I saw that Tennessee recently enacted a school choice problem, and on Facebook, there were a lot of negative comments. I was able to click on the profiles of some of the negative commenters – the majority of them were white, female public school teachers. Well, I thought it might be a good idea to explain to people why Republicans are so interested in letting parents choose.

First, here’s the story from Focus on the Family:

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the Educational Freedom Act of 2025 earlier this week, creating 20,000 educational scholarships for students for the 2025-2026 school year. The bill also gives all public school teachers a one-time, $2,000 bonus for the current school year.

This legislation is part of a growing movement toward giving families the freedom to choose the best type of education for their children, allowing them to thrive and succeed.

[…]The scholarships, amounting to a little over $7,000, can be used for tuition and fees at a private school of a family’s choice, along with textbooks, instructional materials and uniforms at the private school. Money can also be used for transportation, tutoring and computer technology for educational needs.

In addition, “There will be an automatic growth trigger of 5,000 additional scholarships for each year after 75% of total scholarships are taken in the prior year.” The bill denies scholarships to students who cannot establish their “lawful presence in the United States.”

The Education Freedom Act was applauded by groups who want parents and families to have more freedom in choosing the education that best fits their children’s needs.

So, why would the opponents of school choice want to prevent parents from having a choice? Well, they view parents – the very people who pay their salaries – as enemies. They report them to the federal government as “domestic terrorists”. Why? Because those parents object to having their children indoctrinated with secular leftist ideologies.

Here’s an example of school choice opponents dealing with parents who object to their indoctrination:

First Daily Wire post:

On Tuesday evening, school board members representing Penfield Central School District in Rochester, New York, walked out on a packed house of parents who were upset about an inappropriate book on display at the elementary school library called “The Rainbow Parade,” authored by Emily Neilson.

The book in question is about a young girl attending a pride parade with her lesbian parents. The illustrations show men in sexual BDSM gear holding hands, drag queens, and naked people.

Instead of taking on comments from concerned parents, the board’s president called a motion to adjourn and ended the meeting abruptly. Kimberly DeRosa, who attended the meeting, told The Daily Wire that it ended after “more than an hour of presentations celebrating Black History Month and the superintendent detailing the process of submitting objections to books in the school.”

As noted by DeRosa, the board told parents that they should submit their complaints, which apparently negated their right to speak out at the meeting.

“We are here at our board meeting, conducting our business,” one board member told parents, who began booing. One parent responded, “It’s our board meeting,” and others yelled, “cowards!”

DeRosa, who is a Penfield taxpayer, concerned mother, and on the executive board of the Monroe County Federated Republican Women, told The Daily Wire that it was “a slap in the face to everyone there when the board members walked out before any public comments could be made.”

Second Daily Wire Post:

After school board members walked out on parents who were upset over LGBT book “The Rainbow Parade,” the board is doubling down and prohibiting public comments at meetings until at least the end of April, citing alleged racism.

[…]Now, the board representing Penfield Central School District has barred public comment at all meetings for the months ahead.

[…]The message also cited alleged racism, since one of the board meeting attendees showed up on Tuesday wearing a gorilla suit and a black “Make America Great Again” hat. Roberts suggested it was worn as an act of racism, since the district’s superintendent and some of the board members are black.

Can you imagine being treated like this by companies in the private sector, like Amazon.com or Apple? Recently, I ordered some Indian simmer sauces from Wal-Mart. They didn’t arrive for 2 weeks. So I asked for a refund. They gave me the refund immediately, no questions asked. But public school education isn’t like the private sector. You pay your money up front – in taxes – and then they give you whatever they feel like. It’s the complete opposite of the private sector, where they compete with rivals in order to earn your money.

And the Trump administration is aware of this, and they are already doing something about it.

Here’s a story from The Federalist:

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into five Virginia school districts that allow boys to use girls’ facilities like restrooms and locker rooms, moving one step closer to revoking their federal funding.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) confirmed to America First Legal (AFL) that it is investigating Loudoun, Fairfax, Arlington, and Prince William Counties, as well as the City of Alexandria, for violating allegedly Title IX civil rights law meant to protect women and girls at school. AFL filed a formal complaint about the far-left Washington, D.C., suburb school districts in early February.

[…]The school districts in Northern Virginia, which serve some of the largest populations of students in the commonwealth, are notoriously defiant and completely consumed by gender theory, critical race theory, and a dedication to conducting far-left social and academic experimentation on children. If the Department of Education finds them violative of Title IX and they continue to be defiant, the districts are poised to lose federal funding.

You might remember that the Loudon County school board is the one responsible for working with the Biden administration to label concerned parents as “domestic terrorists”. This is why elections are important. The Democrat party thinks that parents should be forced to pay, and if they object to what they get, then they are “domestic terrorists”. The Republican party thinks that parents are more important than the school boards. I hope you voted Republican in the last elections, because they are looking out for your kids.

For Valentine’s Day, I found a new 2024 study that is related to male-female romantic relationships! A lot of people think that men are less committed than women, but if you look at the data, men initiate fewer divorces than women, and they take break-ups a lot harder than women. And lesbian couples have the highest rates of divorce! Let’s take a look at the data.

Here’s the report on the new study, from the New York Post:

Breaking up is hard to do — for men, anyway.

That’s because males care more about being in a relationship than females, a new study set to be published in Behavioural and Brain Sciences found, according to PsyPost.

