By Marina Diaz, Joushua Blount
Columbia Values Diversity Celebration facing backlash over performers in drag; attorney general warns CPS; CPS issues statement
An annual event hosted by the City of Columbia since 1994 is facing backlash for hosting an LGBTQIA+ group featuring three drag queens.
Nclusion Plus performed at the end of the Columbia Values Diversity celebration following keynote speaker Renee Montgomery. The event is a yearly celebration of diversity that’s pegged on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which took place last week.
Columbia Public Schools invited students to attend the event, according to parents posting on social media sites such as Facebook. Parents were required to fill out a permission slip. Copies of the slip have been posted to social media.
ABC 17 News is working to get a copy of the slip.
Columbia Mayor Barbara Buffaloe attended the event and took to Twitter to post pictures with the performers.
We want to thank the planning committee of Thursday’s Columbia Values Diversity celebration. We appreciate the thoughtfulness that was put into organizing an event that recognizes and elevates the diversity of our community
“We want to thank the planning committee of Thursday’s Columbia Values Diversity celebration,” Buffaloe said. “We appreciate the thoughtfulness that was put into organizing an event that recognizes and elevated the diversity of our community.”
Buffaloe said the event ended with an “upbeat and energetic performance” from Nclusion plus.
“Drag is a cross-cultural art form with a long & rich history that is fun and encourages self-expression,” said Buffaloe. “As hate crimes against drag show locations and performers are being committed in other communities we want to reaffirm that Columbia is a community that supports all.”
Columbia Public Schools did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the event.
Republican State Sen. Caleb Rowden said his office has been “inundated with calls and emails.”
My office has been inundated with calls & emails re: grade school kids being forced to sit through a drag show at this morning’s #CoMO Diversity Breakfast. We have heard from parents whose kids attended who are obviously very upset. 1/3 #MOLeg https://t.co/DQT72a8Z0I
— Caleb Rowden (@calebrowden) January 20, 2023
Rowden said he has asked for a meeting with the CPS superintendent and members of the Columbia Board of Education. Rowden said he wants to hear the process that led to this event, and to “gather information to determine what next steps need to be taken at the legislative level.”
“I will use all the resources at my disposal to stand up for kids and their parents, especially in instances where they don’t feel like their voice is being heard,” Rowden said.
Gov. Mike Parson and Attorney General Andrew Bailey, both Republicans, also gave their opinions on the incident in statements.
We are deeply concerned about reports that Columbia middle school students were subjected to adult performers during what is historically a MLK Day celebration. This is unacceptable.
— Governor Mike Parson (@GovParsonMO) January 20, 2023
“We are deeply concerned about reports that Columbia middle school students were subjected to adult performers during what is historically a MLK Day celebration. This is unacceptable,” Parson wrote.
“To characterize a three song, 830am drag set as ‘adult performers’ is incredibly dangerous. You know what you’re doing here and that, my guy, is what’s unacceptable,” Columbia City Councilwoman Andrea Waner wrote in a now-deleted tweet responding to Parson.
Bailey said in a news release that he wrote a letter to the school superintendent saying taking children to the performance might have run afoul of state law that bans providing sexual materials to children.
Drag performances have become a divisive issue, with Republicans and conservatives criticizing events featuring drag performers that cater to children. The issue is part of a broader culture war that includes battles over other LGBTQ issues, including how transgender student-athletes compete.
An Arkansas Senate committee on Thursday approved a bill that would restrict drag performances.
Tara Arnett is one of those parents who were not aware of the performance.
“Mistakes happen. We learn from them, we grow from them,” Arnett said. “But we can’t learn and grow from them if we don’t acknowledge that they even happened or take responsibility for them happening.”
Arnett’s nonverbal autistic son is an eighth grader. Arnett said special planning was done so her son could attend. She did not receive a permission slip, but said she was in constant contact with the school to make the necessary arrangements for her son.
“I started getting wind from other parents through the morning from their students who attended as to what happened and what was there,” Arnett said. “I was not pleased to find this out just because I didn’t have any control over it. It was not something that we consented to as parents.”
Arnett said her son expresses himself typically through reenacting things he sees on television. She said she tries to monitor what he views.
We Project Director Valerie Berta attended Thursday’s event. She thought the event was family friendly. The nonprofit aims to amplify marginalized communities through storytelling.
