It isn’t every day that one of the original #StopCommonCore moms runs for U.S. Congress.
America, please support this mom; if every one who read this donated even five or ten dollars, that would buy many thousands of signs or mailings for Sheri Few’s important, but financially limited campaign.
The article below is a guest post by Sheri Few.
I want to thank Christel for the opportunity to explain why I am running for Congress and why my election is so important for those of us concerned about education in America today.
All my children attended public schools and I could see firsthand the problems in education, from proposed standards for sexuality education to anti-American and pro-Communist propaganda in geography and history books. I decided to get active and fight for change.
I formed South Carolina Parents Involved in Education (SCPIE) in 2000 and began a newsletter informing parents and taxpayers about public education instruction problems, from teaching children they evolved from apes to teaching young children to put condoms on bananas, to anti-Christian/anti-American rhetoric.
Like many of you, I’ve been attending Donna Hearne’s Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis for many years, where I’ve learned so much more about the intentional agenda in public schools to transform our country’s government through the minds of our children – hearing all along about Common Core forerunners: Goals 2000, Outcome-based Education, School-to-Work, and No Child Left Behind.
Around the same time, I became politically active; joined my local Republican Party and was soon the Chairman and member of the State GOP Executive Committee. This provided a platform for the changes I saw necessary in public education. The work of SCPIE writing newsletters turned to educating lawmakers and advocating for and against education policy. I also became active in the Tea Party movement.
Although I knew what was being taught, I mistakenly left my children in public schools, thinking I would no longer have a voice if I withdrew them to homeschool. Now, to my chagrin, my oldest son has rejected his Christian faith because of what he learned in public schools. He also believes the climate change hoax and has adopted many other liberal philosophies. I now never recommend that anyone put their children in public schools.
Six years ago, Jane Robbins from the American Principles Project approached me to help expose the Common Core Standards in South Carolina.
I created a PowerPoint and began traveling my state, making presentations to audiences in nearly every county about the problems with Common Core and the data-mining tests.
Three years of work resulted in the bi-partisan, unanimous passage of a legislation rescinding our agreement with the Smarter Balanced Testing Consortium and a requirement for the State Department of Education to rewrite the English and Math standards.
In 2014, I ran in the Republican Primary for State Superintendent of Education in a field of nine candidates. narrowly missing the runoff by less than 2 points (in South Carolina, if one candidate does not receive 50 percent plus one, the top two vote-getters enter a runoff election).
The new Superintendent was charged with rewriting the English and Math standards, but to no one’s surprise, my state ended up with Common Core rebranded as South Carolina College and Career Ready Standards.
Even our state’s Education Oversight Committee did a comparison and found the standards to be 91 percent aligned to Common Core and they would have been more like 98 percent aligned if there hadn’t been a separate law passed the year prior mandating the return to memorization of Math facts and cursive writing.
SCPIE expanded in 2015 into a national organization adding a Leadership Team of colleagues from around the country who led the fight against Common Core in their state.
We had conference calls twice a month, and as we shared our very similar experiences with Common Core, we agreed that the problems originated with and are perpetuated by the federal government, so we set our goal to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates.
Our movement grew quickly and thirty state chapters have been created, coupled with an exemplary Advisory Board of national leaders.
President Trump’s decision to name my Congressman, Mick Mulvaney, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, created a vacancy for his seat. I prayed about running, talked about it with my husband, made several calls to people in the District who supported my run for State Superintendent of Education, and talked to national Common Core leaders about a possible run.
Everyone I spoke with agreed that there is no one in the U.S. Congress that fully understands the problems in public education. I also analyzed the returns from my 2014 Superintendent’s race and found that I had finished FIRST in the Fifth District, winning by more than 3,000 votes over my eight competitors.
I announced my candidacy in the Republican Primary for South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District in mid-January, and as of this writing, there are seven other Republicans who have filed with the Federal Election Commission.
This is where I stand out from my opponents in this very conservative district that President Trump won by nearly twenty points. Most are “establishment” Republicans who have raised taxes, supported Common Core or sat silent on issues of political correctness.
And none of the others in this race have a clue about education policy and the ongoing problems with Common Core and the data-mining tests that are used to enforce the standards.
I am writing my story to urge you to help me win this election and be our voice in Congress.
I am determined to win and am working 24/7 to do all I can to make that happen, but I need to raise a lot of cash to get my message out to this sprawling district. Several of my opponents are wealthy and can self-fund their campaign, but I am just a mom activist who has volunteered and spent personal resources most of my adult life to fight for the children of this country and to maintain our free Constitutional Republic.
I took a trip to D.C. recently to meet with political action committees, hoping to gain endorsements and financial support. Many of them said they will see how much money I can raise on my own first, and they will be looking at the financial disclosures due the end of this month to gauge who they might support.
