A Wisconsin city that bills itself as “the little city that does BIG things” just made a BIG splash for a BIG stroke of “woke” genius.
As Monique Lopez reports for Green Bay’s WLUK TV, the city of 3,500 is Kiel, and:
An investigation into three Kiel Middle School students has been launched.
The school district has filed a Title IX complaint against the students, accusing them of sexual harassment for using incorrect pronouns when addressing another student.
That’s right. At a time when kids are learning grammatical pronoun use so they can be understood in life (we remember the drills: subject, object, singular, personal, plural, plural possessive, all that verb matching, etc.) these three malcontents are being investigated for doing it "incorrectly".
That’s pretty intense pronoun instruction! Did any of us get investigated this way upon using an object pronoun when a subject pronoun was correct?
Or are postmodernist language police ushering in a "new normal"?
The latter, of course, is the correct answer for this quiz. Mention of Title IX (the DC command that all must be “equal” between the sexes, to which local schools must comply) tips the hand.
And reporter Lopez offers key portions of the government-created issue:
’I received a phone call from the principal over at the elementary school, forewarning me; letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son,’ Rosemary Rabidoux, one of the parents of the students being accused said.
The story gets stranger and more infuriating from there, like a combination of dystopian lit and “The Outsiders.” As Lopez notes, Ms. Rabidoux’s son, 13-year-old Braden, is one of the three Kiel Middle School students accused of sexual harassment:
’(The investigating principal) said he’s being allegedly charged with sexual harassment for not using proper pronouns,’ said Rabidoux. ‘I thought it wasn’t real. I thought this has got to be a gag, a joke -- one has nothing to do with the other.’
Sexual harassment...
Kids.
What in the world does the government allege?
According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), now defending the accused students, in March, one of their peers announced the pronouns they'd prefer to be addressed as: they/them.
Sadly, reporter Lopez discards REAL proper pronoun use as well, and buys into the confused collectivist creed. To be clear, this was ONE student, singular, so Lopez’s use of “they” in the above is inappropriate. But the world of the woke opposes reality. In fact, when another TV station picked up her story, the editor there claimed in the headline that the kids used the "wrong pronouns."
We’ll dig further into the “journalism” of this before we conclude.
Lopez offers more about one alleged incident with this pronoun-confused student, from April, noting that Ms. Rabidoux said:
She (the pronoun-confused student) had been screaming at one of Braden’s friends to use proper pronouns, calling him profanity, and this friend is very soft-spoken, and kind of just sunk down into his chair… Braden finally came up, defending him, saying ‘He doesn’t have to use proper pronouns, it’s his constitutional right to not use, you can’t make him say things.’
Of course, this is a public/government school, so not only can the government “make” kids say things (on tests, with government-funded teacher-union members determining what answers are “right”), but it can tell kids what to read, and it can tell adults to pay for all of it, or pay legal penalties for non-compliance.
These are not picayune distinctions. They lie at the heart of being able to distinguish between peaceful human interaction and government force. And these incidents, and the government responses, all happen within a sphere of political force and education/language control that the reporter, Ms. Lopez not only does not acknowledge, but to which she kowtows, be it intentionally, or out of habit.
Here is another example:
Some say, this could show Rabidoux and her son are against the LGBTQ+ community.
That latter term, “LGBTQ+ community” means, what? Is there an official group called the LGBTQ+ Community? Does that group have a board, voting on official positions for myriad issues? Or is that term simply sloppy shorthand, employing the soft word “community” when one really ought to use “some lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, and etc” people?
It's important to be aware of the specific language used in this piece about language.
To her credit, Lopez does go to the trouble to use that sentence about possibly “being against the LGBTQ+ community” as a springboard to let Ms. Rabidoux offer their position:
’Not at all. Not at all!’ said Rabidoux. ‘My children have been raised to love everybody equally.’
And Lopez adds:
Shortly after finding out her son was being investigated, Rabidoux reached out to WILL.
‘Title IX sexual harassment typically covers things like rape, dating violence, quid pro quo sexual favors; really egregious stuff,’ WILL deputy counsel Luke Berg said. ‘There’s nothing even remotely close to that alleged in this case.’
And, as much as that statement reinforces one’s possible view that this is a tempest in a teapot, centered on the increasingly insane manipulation of language – as much as we know this sad story from Wisconsin is yet another example of woke culture trying to press itself onto not only free speech, but biological reality – one also can note that Mr. Berg’s statement about Title IX, though correct, could use further exploration.
Such an exploration leads one to see that even those issues he mentions – wrongdoing such as rape, dating violence, quid pro quo sexual favors – are not included in the US Constitution as federal issues.
Which ought to inspire more than a few curious folks to question Title IX and become reacquainted with federalism.
It’s not too much to put on the proverbial plate. Indeed, as one sees this tale of pronoun policing in a tiny Wisconsin city, one sees that it made national news the next day, via the New York Post, so people are noticing the tip of the iceberg.
And there’s still time to find out about what lies just below the surface.
Related: Jordan Peterson Battles Canadian Government Push To Censor Internet | MRCTV
A school board in the Las Vegas area shut off a mom's mic for reading her child's graphic, pornographic assignment.
— MRCTV (@mrctv) May 18, 2022
This material isn't allowed in the meeting, but can be taught to kids. pic.twitter.com/DGNJy933Dw