We were warned about co-ed bathrooms

Gender-Confused Virginia Election

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Democrats attempt to make transformational changes in the American way of life, but the party’s progressive agenda is not playing well in the upcoming election for governor of Virginia. This state that Biden won by ten points last year has become a tossup.

The implosion of Democrats in Virginia is due to the havoc they caused by indoctrinating public school students with Leftist critical race and gender theories. The rape of a ninth-grade girl in the girls bathroom, apparently committed by a boy wearing a skirt and then covered up by school authorities, has enraged parents statewide.

The Democrat-controlled school district had recently adopted a policy that allows students to use the bathroom that corresponds to their so-called gender identity. School districts in more conservative parts of the state had rejected this Leftist policy, which was based on a law passed by the Democrat-controlled state legislature last year.

A recent poll by Cygnal of likely Virginia voters shows the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, tied with powerful Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe, at 48% each. But among parents of school-age children, who represent a quarter of the electorate, the Republican leads by a landslide margin of 56% to 39%.

Another new poll by Emerson College found that education was rated as the most important issue for Virginia voters this year, far outpacing Covid-19. Not only do parents and homeowners have a direct stake in the public schools, but all citizens are affected by what young people are taught there.

School library books are another source of concern for parents. Gender Queer, for example, was found on Virginia public school shelves at taxpayer expense, even in traditionally conservative Virginia Beach.

After verifying parents’ complaints, two courageous school board members called for removing five books with inappropriate sexual content, including the sexually explicit Gender Queer. A sixth book portrays white supporters of Donald Trump as Nazis.

A publisher defended Gender Queer by describing it as resource for people who “identify as nonbinary or genderqueer” and for others to understand what that means. Another objectionable book, Lawn Boy, is about sex between two 10-year-old boys.

Terry McAuliffe may have sealed his own fate last month when he arrogantly declared, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Some 57 percent of Virginia parents disagree, according to another new poll of likely voters conducted by Fox News.

Barack Obama pompously descended on Virginia to denounce what he called “these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage that right-wing media peddles.” Brandon Michon, a 2005 Loudoun County High School graduate who now has three young children in the same district, observed that Obama is “tone deaf” for failing to recognize that parents are responsible for the well-being of their children.

Virginia had become a lost cause for Republicans because the northern part of the state is now dominated by federal employees, contractors and lobbyists. But even many liberals are drawing the line at gender indoctrination in public schools, especially if their own kids are affected.

Laura Zorc, director of education reform at Building Education for Students Together, observed that the issue of “parental rights is on the ballot in Virginia. This is not a Republican or a Democrat issue – it’s a parents issue.”

Democrats are so desperate that a video featuring Kamala Harris urging African Americans to vote for McAuliffe has been shown at more than 300 black churches across the state. Kamala’s stunt was denounced by former Democrat Governor Doug Wilder, America’s first black governor, for possibly jeopardizing the tax-exempt status of those churches.

Putting gender-confused boys into girls restrooms or sexually explicit propaganda on school shelves does not help African Americans, nor does teaching them that they are perpetual victims of historical white supremacy. McAuliffe would promote these progressive dogmas without doing anything to genuinely help black students toward greater achievement.

The increasingly ideological curriculum compounds the longstanding problem of underachievement in a state where less than 40% of students are rated as proficient in reading and math. Even Virginia’s top-performing Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria has recently turned away from merit by dropping its competitive admission policy in order to seek diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

As usual, Democrats will try to boost their numbers this election through unsupervised mail-in ballots. A lawsuit by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP) presented sworn evidence that liberal Fairfax County issued at least 339 absentee ballots to applicants who failed to provide the last four digits of their Social Security number as required by state law.

Fortunately, Virginia does not send unrequested ballots to all registered voters as California and a few other states do. To Democrats’ dismay, early voting in Virginia shows a collapse in turnout by younger voters who previously voted for Biden.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

End Public Health Dictatorship

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The pompous oracle of a handful of bureaucrats is causing job losses nationwide through vaccine mandates. On Monday, even the football coach of the Washington State Cougars was fired merely because he declined to take the COVID vaccine by an arbitrary deadline.

