American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten suggested that parental-choice legislation like that spearheaded by Republican-controlled Florida and Virginia could sow the seeds of violent conflict.
“This notion — we’ve been very lucky in America, and we in some ways live in a bubble for a long time,” she said during an April 13 radio interview on The Rick Smith Show. “This is propaganda. This is misinformation. This is the way in which wars start. This is the way in which hatred starts.”
The AFT, one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, has pushed back as school districts across the country experience a resurgence of parental involvement in K–12 education. Weingarten’s organization was chief among the unions lobbying for extending school closures, classroom mask mandates, and other Covid-19 restrictions that interrupted or hampered learning during the pandemic.
While the AFT claims to welcome parental engagement, Weingarten said she believes the latest Republican initiatives to curtail instruction in sexual orientation and gender identity, which Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill prohibits for kindergarten through third grade, could be dangerous for LGBT youth.
“Educators welcome parent involvement in schools because our kids do best when teachers, parents and caregivers work together,” Weingarten said in a statement obtained by Fox News earlier this week. “We have a lot to do to help kids recover and thrive this year after two years of an unprecedented pandemic. So rather than help us help our kids socially, academically and emotionally, these vocal minorities want to marginalize LGBTQ kids, censor teachers and ban books.”
Weingarten’s comments strike a similar tone to that of MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, who recently compared parental-choice legislation to “Russian war tactics” of “dehumanization.” Wallace criticized the “politics of ‘parental choice’” and argued that Florida’s law, which progressives dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” could be disastrous and even deadly.
“The truth is dehumanization as a tactic for politics is from war. Russians get the soldiers to rape children by dehumanizing them,” she said.
“It’s being deployed in our politics, and people like you and I sometimes lose the plot and admire its effectiveness, not its substance, but even the analysis of these tactics loses sight of what this speech brings us back to which is that dehumanization has a cost, right now,” Wallace said.
Wallace repeated Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s warning: “Kids will die.”