The Left’s Assault on RI Families
RI Government Has Adopted the anti-Family Principles of the Radical Left
So much so that we must ask … ‘why are we destroying families’ and ‘what the heck are we doing to our kids’?
#AssaultOnRIFamilies
Rhode Island families and children are under assault from their own government:
- Economically
- Educationally
- Culturally
- Spiritually and Religiously
- Emotionally
- Physically
Preserving and advancing the present and future well-being of the families and and children of our state should be our society’s top goal. Every Rhode Islander wants to live in a peaceful and prosperous society and every family wants their children to enjoy a bright future.
Throughout the centuries, conventional wisdom and common sense suggest that the best path to success in life is to be raised in a stable and supportive family environment. Extensive research clearly demonstrates that this “success sequence” path includes three pillars: achieving a good education and earning a high school degree; obtaining a full-time job; and getting married before having children. Adherence to this success sequence alone gives young adults over a 95% chance of NOT living in poverty.
Yet, virtually every significant social problem we face in our society today can be linked to the breakdown of the traditional family, caused in large part by poor public policy that erodes one or more of these pillars.
While not everyone can be raised in a stable family environment, and while we have a responsibility to support citizens in our state who may be in need, elected officials should continually strive to adopt public polices that reward marriage, promote a thriving economy with a low cost of living, and provide a meaningful public educational system that respects parental rights.
Instead, Rhode Island families are under constant assault from our own state government and the progressive Left.
On the economic front, family budgets are stressed to the breaking point. Rhode Island suffers from one of the highest costs of living in America due to high taxes and inflationary statewide regulatory and spending policies that reduce supplies and raise demand. Our Ocean State is also one of the most expensive states for seniors to retire.
- High housing costs; significantly higher than the national average, while misguided over-regulation by government has reduced the number of units to rent and homes to buy.
- Property Taxes are among the highest in America
- Soaring Local Inflation (Cost Of Living) means families are losing thousands of dollars of purchasing power each year, as prices on many staples continue to rise. Our state is flooded with billions of of dollars in federal aid and hundreds of millions in wasteful spending bonds … most of which ends up in the pockets of insider cronies and special interest groups. These unchecked levels of state spending are a direct and major cause why local prices have risen so significantly. For too many families, rises in family incomes are not keeping pace with rises in the local cost of living. “Shrinkflation”, where consumers get LESS product for the same spend, is also a direct cause of government over-spending.
- A related consequence, the massive hike in interest rates, has made the purchase of a home, vehicle, major appliance, or any item via credit card … painfully expensive to virtually all family budgets
- Housing prices for have exploded past the level of affordability for an increasing number of Rhode Islanders, with lack of availability even a bigger concern. Never-ending government regulation in the housing industry has reduced the number of available units, while increasing costs on builders, sellers, and landlords … all of which are passed onto buyers and renters.
- Ever increasing cost of utilities and exploding energy prices, while simultaneously decreasing energy choices, when it comes to heating our homes and driving our vehicles. Our government’s foolish race to be the first net-zero-emissions state … will actually result in zero world-wide benefit … but will impose massive energy costs upon families, while limiting our freedom of choice
- By next decade, Rhode Island motorists will be banned from buying lower-cost gas powered cars, and will be forced to buy significantly higher-priced and less-reliable Electric Vehicles
- The “Act On Climate”, passed by RI lawmakers in 2021, put our state on an unachievable path eliminate carbon emissions … which will only increase utility and energy prices even more rapidly than we have seen in recent decades.
Educationally, Ocean State families have lost trust in government-run public schools and are seeking alternatives. Sadly, many believe that we must save our kids from RIDE – the RI Department of Education.
The lack of educational achievement among students, combined with the cultural attack on children and parents … is even more troubling.
Instead of pursuing a traditional “content-based” curricula strategy, an objective method of teaching factual material, RIDE has adopted a more subjective and controversial approach, often referred to as “concept-based” pedagogy. In Rhode Island’s case, the Socialist worldview of Infante-Green and her “America as oppressors” point-of-view is persistently woven through
almost all RIDE-recommended instructional content.
The Marxification of Education in RI: On RIDE’s own website, the prominent Marxist Paulo Freire is prominently quoted. Freire’s “critical pedagogy,” whose theoretical roots are derived directly from Marxism, seeks to indoctrinate students to become critical agents of social change.
RIDE has failed in its mission to prepare children for college and life, while also leading the way in advancing a woke, social justice agenda that has divided local communities.
- Failing statewide test scores that have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, despite ever-increasing spending
- Graduation rate racial disparities remain far too high
- A radicalized and divisive curricula that politicizes education by advancing controversial race and gender theories and by exposing young children to age-inappropriate sexually explicit materials. Two examples include”
- Anti-American History. RIDE’s 2023 social studies standards adopt the Marxist tenets of Critical Race Theory; teaches students to hate America, men, and Christians; and advances the notion that America was founded so as to “oppress” minority and native population
- Censorship. RIDE partnered with a so-called “media literacy” group, which in reality, instructs teachers on how to censor credible political views and media organizations – in K-12 schools – just because they offered a conservative political analysis
- The rights of parents are continually eroded, by forced “woke” teachings in schools about sensitive personal and cultural issues that only parents should discuss with their own children.
