(LifeSiteNews) — It gets incredibly tiresome to see a nonstop stream of stories detailing how sex and sexuality is being taught in public schools on the one hand, and the deceit and gaslighting coming from the politicians and the press on the other.

A recent debate over what books might be appropriate in Manitoba public schools, for example, was presented as a debate between “book-banners” on one side and human rights activists advocating toleration on the other. Not a single newspaper writing about the story was willing to publish photos of the content parents objected to, which featured graphic, detailed illustrations of people of various genders in various sexual positions.

To ignore the content of the very resources at the center of the debate is to be breathtakingly dishonest. But the reason for this is obvious. If the journalists writing the story thought that publishing the content in question would help their case, they would have done so — but they knew it would not. They knew that your average parent would be appalled to see what was being taught to children.

So, let’s be reasonable. Consider the following stories — just from this past month alone — and ask yourself: Is this normal? Is it possible that we have gone way too far in our attempt to inculcate sexual libertinism in students? Could average, common sense parents be concerned without being “bigoted” or “hateful?”

In New Jersey public schools, the number of students identifying as “non-binary” — that is, neither male nor female — has gone up by more than 4,000% since 2019.

In a Saskatchewan public school, Planned Parenthood gave a presentation to students on sexuality that included an “A-Z” of sex and included graphic descriptions of truly vile sex acts and instructed them on how to engage in oral sex and “tea-bagging.”

Dozens of public school teachers from the Midwest met this month online to strategize on how to “transition” children at school without the knowledge of their parents, with one educator stating that school staff would have to act “subversively” and said that “[w]e’re working with our record-keeping system so that certain screens can’t be seen by the parents … if there’s a nickname in there we’re trying to hide.”

The Post Millennial just published a report describing an alleged incident in October 2021 of a sixth grader at a middle school in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, who reported being raped in the girls’ bathroom by an older male student. The student’s heartbroken mother “believes the main reason a male student was alone with her daughter that day, and had the opportunity to rape her, is because the school had fully embraced gender ideology.”

Also this month, the Daily Mail published a recording of a furious teacher berating a 13-year-old student as “despicable” for rejecting a classmate’s assertion that she identified as a cat:

The recording begins with the teacher asking one of the pupils: ‘How dare you? You just really upset someone, saying things like [you] should be in an asylum.’ One of the girls responds: ‘I didn’t say that, I just said if they want to identify as a cow or something, then they are genuinely unwell, and they’re crazy.’

‘You were questioning their identity,’ the teacher replies. ‘Where did you get this idea from that there’s only two genders?’

‘I just said my opinion,’ the pupil replies. ‘If I respect their opinion, can’t they respect mine?’ The teacher goes on to say it is ‘not an opinion’ and ‘gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is about how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson’ … The teacher also says ‘in terms of gender, there are lots of genders — there is transgender, there is agender — people that don’t believe they have a gender at all.’

That’s just a sampling of stories from this past month. It is easy for the politicians and school boards and activists to ignore parental concerns when they don’t have to address the specifics, allowing them to default to the lazy slander that is so characteristic of their approach to worried parents. We should press them on the specifics — constantly. Only by forcing them to defend the indefensible will we see the consensus start to crack.