A judge in California has upheld a local school district’s ban on the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Temecula Unified School District, as well as a policy requiring the district to notify parents if their child decides to change genders at school.
The ruling marks a victory, though perhaps a temporary one, for conservative parents and school board members who implemented these policies against intense pressure from Governor Gavin Newsom, activist groups, and the media.
Critical Race Theory holds that racism infects all of America’s institutions. As Breitbart News reported in August, legal activists sued the Temecula school district over the Critical Race Theory ban, adopted in 2022, arguing that it violated students’ rights.
Last week, however, according to the Los Angeles Times, Judge Eric Keen of the Superior Court of Riverside County upheld the district’s policies, at least for now, denying the activists a request for a temporary injunction against the district’s policies:
But on Friday, Judge Eric Keen denied the request, rejecting the argument that the district’s policy was unclear. He wrote in an eight-page ruling that the board’s resolution sets out the specific elements of critical race theory that can’t be taught. Keen added that the resolution limits instruction on critical race theory to a “subordinate role within a larger instructional framework” and one that focuses on the “flaws” of the curriculum.
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Keen also weighed in on a controversial parental notification policy that requires district staff to tell parents when their child is requesting to be identified as a different gender or use a name that’s different from their legal name.
He wrote that the policy applies equally to all students in the district, is “gender neutral” and “does not expressly single out transgender or gender-nonconforming students, as it applies to any student’s request to change their school official or unofficial records.”
Newsom has singled out the district for criticism — though, when confronted by Breitbart News in the spin room at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library after the Republican presidential primary debate in September, he could not say why parents should not be able to know about their children’s gender transitions.
The ruling does not affect a separate controversy over the district’s refusal to teach a state-approved curriculum including LGBTQ figures from history, such as San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, whom a board member called a “pedophile.” Gov. Newsom fined the district $1.5 million for barring Milk from the curriculum.
Several other school board districts have also defied Newsom over the transgender notification policy, setting up legal fights. Polls suggest that the liberal state’s voters oppose Newsom: 84% of California voters back the idea that parents have a right to know.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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