Civil Disobedience Returns to Concord
By David Schaefer
Some 159 years ago, Henry David Thoreau made a name for himself by spending a night in the Concord (Massachusetts) jail, as part of a tax protest--an event glorified in Thoreau's subsequently famous essay on "Civil Disobedience." Recently another resident of this bastion of blue-state liberalism emulated Thoreau (perhaps inadvertently) by allowing himself to be jailed overnight for an issue much closer to home than Thoreau's antislavery crusade.
David Parker was arrested for refusing to leave the property of the public school in neighboring Lexington, where his 5-year-old son attends kindergarten, after the son came home from school with a bag of books promoting "diversity." Titles included
Who's In a Family, which depicts different kinds of "families," including same-sex couples raising children. Parker told the
Boston Globe that he and his wife, practicing Christians, had previously asked school officials to notify them in advance about classroom discussions about topics like same-sex marriage, and to allow them to exclude their son from such discussions.
According to the co-president of the school's PTA (and also a member of its "Anti-Bias Committee"), the school sends the bag of diversity-promoting books home with one student at a time not to advocate "homosexuality, heterosexuality, or any other kind of sexuality," but just to teach them "about the realities of where different children come from." (One can only wonder what "other kinds" of sexuality the co-president had in mind.)
Parker was arrested, by his account, when school officials refused to guarantee him that he could opt his son out of such instruction in the future. As he explained, he and his wife, while opposed to same-sex marriage, are "not intolerant" of other people, but are determined not to give administrators "unfettered access to the psyche of our son when he enters the school."
Thoreau's protest was a quixotic challenge to having to pay taxes to support a government whose laws and policies he deemed illegitimate. The Parkers' request is far more modest. Has the war against the traditional family really reached a point where children must be publicly indoctrinated to appreciate the virtues of same-sex "parenting" (or at least to make them "nonjudgmental" about it), starting at the age of five?
David Schaefer is professor of political science at Holy Cross College.