Berta thinks the backlash the event has received is alarming.
“As Mayor Barbara Buffalo said, it’s a really important thing to do, to emphasize the fact that here in Columbia and in Missouri, we value diversity, we value being inclusive of all our humanity,” Berta said. “Especially I think, in the face of attacks, sometimes really violent, physical and so there is real danger involved in spreading those narratives. That is really, to me, profoundly disturbing.”
On Tuesday night, Philadelphia Flyers‘ Ivan Provorov refused to wear a gay pride warm-up jersey on the team’s Pride Night, citing religious beliefs.
Provorov’s move has garnered plenty of criticism, even by the NHL’s own reporters.
On Wednesday’s edition of “NHL Now” on the NHL Network, senior reporter E.J. Hradek gave Provorov, who is Russian, an ultimatum.
“Ivan Provorov can get on a plane any day he wants and go back to a place where he feels more comfortable, take less money and get on with his life that way if it’s that problematic for him …” Hradek said. “If this is that much of a problem for him, to maybe assimilate into his group of teammates, and in the community and here in this country, that’s OK. Listen, you can feel any way you want. But the beauty is, if it bothers you that much, there’s always a chance to leave, go back to where you feel more comfortable — I understand there’s a conflict of sorts going on over there, maybe get involved.”
Provorov has been labeled “homophobic” for the move, despite saying he “respect[s] everybody and respect[s] everybody’s choices.”
“My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion. That’s all I’m going to say,” he said after the game.
In a statement released Tuesday night, the Flyers said they are “committed to inclusivity and is proud to support the LGBTQ+ community.
“Many of our players are active in their support of local LGBTQ+ organizations, and we were proud to host out annual Pride Night again this year,” they said. “The Flyers will continue to be strong advocates for inclusivity and the LGBTQ+ community.”
Head coach John Tortorella said it would have been “unfair” to bench Provorov for his beliefs, adding that he respects Provorov for “always [being] true to himself.”
The league said on Wednesday that “players are free to decide which initiatives to support, and we continue to encourage their voices and perspectives on social and cultural issues.”
Nicole Mann Becomes the First Native American Woman in Space
She is the mission commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission that will spend five months on the International Space Station
Daily Correspondent
The Dragon Endurance spacecraft, built by SpaceX, launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Wednesday afternoon, carrying a crew of astronauts from multiple nations. As the craft hurtled beyond Earth’s atmosphere en route to the International Space Station (ISS), the mission had already made history. With it, Nicole Mann became the first Native American woman to go to space.
Mann, a 45-year-old member of the Wailacki (why-las-key) of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, is serving as mission commander for the SpaceX Crew-5 mission. The flight marked the sixth time Elon Musk’s space company has ferried astronauts to the ISS on behalf of NASA.
Her historic achievement comes 20 years after the first Native American man, John Herrington, walked in space in 2002. Mann is also the first woman to serve in the commander role during a SpaceX mission. (Only two women—Eileen Collins and Pamela Melroy—held that position on NASA space shuttle flights before the agency retired that program in 2011.)
Born in Petaluma, California, Mann studied mechanical engineering at the United States Naval Academy, then went on to earn a master’s degree from Stanford, per NASA. She began her military career with the United States Marine Corps as a second lieutenant in 1999 and completed flight training in 2001.
In 2003, she became a naval aviator and, a year later, started her operational flying career with the military, which has included 47 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. She also served as a test pilot for the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet in 2009.
In total, Mann has flown more than 2,500 hours in 25 different types of aircraft and is a “proven warfighter,” as General David H. Berger, the commandant of the Marine Corps, described her in a statement. She is now a colonel in the Marine Corps, and she began astronaut training with NASA in 2013. She lives with her husband and their son in Houston.
Impressive right? Yet with all of those accomplishments, due to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the key accomplishment, according to the press, is that she is a native American.
That is what is wrong with Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/opposing_dei.html
Opposing DEI
By Henry Kopel
Henry Kopel, a former federal prosecutor, is the author of War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom, and is working with several parents to oppose DEI curricula in a Connecticut school district.
Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) is now big business in America. A 2021 Heritage Foundation study found that the average American college employs forty-five full-time DEI administrators.
