Teen Vogue teams with public school activists to sexualize children
February 15, 2022
Teen Vogue — a magazine that wants its young readers to know “How to Masturbate Without Porn” — has found allies in American schools who share its mission of sexualizing children. The threat posed by parents who are waking up to trends in the classroom must therefore be immediately addressed.
Orion Rummler warns that parents are motivating legislators to curtail the radical content of public school curricula.
“At least seven states have introduced bills to regulate how textbooks and school curriculums talk about LGBTQ+ people or how teachers can discuss gender identity and sexual orientation with students,” Rummler said.
Teen Vogue republished Rummler’s report from The 19th, which was named in celebration of the amendment to the United States Constitution that recognized women’s right to vote. When those women turn out to be mothers exercising their democratic power to protect their children from inappropriate lessons pushed through the schools, however, they are not to be celebrated but thwarted.
Success for the parents’ movement would limit the ability of teachers like “out and visible” bisexual Jeanne Nettles, who teaches in Florida, to fulfill their sense of “responsibility… to be there for students who aren’t ready to talk to their parents about their gender identity or sexual orientation.” Nettles asserts that she’s a “safe adult,” but the article avoids the crucial questions: Who should decide if she really is safe, and why should policy assume that teachers are safe, but that parents are not?
The latter assumption is the key to Teen Vogue’s efforts to separate its readers from their families. Rummler’s article frets about legislation that would, for example, “require parents’ written permission for students to join any student group or club involving gender identity and sexuality.” Aaron Ridings, of the activist Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network worries about “young people being outed to families and parents who may not be affirming.” Human Rights Campaign legislative director and senior counsel Cathryn Oakley speculates that “if a kid isn’t safe coming out at home, or they’re not sure, coming out to a guidance counselor is perhaps a significantly better idea.”
The consistent theme is that the government should not trust parents with their own children. Whereas Rummler worries about too much regulation of public schools, a Teen Vogue article by Eve Ettinger and Nylah Burton demands more regulation in a different area of education: “Homeschooling is a system that can enable abuse and must be practiced in a way that centers the needs of students.” Again, parents are a danger, and activists in government must have the power to interpret, decide, and mandate what students need.
One interviewee tells Ettinger and Burton that homeschooling “just needs to get out from under the heel of evangelical Christianity.” The writers return repeatedly to the idea that Christianity is the problem, even relying on the same interviewee for an extreme example of “two white women [who] drove off a cliff in northern California with their adopted Black children in the back seat.” These women, the article reports, had hidden long-running abuse of their children behind homeschooling, and the writers insist that their story is only an extreme representative of the “many homeschooling families who are able to abuse their kids without getting caught because they never go that far.”
Curiously missing from this narrative is the fact that “the two white women” were spouses in a lesbian marriage and that both had attended college for elementary education.
Teen Vogue apparently hopes teens won’t do deeper research into the subjects of its articles instead of remaining profitably confused about sex and identity while being active in progressive political campaigns supporting the Democratic Party.