Researchers at the Humboldt University of Berlin are pouring cold water on the popular belief that gals are more desperate for a partner — saying that guys are more likely to experience loneliness after calling it quits, and are less likely to see the silver lining to the situation.

The team analyzed more than 50 scientific studies on gender differences in heterosexual relationships to come up with their findings.

Women are more likely to initiate divorces than men:

The results could explain why men are less likely than women to initiate a break-up when in a steady relationship — 70% of divorces are initiated by women, the experts stated.

Men are also more likely to search for a partner and to be focused on entering into a serious relationship — perhaps because they have more to gain.

“We know from numerous studies that women typically receive more emotional support from their social environment than men. Therefore, heterosexual men are more dependent on their partners to fulfill their emotional needs than heterosexual women,” Iris Wahring, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

“In short, steady relationships are psychologically more important for men than for women.”

If you look at the instability rates of lesbians, they have the highest rates of relationship instability of any relationship arrangement.

During the five years of marriage, lesbian spouses have twice the risk of divorce compared to heterosexual marriages. Only after 25 years of marriage this difference seems to be gone, the study shows. Same-sex male couples only have an 8 percent higher chance of getting divorced than heterosexual couples in that same period. Senior researcher Ruhne Zahl Olsen is not surprised by the results. They have been the same in other countries, he says to Aftenposten.

[…]For the survey, 5,187 same-sex couples and marriages entered between 1993 and 2018 were examined.

This is important, because in lesbian relationships, it’s two women. So, you can’t blame the high rate of instability / divorce on any man. There isn’t any man there to blame!

Anyway, I thought this new study would be good for men. Men are always getting beaten up and blamed for everything. But not everything about men is bad. I don’t mean the top 20% most attractive men, who have so many options that they don’t have to be nice to any particular woman. I mean the vast majority of ordinary men who just work and live quiet lives. They are the ones who are good at commitment.

Something to think about for those who are wondering “where are all the good men?”. Men are good, you just have to choose the good character ones.

Americans can learn which policies work and don’t work by looking at policies that have been tried in other times and places. That way, we can avoid the mistakes that other people have already made. That’s one of the reasons why people like Thomas Sowell so much – he is always talking about which policies work, and which ones don’t. And in Germany, it’s mostly policies that don’t.

Here’s a fun article from Victor Davis Hanson, writing for the Daily Signal. If you’re like me, you already know Dr. Hanson from his writings on military history. But he likes policy, too.

He says:

 Today I’d like to talk about the crisis facing Europe, specifically its self-implosion across the spectrum—energy, population, fertility, defense. Germany, for example, has been systematically shutting down its nuclear plants and, for a while, its natural gas electrical generation plants.

If you know your energy policy, then you know that natural gas and nuclear power are the two power sources pushed by conservatives. They are safe and reliable, and they are also zero emission. Best of all for me, they don’t kill bats, birds and other animals. Birds are my favorite animals, and that’s a huge reason why I hate wind and solar power – they kill birds in large numbers.

More:

the net result of all of this deliberate turn to wind and solar, at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear, is that it costs about four times more to use electricity in Germany than it does on average throughout the United States. That’s not the only problem.

Germany is deindustrializing. And by that I mean it’s losing about 200,000 jobs in its auto industry due to these high energy prices and regulations. Its green mandates, especially electric vehicle mandates, have revolutionized the car industry, in the sense that they’re not selling abroad as they did in the past.

When you raise the prices of gas and electricity, it raises the price of all production of goods, and transportation of goods. The funny thing is that this has been going on for some time. I remember talking about Angela Merkel’s failed policies with an international student from Germany with I was in grad school. And they never pulled out of their death spiral! It’s still going now.

Anyway, the higher cost of gas and electricity is having big effects:

In addition to that, Germany’s disarmed. They only have about 125 attack aircraft. They have very few armored vehicles. Their active military is only about 180,000 soldiers.

They have 84 million people in the country. The fertility rate is getting very close to 1.4. I know we have problems here in the United States at 1.6, but 1.4.

And they don’t have borders. They have had a million to 2 million illegal aliens just prance into Germany, especially during the last years of the Merkel chancellorship. In terms of percentage of foreign-born, Germany has more foreign-born than does the United States, which doesn’t have a border in the south, at least until Donald Trump comes in. Twenty percent of the German population is foreign-born.

We have a new administration now, and if you look at the picks for Department of the Interior, and Secretary of Energy, then we should be getting some action on developing our own supply of clean energy. Let’s hope that we don’t make the same mistakes that the Germans made.

By the way, if people ask you “why are you a conservative?” it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You don’t have to bring up Bible verses, religious beliefs, or moral issues. Start with economic policies. Just tell them that conservative policies are policies that allow you to have a job, earn money, and spend it how you like. And when they ask you for an example, you can talk about energy policy, and how things are going in free countries that produce a lot of energy (like Norway) vs un-free countries that don’t develop a lot of energy (like Germany). Norway’s GDP per capita is $90,500 (great), but Germany’s is $61,900 (trash). That’s why we want to be like Norway, and we don’t want to be like Germany.

By arguing for conservative fiscal policies, you often will get an opportunity to argue for conservative social policies. Once people see that you have done your homework in one area, they will be more welcoming of your views in other areas. At the very least, you win whenever you can show your work.

Conservative policy is just “let’s do what works” and “let’s not do what does not work”. Secular leftist policy is “do what feels good” and “do what makes people like me”, but that often produces very bad results, especially for the next generation.

Image source: Clean Energy Wire (January 2023)