At a reported average salary of $81,800, this army of DEI staffers costs the average college $3.68 million annually. Across America’s more than 4,000 colleges, the yearly college DEI bill exceeds $14 billion.
And that figure omits the vast private-sector industry of diversity trainers and equity consultants, as well as the ubiquitous DEI officers that populate virtually all government agencies, plus a wide array of non-profits.
This aggressive expansion of the DEI industry across leading American institutions has proceeded with little opposition until now. Like an invading army in hostile territory, the DEI industry has made the mistake of seeking to extend its reach across America’s K-12 educational sector, and taxpaying parents are standing up, saying: “Not with my children — the indoctrination stops here!”
The DEI industry’s answer is that such parents are just old-fashioned racists, White supremacists who seek to suppress discussion of America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and continued “systemic racism” today.
An entire academic industry supports this false view. An alphabet soup of university “studies” departments — Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Gay Studies, Gender Studies, Whiteness Studies, Women’s Studies — supported by ever-expanding diversity bureaucracies, promote the view that America denies that it remains a deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic country.
These “XXX Studies” professors and their ideological allies promote a hard-left menu of alleged solutions to this litany of damning “isms,” namely: dismantle capitalism; expand the welfare state; impose “anti-racist” hiring quotas; eradicate “biased” ability testing in schools, college admissions, and hiring practices; outlaw and prosecute speech deemed offensive; and establish sprawling government bureaucracies to combat this alleged plague of American horribles.
Leading writers in this field have crafted a flawed but seductive argument that delegitimizes and shuts down those who question their ideology, as exemplified by Robin D’Angelo’s book White Fragility. In D’Angelo’s world, any critique of the ideology is not an invitation to discuss — rather, it is proof of the “fragile” questioner’s inherent racism, and hence illegitimate.
Unfortunately, much, if not all of this — to borrow the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s apt phrase — is just “nonsense on stilts.”
The claim that DEI (and its linked twins, Critical Race Theory and ethnic studies) merely involves teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement is a bald-faced lie. Our public schools have been teaching these important subjects for years. DEI is something entirely different.
As actually applied in K-12 classrooms, DEI is primarily a classification system that divides kids into various “us-vs-them” groupings of privileged oppressors vs. marginalized oppressed.
For instance, a typical DEI lesson plan will teach that white, heterosexual, males fall into three privileged oppressor groups; and that non-white lesbian females fall into three marginalized oppressed groups.
Often this is taught through a DEI exercise called the “Privilege Walk.” Elementary and middle school kids are forced to stand in an open space while a teacher reads out a series of so-called unearned, unfair “Privileges” — like being white, male, wealthy, heterosexual, or “cis-gender.”
The teacher orders the students having such privileges to take a step forward for each one; and those lacking the same must take steps backward. The shame and blame message could not be clearer.
These lessons are doubly harmful. They discourage the so-called “oppressed” kids with the message that the system remains rigged against them — hence if the fix is in, then why even try? And it shames the “oppressor” kids as being the cause of the rigged system — inviting them to doubt and question their aspirations and achievements….
….The core problem with DEI curricula is that they train students to think of themselves and others primarily by their separate racial, ethnic, and gender/sexual characteristics. Hence. they teach the very opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King’s momentous call for racial equality. Whereas Dr. King called for E Pluribus Unum, DEI calls for E Pluribus Discord.
Oftentimes DEI programs also force schools to lower academic standards, to make kids feel more “equal.” Across America, DEI advocates have been in the forefront of efforts to eliminate “gifted and talented” programs, and to stop teaching Algebra I classes in middle schools.
The DEI industry justifies these attacks on excellence as simply dismantling the attributes of “white supremacy culture” — which per the DEI ideology, include such evils as “objectivity,” “perfectionism,” and “worship of the written word.”
This is both counterproductive and profoundly demeaning to children of diverse backgrounds, by its false implication that such advanced learning is not for them. Instead of downgrading standards, the effort should be to uplift those kids having a harder time….
……DEI advocates seem blind to the historical reality of humanity’s long and painful efforts to rise above our ancient, hard-wired tendencies towards tribal, “us-vs-them” division and violence. The flawed DEI teaching model would send us back down that violent rabbit hole. It should be opposed by all supporters of pluralistic liberal democracy, regardless of one’s race, creed, color, or political affiliation.