Persistence pays.
Just ask Melvin Williams, the retired dairy farmer from Waldoboro who was first elected to the RSU 40 school board in 2017.
At the time, Melvin was the lone voice on the 16-member school committee in favor of protecting students from the dangerous and demented gender ideology that’s now the rule rather than the exception in Maine’s government-run K-12 schools.
Seven years later, some measure of sanity is slowly but surely being restored in the district, comprised of the mid-coast towns of Friendship, Union, Waldoboro, Warren, and Washington.
Last Thursday evening, the RSU 40 board voted to rescind the insane gender-bender policy it first adopted in 2018, titled “Transgender and Gender Expansive Students.” The policy compels female students to share their restrooms, showers, and locker rooms with mentally ill (gender dysphoric) male students. And that’s not all. Faculty, staff, and other students are required to address the gender dysphoric students by their bogus “let’s pretend” pronouns.
To be clear, the repeal vote last week was a preliminary “first reading” that will require a final vote on June 6th, but make no mistake, this was a huge victory after years of hard work by a growing grassroots army of parents and taxpayers.
Hundreds of Maine First Project supporters have been in the trenches across Sagadahoc, Lincoln, Knox, and Waldo Counties for the past three years. Our organization hosted a half dozen Activist Training sessions from Bath to Rockland during that time, and now our Mainers for Excellence in Education initiative is beginning to bear fruit.
Last week’s first-round victory in RSU 40 is a reminder that the grunt work of election campaigns is essential to winning these policy battles. Showing up at school board meetings is important, but it’s no substitute for the phone calls and door-knocking that are the foundation of any successful campaign to flip a school board seat.
All that hard work on the campaign trail over the past few years paid off handsomely last Thursday when 150 people packed the Union Elementary School gymnasium for the debate and vote on keeping boys out of the girls’ restrooms.
You may be surprised to learn, as I was, that the crowd was overwhelmingly in favor of retaining the policy. Of the 50 people who addressed the board during the public comment period, 40 of them were in favor of the policy, and 10 were opposed.
One of the people who spoke in defense of the policy was habitual liar Barbara Archer-Hirsch, counsel for the Maine Human Rights Commission. She claimed that “the courts have ruled that students are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity,” but she neglected to mention that the Maine Supreme Court decision on which she relies was very narrow in scope.
Doe v. RSU 26 (2013) applies only to students with a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while the policy in effect at RSU 40 is a blanket open-door invitation for students without a medical diagnosis to relieve themselves in whichever restroom suits their fancy.
The two hours of public comment were an unhinged Gender Expansive hate-fest of vitriol and ridicule directed at members of the board who oppose the policy. Board chairman Danny Jackson allowed the mob to insult, shame, and threaten board members who favored repeal. But they stood their ground, and when the motion was finally made around 11 pm, the board voted 8 to 7 for repeal.
The positive outcome last week in RSU 40 follows on the heels of the Augusta school board rejecting an open-door transgender policy in December of last year. Before that, the Old Town school board indefinitely postponed a second reading of the same policy in May of last year.
I believe it’s safe to say the successful recall campaign in the Oxford Hills school district in January of last year was the spark that ignited the brush fire now sweeping across the K-12 landscape.
We are at the beginning of a long march to reclaim our public and private institutions from the diversity fascists who have dominated state government, academia, and the Fake News media for the past half-century.
We have our work cut out for us, don’t we?
Thanks for all you do every day to restore Maine to The Way Life Should Be.
And now, let us run with patience the race that is set before us.