Judicial Integrity and the Culture Wars

Sexualization of children …  lies by the parents’ rights lobby … astonishment in Hanover.

School board elections are a bit more than three weeks away and the above is some of what’s going on.

Officially, school elections are nonpartisan and apolitical, but that’s not today’s reality.

Democrats and Republicans, or if you prefer, liberals and conservatives, are campaigning hard to win seats and sway school boards. In some ways, this is a back seat issue. School elections notoriously draw few voters and candidates are sometimes hard to find on the ballot.

But make no mistake, this fight is quite real.

The right has been quicker off the mark than the left regarding the school vote.

Conservatives and some Republican organizations began recruiting candidates a few years ago, fueled by what they say is too much sex ed, inappropriate books, and a general belief that public schools are presenting a left-wing agenda.

Just a few nights ago in Dover, Kristen Cobo, of Roxbury, formed the issue this way.

“Conservative parents are under attack,” Cobo told a group of Republicans gathered at the local Moose Lodge. The event featured an appearance by radio host and likely 2025 gubernatorial candidate Bill Spadea.

Cobo is perhaps an unwilling participant in the so-called culture wars. She is one of four Roxbury residents being sued for defamation by the local high school librarian. The suit claims the four defamed the librarian during an ongoing debate over books in the school library. The suit, which is meandering along, is now in the discovery phase.

It was Spadea who helped crystallize the issue, telling the crowd of about 75 that winning local races – think school boards – can be more vital to the state’s conservative movement than even the state Legislature. This is at odds with state Republicans who are dreaming about making gains this fall in both houses. Then again, Spadea is no fan of the state’s GOP establishment.

They may have had a late start, but the left is fighting back with help from a newly-formed group called the New Jersey Public Education Coalition.

This brings us to a digital ad, or public service announcement, put out this week by the coalition.

It seeks to counter a core argument of the “parents’ rights” movement – that being that a majority of parents oppose a sexually explicit curriculum.

The coalition says it filed Open Public Records Act, or OPRA requests, with every district in the state, to find out how many parents had their kids “opt out” of sex ed courses. This is allowed by state law.

What was the result?

The coalition said it found that only 3 percent of parents executed the right to “opt out.”  The response rate was about 25 percent, but in a state with as many districts as New Jersey, that was a representative response.

“Do you like being lied to?”

That’s how the spot begins. The point is obvious – conservatives are as wrong as can be when they say a majority of parents oppose the state’s health curriculum.

The ad concludes with this reference to conservative groups:

“So, can we trust them to tell the truth about anything?”

As the runup to the Nov. 6 election continues, we must note that the state Attorney General is suing four school districts – Middletown, Marlboro and Manalapan-Englishtown (Monmouth) and Hanover (Morris) – about parental notification policies regarding gay and transgender students.

This litigation often gets a derisive mention by Republicans on the campaign trail. The verbiage is along the lines of, “Can you believe the AG is suing school districts?”

Left unsaid is that so far the courts have put all the notification policies on hold. In simple terms, the state AG has won the initial round.

In a responding statement, the Hanover school board said:

“Astonishingly … Judge (Stuart) Minkowitz enjoined Hanover Township Public Schools from enforcing, implementing or otherwise giving effect to a common-sense parental notification policy.”

The statement went on to say that was no surprise, because Minkowitz along with David F. Bauman, the judge in the Monmouth cases, “demonstrated from the outset his resolve to side with the Attorney General at any cost. The message from these judges is clear – there is one set of rules for the Attorney General and another set of rules for the rest of us.”

Some may find it “astonishing” that the Hanover school district is suggesting that the judges were, bluntly stated, in the tank for the AG.

So much for a belief in judicial integrity and the culture wars.

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