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for president on a ridiculous platform of climate change, demanded that all state employees receive the COVID vaccine by Monday or be fired. Supposedly some limited exemptions were made available but the football coach’s request for one was rejected.

Such havoc is wrought by the socialist mindset of public health. The United States has not done any better against Covid than the rest of the world, despite these arbitrary requirements of vaccination here.

Police officers of Seattle, also located in Washington State, are waving Gadsden flags from their official vehicles in protest of the vaccine mandate. The coiled rattlesnake against a yellow background is recognizable to Americans as a symbol of resistance for the cause of freedom, dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Meanwhile, another kind of news emerged on Monday. Colin Powell died from Covid despite having been fully vaccinated against the disease.

Had Powell not been vaccinated, the storyline would have been a clarion call for all the unvaccinated to drop their resistance. Instead, the liberal spin is to criticize anyone who cites this example as a legitimate reason to wonder about whether the vaccine really works and whether the mandates are justified.

Poorer countries have fared better than the United States in dealing with Covid. Early and preventive treatment in many countries, such as access to over-the-counter hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, seems more effective in combating the disease than the experimental vaccine has been.

Yet almost no court has been willing to rule against public health officials, even when they overstep far beyond their authority. Last summer the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a moratorium by the CDC on evictions by private property owners, while meekly mentioning with timorousness that the moratorium should not last forever.

Everyone from the president on down has given breathtaking deference to a small group of unelected, underachieving technocrats who pretend they know better than our physicians. Patients unlucky enough to end up in a hospital find that their own physicians cannot even prescribe them medication due to senseless guidelines issued by bureaucrats.

The vaccine mandates have consequences far beyond their dubious impact on public health. A labor shortage has developed to cause a supply chain crisis, which is restricting access by many Americans to ordinary goods that we need and casting a cloud over upcoming shopping for Christmas.

Roughly 20% of truck drivers are unvaccinated, and there is no reason why such a job should face any vaccine mandates. Their contact with others is minimal, as many truck drivers ordinarily sleeping in their own rigs during their long trips.

The cross-border truck traffic between the United States and Canada is an essential part of keeping goods flowing. A rise in vacant truck jobs could skyrocket as the vaccine mandate comes down against the trucking industry, thereby worsening the supply chain problems.

Southwest Airlines, once an exciting place to work, is experiencing no-shows by pilots which caused surprise cancellations of thousands of its flights. On Monday, employees stood outside its Dallas headquarters with signs including “jobs, not jabs” and “freedom, not force.”

Companies are trying to justify their imposition of vaccine mandates on workers by citing Biden’s edict that all employers having at least 100 employees impose the requirement of being jabbed. But doubts grow about whether the Constitution grants the federal government that authority, and no regulations have been issued requiring it.

A majority of the Supreme Court felt in 2012 that there was not a constitutional basis for imposing Obamacare, and it survived only due to a contrived interpretation of the law as a tax. But there is no tax in the vaccine mandate, so it should be as unconstitutional as Obamacare would have been.

A timid decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which no judge signed, ordered Western Michigan University to at least have the courtesy of informing football players why their religious exemptions were rejected. The players successfully sued after their exemptions were denied, and the court should have tossed out the mandate entirely.

Football players risk far more to their health by playing the violent game than they do from possibly being exposed to Covid-19. These and other examples of overreach in imposing the vaccine mandate illustrate that this game is not about health, but about power.

Dictators grab control as long as others allow it. It is overdue for courts and politicians to end this power grab disguised as vaccine mandates.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Biden Down to 38%

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Joe Biden has declined to 38%, and not just in his mental capacity. The reliable Quinnipiac poll announced that Biden’s disapproval has risen to 53% while his approval falls to only 38%.