I talked to them about the importance of our issue and explained that what is being taught in public schools is fundamental to many of the problems our country faces politically. I explained the intentional agenda to change our form of government through the liberal indoctrination of our country’s children and pointed to the evidence of the fact that most young Americans wanted the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders for their President. We must stop allowing our tax dollars to fund this agenda.
Please help this mom activist go to Washington D.C. to be our voice. Seize the moment with me while we have a Republican-led Congress, and a bold president who does what he said he would do. Time is of the essence if we are to preserve our Constitutional Republic. I need your help.
Please donate any amount to my campaign, but please give a lot of thought to contributing $250 or more right away, so I can list your name on my FEC report as one of my strongest supporters. Alternatively, would you consider a weekly pledge of $10, $20, $50 or $100 for the remaining nine weeks of the campaign?
Many of you have never contributed to a candidate before. I hope you will consider making your first contribution to help me win this seat.
This election is too important to lose, because with President Trump’s election and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, it’s time to seize the moment and work as aggressively as possible to move our conservative agenda as fast and as far as we can.
I’m planning to run an aggressive campaign, and I have no fear of calling out my opponents for enabling those who are taking away our freedoms. Too many conservatives lose elections because they are afraid to stand up when the left attacks. I welcome it.
I am working twelve to sixteen hours a day, making calls to raise money, speaking at events and issuing press statements, because I know I can win this race. I need your help and support from others across America who are concerned about our nation’s future. Please do what you can today.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, for considering my candidacy, and for all the work you do to take back our schools.
Utah’s pro-SB196 and pro-CSE people make what they do sound like pure charity.
But it’s not.
SB196 promotes what the U.N. promotes: adult advocacy of practicing homosexual behavior –to kids. Note: by removing prior language that forbade teachers from advocating homosexuality, the bill now permits advocacy (to kids) about engaging in homosexual behavior. There is a big difference between tolerance for a personal decision and advocacy to others about child engagement in controversial, potentially dangerous, behavior.
This article is not aiming to attack anyone, but aims to show that when you look at multiple bills, and what they are doing, you begin to see a big picture concerning sex ed here and around the globe; it’s about bills that are perhaps unintentionally pushing immorality in the form of education through common, global “comprehensive sexuality standards”; it’s about a Utah bill pushing gay advocacy on children in the guise of kindness toward gays; it’s about a good bill on informed consent to educate pregnant women about abortion before they abort.
It might seem that these things are unrelated. But they’re not. They are all aligned to the globalist (UN) agenda –and monied lobbying groups and governments far from Utah do want to see Utah fall like a domino into line with their version of “rights” and “education”.
Before I ask you to consider helping to stop SB196, the “advocacy of homosexuality to children” bill; and before I (relatedly, belatedly) report about the happy death of HB215 last month (that was to add erotic CSE sex standards, detailed in Comprehensive Sexuality Education Standards (CSE), here’s a frame of reference. It’s a video clip that shows the divide in Utah’s legislature on reproduction and sex ed issues. Click here.
Fast forward to 1:30 -ish on the video. Representative Stratton speaks for the bill (at 1:30) which is written to promote informed consent of pregnant mothers prior to aborting babies. It’s a good bill. Then Representative King speaks against Stratton’s bill. (See 1:38 – one hour, thirty eight minutes)
At first, King sounds calm and almost reasonable.
Around 1:40 King’s tone turns and he says, “I don’t want to hear anyone stand up and talk to me about “babies” or killing babies,” he says, “What we are talking about are zygotes, embryos, and fetuses… When I hear an individual refer to an unborn child as a baby, I know immediately they are not to be taken seriously.”
This is who we are dealing with: legislators who won’t call abortion a death, or fetuses, humans.
A year ago, pro-abortion UT Rep. Brian King pushed CSE language in a bill that failed to persuade the legislature that CSE standards were really an improvement over Utah’s current sex ed standards.
I was present last year. There was an overflowing education committee room, lines and lines of people queuing up to speak for and against it, and, thankfully, that bill died in the committee’s vote.
One year later (a few weeks ago) again, the legislative education committee room was packed to standing room, with overflow rooms and online audiences receiving video or audio. Many in the crowd wore red to signify “STOP CSE” (Stop Comprehensive Sexuality Education). The bad bill was CSE-promoting, contraceptives-for-kids-promoting, parental consent-deletingHB 215.
This meeting went on for about four hours. As in the previous year, there were lines and lines of people queuing up to testify both for and against the bill. It felt like a miracle when the bill failed in the vote.
We knew it was only a temporary miracle: the national, big-monied lobbying groups, such as Planned Parenthood, and the liberal, progressive think tanks, and the United Nations itself, are relentlessly pushing CSE in every state. Bet money, if you are a gambler, that its core principles (anti-life, anti-morality) will be back every year, slid into multiple forms of bills. But we didn’t know how temporary.
