The Bow-Dunbarton School district has a liberal privilege problem. For the unfamiliar, Liberal Privilege is a lot like radical Islam. If you are advancing the global Ummah, no traditional rules or restrictions apply. You can be a sacrilegious ass and still be rewarded with eternal life, 72 virgins, and all that.
Here are a few examples of liberal privilege.
- I can freely express my opinions on virtually any political issue, and I don’t have to worry about whether anything I say will be deemed offensive or uncomfortable to anyone around me.
- I can remain ignorant of the thoughts, teachings, and philosophy of 50% of the country without paying any penalty for such ignorance.
- I can turn on the television news or view the front page of almost any newspaper and see people of my political persuasion widely represented.
- I can be comfortable ignoring another person’s voice in a group in which he or she is the sole representative of an opposing political ideology.
- I can send my children to a private school and I don’t have to apologize, explain, or feel embarrassed about this choice.
- I am almost never asked to explain or defend accusations of hypocrisy by people of my political persuasion, and if challenged, I know I can pretty much change the subject.
- I can criticize my government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as an “extremist.”
- I can usually get the media on my side, without having to bend over backwards to get fair coverage or worrying about being ambushed or stabbed in the back.
- I can speak out at a meeting or disagree with a proposal without having people dismiss me, ignore me, or attack me on a personal level.
- I can be pretty sure of never having my point of view seriously challenged and never having to defend my views in any systematic, thoughtful way.
There are fifty of them if you have the time, and most, if not all, will apply in some degree to the proglodyte superintendent of the Bow-Dunbarton School district, Marcy Kelley. I can say with certainty because, without regard to facts on the ground, she banned parents from wearing pink wristbands with two Xs to a girls’ soccer game.
I doubt she intended to create a symbol of resistance to liberal privilege and, more specifically, the destruction of Title IX and girls ‘ school athletics. Liberal privilege also shielded her from any sense of wrongdoing. She isn’t denying someone their Constitutional rights because they aren’t entitled to them if their ideas about sex, culture, and speech do not align with hers.
Kelley is on a short list of rouges who aided and abetted in the unconstitutional act and are getting sued. They will lose, and what that looks like depends on the plaintiffs, but the taxpayers who pay their salaries and the cost of the liberal privilege should take note. Peter Vlaming, a public school French language teacher, was bullied, harassed, and fired for refusing to use preferred pronouns. He sued.
To settle a lawsuit brought by Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing a former Virginia high school teacher who was fired for avoiding the use of pronouns to refer to one of his students, the West Point School Board has agreed to pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. In addition, the school board cleared Peter Vlaming’s firing from his record, and separate from the settlement agreement, changed its policies to conform to the new Virginia education policies established by Gov. Glenn Youngkin that respect fundamental free speech and parental rights. The settlement follows last December’s landmark Virginia Supreme Court opinion in Vlaming’s favor affirming that the Virginia Constitution contains robust free speech and free exercise protections for public employees.
We do not know what the legal and court fees might be, but it is safe to guess that the district that tried to compel Vlaming’s speech and then fired him for thinking they had no such right a cool million. It might be more, and this is where we add to the list of things that identify liberal privilege that is of interest to taxpayers.
51. I can be horrible to anyone and everyone without considering their rights or the legal and fiscal consequences of my actions.
Bow, New Hampshire, is liberal enough that the majority of taxpayers might agree with my addition of rule 51. However, when Liberals say paying taxes is patriotic, they leave out how they are not. They don’t like paying taxes, and the right to reasonably avoid them might be rule 52. Not that this translates to votes – Democrats keep electing Democrats despite the evidence that they’ll get the crap taxed out of them.
We could post here the maxim that some people are so smart they are stupid, but this sounds to me like stupid is as stupid does.