- To radical woke education officials, parents are considered the enemy of their own children, if moms and dads do not support the transgender delusions of their kids
- Many education experts believe that just around the corner is the threat of the State physically seeking to remove children from their loving families because they refuse to comply with gender-denying programs that being pushed by school officials.
- Lack of confidence is public schools is demonstrated by the alarming levels of student and teacher absenteeism, as well as increasing numbers of students and teachers fleeing the public school system entirely
Of course, not every family objects to the issues raised above … as many parents believe that the government should have more say in the raising and education of children. Some parents may also believe in some of the teachings that others find controversial or inappropriate.
The need for expanded school choice options. Given these emotional differences of opinion on what is being taught to our children, it is more important than ever for families in Rhode Island to be afforded the same choices that parents in dozens of other states presently enjoy. More school choice opportunities … in the form of educational scholarship accounts that provide for some level of public money to follow each student to the public, private, parochial, or home school of their family’s choice … must be instituted in our state.
At a higher level, even greater educational freedom is required in our public , including full curricula transparency, full parental notification polices, with greater awareness and opportunities for parents to opt their children out of some of the controversial surveys and other Social and Emotional Learning programs that school officials now persistently expose to young students.
- Promoting “fatherlessness” and paying poor single women to have more children … leads to increased levels of poverty, crime, drug use, and incarceration
- Acceptance of a drug culture, including the legalization of marijuana; Oregon has recently rescinded its 2-year old drug legalization policies and will now re-criminalize drug possession after disastrous increases in deaths
- Mask & vaccine mandates during the pandemic that infringed on constitutional rights and cost many family members their jobs
- The pressure to adopt DEI policies in government institutions, in public schools, and in corporations … has led to the loss of jobs and discrimination against family members who do not fully conform with woke philosophy or who do not check certain boxes
- Woke transgender policies that defy medical and biologic realities and often inflict permanent emotional and physical harm to individuals confused about their gender.
- A ‘death culture’ that glorifies abortion. It is the Left who holds non-mainstream views on the killing of babies in the mother’s womb. 75% of Rhode Islanders believe in some restrictions on abortion. However, the Left believes in no restrictions and openly promote: gruesome late-term and partial-birth procedures; taxpayer funding of the taking of a life; as well as NO parental notification or approval for minors seeking this life-ending procedure.
Emotionally, the emerging mental health crisis developing among Ocean State youth, and recognized by virtually every expert. The increased emotional instability of students and their decreased social development, was exacerbated by the the mishandling of the pandemic by education officials, forcing students to wear masks and isolating them to home-based learning and away from their friends.
Further, often bullish social media engagement along with perverse Hollywood and television storylines, only add to the confusing and destabilizing influences that our children are constantly subjected to.
To top it all off, the age-inappropriate sexual, gender, and racial themes regularly pushed by most schools … only adds to the problem. Imagine being taught to question your own God-given personal characteristics or to question whether your home and you parents might not be a ‘safe space’ for you to live.
No wonder the Left’s assault on children has been so devastating to their emotional well-being.
Physically, our state’s lax approach towards crime and drug use has led to death, permanent disability, or severe medical conditions.
Violent incident in schools are on the rise, physically harming many students and staff … while often there is little to no recrimination for the assaulting perpetrators.
For children and young adults, the chemical castration and surgical mutilation of transgender transitioning procedures often lead to permanent infertility and lifelong medical problems and surgeries.
More on Saving Our Kids from RIDE
- Each oversees a falling educational institution that puts woke politics ahead of student achievement
- Each were lauded with the meaningless trope of being the first “person of color” to lead their respective organizations
- Each has failed in their current positions, which they were not professionally qualified for in the first place
- Each is a product of the divisive DEI philosophy, which puts skin color and fealty to the BIPOC agenda ahead of an actual record of accomplishment
- Each has suppressed freedom of expression, by engaging in vindictive and unwarranted administrative punishment of faculty who publicly disagreed with the woke narrative
- Each, under the guise of advancing an “anti-racist” mindset, is openly supportive of the “racial justice” or “social equity” agenda
- Each has promoted racist policies or guidelines that poison the minds of students against their country, their Caucasian brothers and sisters, and/or God
- Each is engaged in corruption scandals that would disqualify any other head of an organization, were they not members of a protected class
- Each is facing public calls for their resignation or replacement
- Each remains in power only because those who appointed them do not have the courage to acknowledge that their faux diversity narrative has failed their institutions
- DEI
- CRT
- ESL
- CSE
- Transgender policies that ask school officials to lie to parents