WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Education and parents rights activists blasted President Joe Biden’s new council on parental rights and families.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona announced Tuesday the new “National Parents and Family Engagement Council.”
“Parents are a child’s first teachers, and there’s no one better equipped to work with schools and educators to identify what students need to recover,” stated Cardona, who has refused to say that schools should not hide children’s “gender transitions” from parents. “The National Parents and Families Engagement Council will serve as an important link between families, caregivers, education advocates and their school communities.”
Conservatives are skeptical because of the past history of Biden officials, including Secretary Cardona, targeting parents who expressed criticism of COVID policies, curriculum and book choices, and transgender bathroom rules. Cardona coordinated with several National School Boards Association (NSBA) leaders to draft a policy that likened education activists to domestic terrorists.
Attorney General Merrick Garland then used the letter from the NSBA to direct federal law enforcement and prosecutors to crack down on activists who came to school board meetings to criticize pornographic books or mask mandates. One federal prosecutor from Montana even took the cue from Garland and drafted a memo listing possible criminal charges that could be levied against parents and other activists.
READ: Top Biden officials encourage transgenderism in kids, vow to punish states resisting transmania
Former NSBA CEO Chip Slaven at one time considered asking for military police to be deployed to some school districts where parents were particularly outspoken.
“This is a blatant attempt to cover-up the many anti-parent actions of this reckless department,” Mark Lloyd, policy director for the Alliance for Free Citizens wrote in an email. “They literally coordinated an attack on parents seeking to engage the school systems by labeling them as ‘domestic terrorists.’”
“We now know that the entire effort to smear and denigrate parents opposed to the radical gender ideology and the racist ‘critical race theory’ in their children’s schools was organized and directed by the Biden regime,” Lloyd wrote. “Now, they are desperate to divert attention away from their anti-parent, anti-family policies.”
“This is pure Soviet-style education,” Lloyd stated further. “Parents are becoming engaged across America. But the government doesn’t like what those millions of parents are saying. So they set up this ridiculous shell group to divert attention and spew their propaganda.”
He called the new council “an insult to those who have been attacked and demeaned by the professional indoctrination crew of the Biden Department of Education.”
Lloyd told LifeSiteNews in follow-up comments that the council “does not make up for Merrick Garland’s memo. If this is an attempt to repair the damage of that memo, it falls short.”
READ: Biden tells teachers that students are ‘like your’ children, not ‘somebody else’s,’ in the classroom
The best (funniest?) thing about this “parents council” is that it includes people who publicly defended the letter that called parents “domestic terrorists” and were vicious towards those who publicly called the letter out. https://t.co/ZUDtQKSW9j
— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) June 14, 2022
“The best (funniest?) thing about this ‘parents council’ is that it includes people who publicly defended the letter that called parents ‘domestic terrorists’ and were vicious towards those who publicly called the letter out,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education (PDE), tweeted on Tuesday. She did not respond to a Twitter message on Wednesday.
“This is too little too late from this Administration, which has made abundantly clear through its actions that it views actual parental input as an inconvenience,” Nicole Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education, told The National Desk. “I would have hoped the Biden Administration would realize the importance of bringing many perspectives to the table – but I am not surprised that other voices are not welcome.”
Members include the National Parents Union, the National Parent Teacher Association, and National Action Network.