Rita Bennett

Rita attended a meeting of the Lincoln Public Schools Board of Education on February 22, 2022, a few citizens participated in public comments on a variety of topics. During their remarks, several public commenters promoted “The Mind Polluters,” which they described as a powerful investigative documentary that outlines the harm happening to children in public schools. Commenters encouraged school board members to attend a screening of the film, suggesting that viewing it and listening to the” three national experts” who participated in the documentary would open their eyes and persuade them to agree with the alarmist views being shared by these public commenters.

I came here this evening as a community member, as a graduate of Lincoln Public Schools, and as a parent of children who were graduates of LPS.

 

 Over the past several months, I have watched and listened as a few people have come here repeatedly during public comment to make baseless allegations, to share false information about curriculum, to demean our educators, and to follow a script being fed to them by a national movement designed to do nothing other than denigrate the dedicated public servants and staff who work in our schools so that their religious views can take center stage. This has been the case at both local and state board of education meetings.

 

 I would not ordinarily even bother to respond, because despite what they claim, I know their views are not representative of our community, nor are they representative of the majority of parents of LPS students.

 

 However, given that their remarks seem to be on repeat, I wanted to be here tonight to add my voice to the record. These attacks are baseless. They are founded on lies and a lack of knowledge about our district and its curriculum.

 

 

First: health standards that were discussed by the state board of education are NOT being considered by LPS. Nor were any of those standards presented as required by any school district. Bringing that argument here is a waste of the Board’s time. I want our board of education to be able to focus on the current work that has a positive impact on kids.

 

Second: CRT is not taught nor discussed in LPS curriculum. It never has been. This is a study that may take place in law schools around the country, but it is not a thing here. It is a waste of the Board’s time to suggest otherwise. What IS taught is history. Factual history. And by the

way, I learned about the horrible racism of slavery, and at no time did I feel the purpose of that was to “shame” me for being white. To the contrary, it gave me a perspective that encourages me to keep learning to this day so that I can dismantle systems that are harmful to anyone. It bothers me to think that there are people who are threatened by the concept of true equity

and equality.

 

Third: True science is valued and respected and taught. This means following public health guidance to do all that we can to keep students, staff, and families in our community healthy. No, LPS will not follow junk science. Yes, LPS will listen to parental concerns about masks or any other policy. Every classroom is a collective, and the district is responsible for every child. That is why we have laws involving immunizations. Before COVID, I don’t recall having a line of people coming here to protest that because people can use the processes already in place for appropriate exemptions for their children.

 

Fourth: Yes, LPS expects staff and students to show respect and understanding for ALL. And yes, ALL means ALL. And that includes those who are part of the LGBTQ community. We have a diverse society. There is room for you to instill your own views with your children at home. But I am glad that LPS has held its ground in making sure our schools are safe places for all students, and that insisting on mutual respect and awareness is a part of its mission, with students who learn to become citizens of a pluralistic community, nation, and world. Your children’s world will include those who don’t look like them and those whose lives don’t mirror theirs. But having our children learn to understand and show respect is universal.

 

Finally, to address the comments that allege LPS is trying to “indoctrinate “children. The only thing LPS is interested in is having all children learn about their world, even the parts of it some people still don’t understand, so that all children can be responsible members of society who value and respect other human beings. That’s it.

 

What Is and Isn’t Happening In Our Public Schools

 

Are minds really being “polluted?”

 

▪ Where did these allegations come from? What is their motive?

▪ What you can do/how to know for sure

 

 

 

 

Mark and Amber Archer, through their “filmmaking ministry,” Fearless Features, were introduced as starting a new documentary film “to expose the perverted sexualization of children across American through the education system.” (Source: Purple Parents Indiana, a group “dedicated to exposing the indoctrination &sexualization of children in the public education system.” (Purple Parents Indiana, Facebook account)  “Mark and Amber Archer…have started a new documentary film, “The Mind Polluters”, to expose the perverted sexualization of children across America through the education system and they need our help! Be sure to visit www.themindpolluters.com to learn more about this powerful film and how you can be a force multiplier for TRUTH.”

