Parents at Superior Elementary School in Superior, Colorado, are suing their school district for imposing the transgender ideology on their children, despite the families’ objections based on their religious convictions.
The Denver Post reported on Lewis and Brecken Jones, “who say they are Christians,” and their lawsuit, which is based on the Boulder Valley School District’s handling of their formal complaint about the transgender program and its assault on their religious liberty and parental rights.
The story goes back to 2018 when the Joneses first learned about the lesson plans, according to the Post:
The presentation at the kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school had been prompted by the bullying of a transgender student, the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder reported at the time. School administrators planned to include the performance of a musical by Phoenix, Colorado’s Trans Community Choir, as well as videos on gender roles and related topics, followed by classroom discussion.
The lawsuit alleges the school district violated its own policies when administrators allowed the Jones’ children to opt out of only the musical performance, and not the videos and classroom discussion. The lawsuit also claims the district retaliated against the family by creating a hostile environment after the parents filed a formal complaint with the school district in November 2018. That complaint was supported by nine other families, the Camera reported at the time.
“Teachers were overheard at school openly maligning the families who complained about the (school’s) transgender materials,” the complaint reads. In addition to the religious freedom violations, the lawsuit also alleges the school district violated the parents’ constitutional right to raise their children as they choose.
The Joneses pulled their children out of the school and are also seeking financial relief for having to arrange alternation learning sources for their children.
The Post interviewed Sam Bullington, the person who founded the transgender choir, about the musical, which “featured animal characters and was about a transgender raven who is considered to be a girl but doesn’t feel like a girl … and the raven’s journey to acceptance among friends.”
In another article about the choir, Bullington described the choir this way:
Trans sensibilities (like fluidity, multiplicity, innovation, and self-direction) are at the core of all of our work. Phoenix is an egalitarian arts collective, so we make decisions collaboratively. We don’t have a board, as we all are Phoenix, nor a budget. Part of our mission is to redefine what an organization looks like and how it is run. Just as we have no desire to assimilate into a dysfunctional culture of normative gender, we also have no desire to follow traditional models of organization-building. We believe that transpeople are meant to be innovators and so how Phoenix is run is a big part of who Phoenix is.
In the Post article Bullington mocked the parents’ faith.
“So yes, one of the parents is like, ‘This is incompatible with my Christian faith,’ and I’m like, ‘The message of the play is around the importance of unconditional love, which is the message of your faith,’” Bullington said. “The play never mentions the word transgender, it is really about being seen for who are on the inside, rather than the projections put on you based on what you look like, which is relevant to everyone.”
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