Interviews of ordinary Democrats confirm the dismay, as reported by Politico, that many have about their own president and his inadequate performance. Their legislation on Capitol Hill has stalled, and nothing seems to be accomplished even though Dems control both Congress and the White House.

An historically low approval rating for a president means that the candidates in his party face landslide defeats in the midterm elections, as happened in 1946, 1994, and 2010. The governor’s race in Virginia next month, once considered a safe Democrat seat amid a sea of government workers, has shifted to a toss-up.

Obama’s adviser Susan Rice is apparently making decisions in the White House now, but most of the public does not even know who she is. Biden is mentally incapable of giving a press conference or holding an event that might restore the lost public confidence in him.

No one, other than Trump supporters, is quite sure why Biden’s ratings have dropped so sharply. Some attribute it to a Covid-19 “malaise,” while others cite Biden’s mishandling of the Afghanistan pullout and the flooding of our country with refugees.

The goal of Democrats to have Biden as a placeholder in the Oval Office until an electable liberal can be found is not working. No electable Dem successor is on the horizon, and Democrats face three more years of decline until Trump will be on the ballot again.

Loud protesters greeted Biden when he went to Michigan recently, a state that he reportedly won without a meaningful audit. "We’re going to support Trump still until he’s put back in," Philip Ludwig told the Detroit News.

Trump seizes the day, in ways that only he can. On Saturday he held a spectacular rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, which liberals lament surpassed his earlier rallies this year.

Trump let it rip by emphasizing that he never conceded to Joe Biden in the presidential election last year, and more audits should be ordered. Despite criticizing Trump for his rhetoric, liberals are stunned that 91% of Iowa Republicans support Trump.

On stage with Trump was Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the 88-year-old Iowa farmer who leads his opponent by 15 points in the polls. The crowd went wild as Trump endorsed Grassley, who enthusiastically accepted the endorsement.

Everyone knows how important securing the border is to Trump, but he said that there is one issue that is even more important. That issue is ending election fraud by the Left as it steals elections.

Trump's leadership in opposing election fraud puts him a mile ahead of every other politician. The Never-Trumpers continue to deny the importance of this issue, which if not rectified will result in permanent one-party rule by Democrats.

Look no further than California, where a groundswell movement to recall its tyrannical Governor Gavin Newsom was shut down by a porous mail-in system enabling unverified voting. Then California Dems made their anything-goes style of voting permanent, which ensures it will continue to be a one-party state.

Not so in Iowa and the rest of the Midwest, where election integrity is taken seriously and Trump is immensely popular. Trump enjoys a 53% approval rating in Iowa, the same number that disapproves of Biden nationwide.

Future presidential elections and key votes in Congress will be decided by the Midwest, stretching from Pennsylvania in the east to Oklahoma in the southwest. America’s most famous painting is "American Gothic," which depicts a skeptical Iowa farmer standing next to his homely daughter, armed with a pitchfork if needed to defend their farmhouse.

That defense is needed now, as the East and West Coast increasingly rob the Midwest on energy and other issues. Drought-ravaged California just banned gasoline-powered lawnmowers, which are necessary in the fertile Midwest on a weekly basis.

There are virtually no oil, coal, or traditional car manufacturers in the eastern or western states, while all are basic to the Midwest and our Nation's economy. Semiconductor production, harmful to the environment, is big in several western states while non-existent in the Midwest.

Donald Trump is no longer a New Yorker and increasingly looks like a younger version of Sen. Chuck Grassley, whose homespun common sense has repeatedly reelected him. Democrats will need to win three big states in the Midwest to hold onto the White House, while the bellwether state of Iowa goes strongly Republican.

Meanwhile, the Left Coast controls social media and continues to censor Donald Trump there, so he filed suit last week to restore his free speech rights. Monopolization by Big Tech has made it comparable to public utilities, which cannot refuse service to political adversaries.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Vaccine Tyranny Gets Booed

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) spoke to Republican supporters on Saturday in his home state, but they turned against him when he repeated the talking points of vaccine tyrants. Thousands have lost their jobs and 16,000 have died soon after receiving the Covid vaccine, according to the official government VAERS database.

