusetts or anywhere else in the country for that matter.

Of course the school board, school administrators, and the teachers union could not stop at gender.  Gender awareness was only one of the changes to the curriculum necessary for the social reform that they and like-minded progressives sought. The other was white privilege.  

Young children must be aware of the white race’s consistent history of oppression of black people, their slave-owning past, their racial brutality and sexual abuse, and their endemic, systemic racism which persisted to this day.  White people are ipso facto the inferior race, and such immoral, predatory, brutality can only be a signs of DNA gone rogue and wrong.  Black Americans, descended from noble African tribes with a purity of mind and spirit, gentle souls, and a highly evolved society, should be recognized for their racial superiority.

Of course these same educators knew that this would be a hard sell to adults.  After all, Western civilization was not all bad despite slavery.  The art, literature, philosophy, and science of Ancient Greece and Rome; the cathedrals of Rouen, Chartres, Salisbury, and Dresden; British laws, governance, and rules for a coherent civil society could not be swept under the rug.  Yet, what did children know of all this? And weren’t centuries of slavery and abuse of the black man far more telling of the character of Western civilization than a few churches?

Needless to say, Elvira Handy did not stop at the insidious gender claims of the school board.  Taking a lesson from Florida, she demanded to see all textbooks to see how and where they included the same deformed concepts of race that were included in Tallahassee. And there they were and just as bad.  Racial notions of black superiority and white inferiority couched in the language of ‘diversity’ showed up in math, reading, and geography.  This was even more of an outrage to Elvira and her formerly progressive neighbors.

Her fight against the Bartlett, Massachusetts school board made the national news.  “Outraged Parents Demand A Return To The Three R’s” was perhaps the most neutral and objective.  The New York Times wrote, “Conservative Apoplexy Reigns In Massachusetts” while the National Review said, “Sanity Returns To The Classroom, The Case Of Bartlett, Massachusetts”.

Her campaign against the school board was so successful and gained her such national recognition, her neighbors suggested that she run for office.  The political tide was beginning to turn.  Ron DeSantis was only one of many high-profile conservative governors stemming the progressive tide.  Greg Abbott of Texas, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and Tennessee’s Bill Lee were among many other local and national politicians raising their voice.   Why shouldn’t she become one of them?

She demurred and returned to her life as mother, wife, and businesswoman, enough for the time being, and difficult enough to maintain without outside diversions. 

The furor in Bartlett died down, the school board was voted out, offending administrators and teachers dismissed, and Bartlett Elementary won a state prize for The Most Improved – all thanks to Elvira Handy who was too modest to take credit.  “It was bound to happen”, she said.  “Absurdity can never last”.