Refresher: The national CSE standards call for children as young as third grade (nine years of age) to describe male and female reproductive anatomy and functions; to describe the changes of puberty; and to “define sexual orientation as the romantic attraction of an individual to someone of the same gender or a different gender.” And that’s just for nine year olds. It gets more inappropriate for older children. See: National Sexuality Education Standards
In their testimonies, some of the pro-CSE speakers at the recent hearing said that they had been raped –as a direct result of lack of good sex ed. They claimed that Utah doesn’t have thorough sex ed. But they must not have been taught in Utah schools; read the sex ed standards posted at USOE.
Interestingly, some of the anti-CSE testifiers were also rape victims. The rape-prevention argument for CSE thus bombed. (Is it remotely logical that teachers’ advocacy of eroticism and masturbation (topics which CSE standards advocate as “rights of a child”) would be likely to cause –as soon as prevent– the horror of rape?)
It simply is not true that Utah’s sex ed standards are lacking substance or detail or science. In Utah’s current, extremely thorough, sex ed standards and teacher/parent resource guides, I see nothing skipped over, nothing shallow, unscientific, sloppy or prudish.
It is very simple to document for yourself: just lift terms out of Rep. King’s bill, and do an internet search to see how many far-left organizations and universities have used and coined, in their publications and initiatives, the same almost-bland sounding terms. Trace, for example, the scholarly articles and the money trails for groups publishing articles on “comprehensive sexuality” and “positive youth development”)
What Rep. King and CSE promoters don’t like about Utah’s sex ed standards is probably, simply this:
“The following shall not be taught:
1. The intricacies of intercourse, sexual stimulation, erotic behavior, etc.
2. The advocacy of homosexuality.
3. The advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods.
4. The advocacy of sexual relations outside of marriage or sexual promiscuity”.
Each of those four things are fully promoted by CSE.
Need evidence? Watch the “War on Children” video. Read the CSE standards of FoSE and SIECUS here. Visit the United Nations’ website, which openly states that it works through governments [people like Representative King] to push its values on the entire world.
It admits: “UNFPA works with governments to implement comprehensive sexuality education, both in schools and through community-based training and outreach. UNFPA also promotes policies for, and investment in, sexuality education programmes that meet internationally agreed standards.”
Internationally agreed?
Have you agreed to CSE? Has our entire country, our entire world? Do you even know what’s written in CSE?
I do.
This fight is not over.
How relieved we felt, a few weeks ago, when the vote was taken and King’s CSE bill died. We thought we had a break until next year’s session.
We were wrong to think we had a year of rest.
RIGHT NOW, there’s another bill, SB196, working its way through the legislature –right now– that has already unanimously passed a Senate ed committee. It will remove point #2 above: “the advocacy of homosexuality”.
KSL reported that SB 196 unanimously passed the ed committee, even though it removed the prohibition against Utah teachers advocating for homosexual lifestyles for Utah children.
News flash: Advocacy of homosexuality is not sex ed. It’s advocacy!
Education about homosexuality, or teaching kids kindness toward homosexual individuals, is not the same thing as having teachers advocate engagement in homosexual behavior, to children.
How could the senate pass this “advocacy of homosexuality” bill? I was told it was to dodge a huge law suit.
I don’t get it. Do you? What are the weights and measures– what do we prioritize: protecting and educating kids, or fearing law suits?
And in my estimation, the law suit is a brain dead argument.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the law suit (which supposedly spurred the unanimous yes vote on bill 196) said:
“These laws prevent presentation of accurate information concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual people in health classes and other classes, even when such information serves important educational purposes, while imposing no similar restriction on discussion of heterosexuality”.
That’s not true. Utah law does not prevent presentation of accurate information; in fact, USOE standards explicitly say that sex ed includes discussion of homosexuality. The laws do say that teachers cannot advocate for homosexual nor for heterosexual promiscuity. Advocacy rightly is prohibited in schools. It’s not a school’s job to advocate, but to teach academics and health.
More ridiculousness in the suit: the Tribune reported that the lawsuit claimed that there were no similar bans applying to clubs about heterosexuality, heterosexual persons or heterosexual issues, and that “that discrimination harms LGBT students… preventing them from participating equally in student clubs, stigmatizing them as inferior an unequal.”
Not true. Teachers are not permitted to advocate for heterosexual promiscuity, either.
Some people claim that the legalization of gay marriage necessitates teachers advocating gay lifestyles in schools. That makes no sense to me.
What will teachers advocate for next, if this passes? Pedophilia, so that pedophiles can have an after-school club, too? Where do we draw a line?
All human beings should support and practice advocacy for special needs children, and for any individual being bullied, whether he/she is gay or is of an ethnic or religious minority, or is obese, or is blind, or is anything else that others may bully. What I do not support is party-line advocacy of participation in a very controversial, potentially dangerous sexual behavior to young people who are, by law, in school.
If you live it Utah, and if you think that altering the language to make advocating for homosexual behavior is wrong, please asking the representatives to say “no way” on SB 196.
Protect kids! Stop SB196 now. Then, work to educate others to stop CSE in all its forms.
COMMON CORE 