Sen. Graham, who supported Anthony Fauci and the CDC as they undermined Trump throughout 2020, suggested that everyone should think about getting vaccinated. Loud cries of “no” rained down upon him in response.

Graham retorted, “I didn’t tell you to get it, you ought to think about it.” He was then heckled again, as he and other politicians are doing nothing to protect the right to decline.

Some employees are being hit with a surcharge if their spouses decline this experimental vaccine. This injustice results because most Americans get health insurance through their employer, which puts their entire family’s health at the mercy of their company’s H.R. department.

For years Democrats demanded that insurance plans be forbidden to charge more for pre-existing conditions, saying it was unfair to force people to pay for their unhealthy lifestyles. Now liberals applaud when employers use costly insurance to punish people for merely having an unvaccinated spouse.

Courts have upheld these insurance mandates, and even allow hospitals to block patients from receiving a safe dose of prescribed ivermectin. Only about 500 out of America’s 1 million physicians courageously and consistently prescribe ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine as early treatment for Covid, despite easy over-the-counter access to these safe medications in poor countries.

Graham might as well have told his audience of patriots to “think about” submitting to a dictatorship. Fauci recently implied that unvaccinated Americans shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate Christmas with gatherings this year.

Graham repeated false talking points of the public health authorities, who simultaneously deny the health crisis at the open southern border. “Ninety-two percent of the people in hospitals in South Carolina are unvaccinated,” Graham began to say, until he was drowned out by loud cries of “no” and “not true.”

Distorting the data, some hospitals do not even test vaccinated patients for Covid. When a vaccinated person dies from Covid, it may not be reported as a Covid death.

Hospitals are beholden to unelected public health bureaucrats for funding. The quickest way for a hospital to lose profits is to report that vaccinated persons are dying, because retaliation would ensue.

We still don’t know the harm that the Covid vaccine causes in pregnancy, and stillbirths are occurring due to umbilical cord clots after their mothers received Covid vaccines. Knowledgeable health care workers are among those most resistant to receiving the vaccine, and the mandates make no exception for pregnant women.

For the second time in two months, the Supreme Court denied an application to review a mandate that infringes on the rights of thousands. Obama-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor just denied the application by New York City public school teachers to review the senseless mandate that they all be vaccinated or lose their jobs.

In 1905, the Supreme Court upheld a $5 fine against a minister who declined a city-mandated vaccine for smallpox. Many courts still cite that anachronistic decision even though, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his cruel decision endorsing mandatory sterilization, “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

A measly $5 fine, even in 1905 pre-inflation dollars, is hardly the penalty of losing one’s job or being expelled from college. The smallpox vaccine was not experimental and unapproved as the Covid vaccine is today, which continues to be administered under an unusual Emergency Use Authorization.

Graham tried again with his crowd, asking them “how many of you have taken measles shots?” Outrage showered down on him again, with pointed shouts of “it’s not the same!”

The crowd was right; the measles vaccine was more thoroughly tested and has caused only a tiny fraction of the adverse reactions reported to VAERS on the Covid vaccine. Graham’s silly question would be like downplaying the opioid disaster by asking how many have had a glass of wine.

It is baffling that Graham and other Republicans do not realize how the Fauci mindset is transforming our nation into tyranny. Millions of voters are ready for candidates who promise to strip public health officials of their pompous authority, as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) demanded on Monday to fire Fauci.

Mass vaccination has not ended the pandemic, here or in Israel. Authorities always knew that 70 million or so Americans would never voluntarily submit to the experimental Covid vaccine.

But enemies of liberty seized on this opportunity to control Americans in ways unimaginable two years ago. Many of the 70 million vaccine resisters are swing voters, and their support could be enough to bring election victory to candidates who stand up for them.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.