Conservatives are sometimes guilty of seeing slippery slopes where there are none, but the confluence of critical race theory and radical gender ideology is pushing school curriculums in previously unthinkable directions.
Brittney Cooper is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University Department of Africana Studies. According to a source, Cooper’s book Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood is being prominently displayed at a school in New England that serves 11- to 17-year-olds.
“Feminism AF uses the insights of feminism to address issues relevant to today’s young womxn,” the publisher’s description reads. “Covering colorism and politics, romance and pleasure, code switching, and sexual violence, Feminist AF is the empowering guide to living your feminism out loud.”
So what advice does Cooper have for young “womxn”?
“We think letting go of the idea that relationships have to be between only two people boots the patriarchy out of relationships,” Cooper’s book advises.
“Polyamory (from the Greek poly, ‘many, several’ and the Latin amor, ‘love’) is the practice of having intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the informed consent of everyone involved,” it continues. “The informed consent is the key here — this isn’t just one person stepping out and cheating.”
When the Black Lives Matter movement said it aimed to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement,” booting “the patriarchy out of relationships” by ditching monogamy appears to be exactly what they had in mind.
Never mind that supposedly consensual nonmonogamy isn’t nearly as consensual as its boosters constantly claim or that it is almost always men who push nonmonogamy on women. The Black Lives Matter movement did get one thing right though: Monogamy is “Western-prescribed.”
For almost all of written history, humans lived in societies dominated by wealthy polygamous elites. Name any empire on any continent at any time. The Sumerians, the Chinese, the Malians, the Vikings, and the Aztecs — all were polygamous. Even the Greeks and Romans were functionally polygamous, featuring government-subsidized brothels for citizens who couldn’t afford mistresses or concubines.
It wasn’t until Jesus taught that “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” that monogamy began to take root in the West as an expected norm for rich and poor alike.
The United States was founded on the belief that a functioning democracy requires strong nuclear families to raise the next generation of responsible citizens. This belief is anathema to both the critical race theory and radical gender ideology movements. We can’t allow these ideologies to be taught prescriptively in our schools.