 

“The Mind Polluters” is a feature length investigative documentary film that follows the efforts of grass roots volunteers, legislators and Christian academics to expose and stop the efforts of corrupt organizations and groups to infiltrate the nation’s school systems with pornographic and pedo-sadist (pedophilia) materials. The film not only shows the brutal battle being waged right now to force both public and private school systems to indoctrinate children as young as pre-school age with materials so heinous that they are illegal everywhere else except in the classroom, it also explores the history of the pornography battle in the United States for the past 75 years. ​ The battle lines have been drawn. Will the Church stand for Truth, or will we falter?”

 

From The Foundation for American Christian Education (https://face.net/alex-newman/), I found a biography of Alex Newman. Notable first is to learn about the FACE mission and intent: “FACE is committed to a resurgence of Biblical Classical Education in America and around the world. We accomplish this through establishing Principle Approach schools, training teachers, and publishing books and curricula that realign the education of K-5 children with Biblical principles to form Christian character and to foster Christian self-government. Raise an army of individual lives prepared to build the family, the church, and the nation through education in a Biblical-theistic worldview to glorify God above all and bless the people by applying wise principles to all areas of life.” He is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who seeks to glorify God in everything he does. In addition to serving as president of the small media and information consulting firm Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc, he has written for a wide array of publications in the United States and abroad. 

 

She is also listed as a “visiting professor of law” at the right-wing Liberty University and has appeared as an “expert” on congressional panels and court cases over the years. That’s no small feat for someone with a Ph.D. in communications and no formal training, education or credentials in law or psychology. Now they’re trying to bring Reisman into the fold, citing her background in the “fields of Science Fraud, Human Sexuality, Child Sexual Abuse, and Mass Media Effects.” However, Reisman has no formal training, background or credentials in these fields, with the exception of “mass media.” She wrote her dissertation, for her Ph.D. in communications, on pioneering TV anchorwoman Dorothy Fuldheim. Nonetheless, she’s made a career out of promoting sexual pseudoscience and conspiracy theories about the work and life of prominent sex. researcher Alfred Kinsey. She is a supporter of the thoroughly discredited Holocaust revisionist work of notorious anti-LGBT hate group leader Scott Lively, who spuriously claims that gay men ran the Nazi Party and are thus responsible for the Holocaust.

 

Kenneth Alfred Ham (born 20 October 1951) is an Australian Christian fundamentalist, young Earth creationist and apologist, living in the United States. He is the founder, CEO, and former president of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a Christian apologetics organization that operates the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Ham advocates biblical literalism, accepting the Book of Genesis creation narrative as historical fact and believing the universe and the Earth were created together approximately 6,000 years ago, [n 1]  contrary to the scientific consensus that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. In 1979, he resigned his teaching position and, with his wife, founded Creation Science Supplies and Creation Science Educational Media Services, which provided resources for the teaching of creationism in the public schools of Queensland.

 

 The end goal: what do they want?

 

While I was highly skeptical that I would find the content of “The Mind Polluters” or its creators to be a credible source of information, since the public commenters so heavily promoted it as such, I felt compelled to take a closer look. In full disclosure, I did not view the documentary. Had I found any suggestion that the documentary might contain information of value or that it was presented from a purely unbiased, scientific and/or educationally sound basis, I most certainly would have been willing to invest the time to view the film.  I would like to assume that this group of public commenters (many of whom we’ve heard from before, at both local and state school board meetings) is so “fringe” that they are not deserving of the time I spent assembling the information I share here. However, their agenda is a frightening one that most certainly will harm children, and they are but a small part of a national movement to evangelize all education, including our public schools. It is critical that we pay close attention and do all that we can to disrupt and dismantle this movement.