Here we go again. Campaign by dog whistle.
How much did it cost Jessica Kohn to spam her little campaign plug into my iMessages account? And who paid for it? But she sent it to me, and I will respond.
The first sentence of the message in the screenshot carries all the weight: Jessica Kohn believes in parental rights. The rest is filller.
The truth: Everyone believes in parental rights. Parental rights are encoded in Michigan law. They are not threatened here. So we do not need Jessica Kohn to defend us.
But if you want to pose as a defender in a situation where no defender is needed, you have to invent a fictional attacker. If you are a disciple of Angela Rigas, a disciple of Donald Trump, you will not hesitate to turn our wonderful Caledonia educators into to the attacker. Insinuating that dedicated, heart-of-gold public servants are public enemies is no problem if it you feel a need manipulate a lot of people who should know better into voting for you. You just have to find and blow the right dog whistle. You have to say what you mean in a coded way, so that the people you are talking to will get your message loud and clear and respond as you wish, but you can still deny having said it. This is the meaning of “dog whistle.”
“Parental rights” is a dog whistle. The words do not carry their literal meaning. The phrase is a banner to wave to rally the partisans into a political battle.
When I first announced my candidacy for school board in 2022, one of the first questions I got was, “Are you for parental rights?” I was puzzled. I asked for clarification, saying I didn’t know what the question was trying to get at. “Oh, yes, you do,” was the reply—dripping with disgust. That’s when I knew that I had been subjected to a litmus test and had failed. I didn’t know the code words. My questioner made no attempt to clarify the question because it was not a real question. It was a dog whistle. And I did not jump in the right direction when she blew it.
Over the following months I tried to get a sense of the underlying concern. And I think I did, from listening repeatedly to people who spoke up in school board meetings. I learned the code words.
“Parental rights” has multiple components. Here are the two main ones in Caledonia, Michigan:
- Conservatives whose belief systems cannot accommodate the reality that the human population naturally exhibits gender diversity—that some people are gay, or nonbinary, or transgender, and that they are so not by choice, not out of moral perversity, but through genetic and environmental factors yet to be fully understood—live in fear that their own kids might turn out to be something other than straight and cisgender. They also don’t want any of their kids’ friends to be those things either, because then their kids might get the idea that this is just part of the normal variety in the human population, like lefthandedness or green eyes. This fear is acute during their kids’ middle school and high school years. Since they know for sure that gender diversity is unnatural and perverse, and that they have taught their children that they must not be that way, the only way these kids could be turning queer is if someone is turning them. It must be blamed on popular culture. On liberals and atheists. On secularists. And the strong suspicion is that some school teachers, counselors, and administrators may fall into those categories. So these parents wish to assert a right to control the entire school environment to ensure that gender diversity is nonexistent there, or at least never acknowledged, certainly not in a non-condemning way. “Parental rights” thus means the right of parents to interfere in every aspect of school life—instruction in classes, web resources used, books read, and counsel given to students who are experiencing rejection or punishment from their parents, or fear of rejection or punishment, because they are different—to ensure that not only their own children but everyone’s children are not educated in these matters.
- “Conservative” parents sometimes also do not want their kids to learn history, because they (the parents) disagree with history. Here I have put “conservative” in scare quotes because real, Burkean conservatives—a rare species in these parts—are open to robust, fact-based debate. But what we deal with here is a vocal minority (I believe and hope) of parents who genuinely disagree with history—specifically with American history, and more specifically yet with the history of colonialism and racism in America. White European settlers drove native Americans off their land and deprived them of them basic human rights. White European settlers imported Black Africans by force, enslaved them, and abused them in every imaginable way. These are historical facts, not political opinions. It is also a fact that the native and Black populations were being deprived of their human rights all the way through the twentieth century and down to the present—with dramatic improvements, to be sure, but not with complete improvement. Parents who were not themselves told the truth by their own parents or by their own schools wish to guarantee that history—real, honest history—is not taught to their children either. This right to interfere in curriculum to whitewash history is a “parental right.” But it is not a parental right.
School boards, administrators, and teachers should certainly honor parental rights. I have never encountered anyone in Caledonia who disagrees. But when “parental rights” becomes a dog whistle, and an assertion of a nonexistent right to force schools to substitute fundamentalist religious doctrine for science or boosterish nostalgia for history or bland pablum for literature, or to turn a blind eye to parental abuse (and this does happen) and a deaf ear to students in trouble and needing help that they are not getting anywhere else, the entire community needs to say: No.
Caledonia teachers and schools are not in the business of turning kids queer. They are not in the business of badmouthing our country. These are feverish fantasies. And candidates who make “parental rights” their lead slogan are catering to them.
At least that is my hypothesis based on my own observations over the last several years of listening to people here who align themselves with State Representative Angela Rigas. (This is the role of Jessica Kohn and Erlina Velting in this election season: they are the Rigas clients this year.) If Jessica Kohn means something else, I hope she will make clear what she means.
As for the rest of Jessica’s statement: Yes, certainly science and math should be taught, and vocational-technical training should be available to those who want it; I am in favor of it. But I miss history, literature, languages, music, art, and physical education in Jessica Kohn’s list of things to focus on. History and literature in particular are studies in which students may learn to understand and analyze arguments and narratives, to recognize fallacies, and to understand places, people, and eras other than their own. In my view the need for solid instruction in these areas is every bit as urgent as the need for training in math and technology.
So I am no more favorably impressed by the rest of this message than I am by the opening dog whistle. We have a candidate who gives no evidence of having thought deeply about education but who wants to be in charge of it. But even if elected, she cannot be in charge of the things she wants to be in charge of. A Michigan school board has no more authority to require a public school system to skimp on real well-rounded education in order to emphasize job training than it has to ensure that the schools are a hostile environment for ethnic or gender minorities.
As I have said in posts on my Pro-Education Facebook page, I have no idea what Marcy White’s political leanings are. In the case of Shawn Collins—I think his leanings are conservative. I doubt either of them would agree fully with my thoughts above; I don’t know, and may never know, and that’s OK with me. What is important to me is that I have seen neither of them aligning themselves with a political party in connection with this election or injecting partisanship and culture-wars dog whistles into our discourse about local schools. That’s why they get my votes.
This election is not a contest between conservatives and liberals. Everyone is either conservative or rigorously neutral. It seems to me to be a contest between people who know what a school board is for and people who think it’s for something else.
We have been here before. See these archived posts from 2022 and 2023:
What do you mean when you say someone is “speaking in code”?
Verba Sparsa 
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