Emotional Extortion Emails: The 'Courage Campaign' Wants You Terrified For 'Trans Kids'

'Send lots of money so we can save them from their parents'

“A school board is on the verge of forcing teachers to out their students to their parents if a student begins going by a different name or pronoun,” the ‘Courage Campaign’ fearmongers in a recent fundraising email.

“You’d think this school board is in Texas or Florida, but no. It’s Orange Unified School District in California,” they cry. You’d think that this would maybe tell the Courage Campaign they should calm down and read the room, but no.

No, they must fight the ‘extremism’ of school boards (checks notes) aligning their policies with established Supreme Court precedents as well as federal laws. Parental rights are now redefined as ‘conversion therapy.’

“Extremist policies targeting LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities are gaining ground in California, driven by hate groups like Moms for Liberty, but there has not been a unified progressive effort to push back,” the Courage Campaign writes. “That changes now.”

Again: they are attacking another nonprofit organization because school boards are listening to its fact-based, constitutionally-protected speech.

To be clear, Courage Campaign is mad that Moms for Liberty understands the law better than they do, and has communicated to school boards just what legal risks they face by heeding the siren-song of the Courage Campaign to nullify parental rights.

“Courage California is leading the fight to stop them,” the email continues, “and we’re launching a brand new initiative to call out these hate groups for the harm they do to our children.”

Everybody who disagrees with the Courage Campaign is literally Hitler. They must be stopped, or else the ‘trans people’ will be marched into gas chambers.

“Moms for Liberty was designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its extremist vitriol,” they argue.

Yes, the SPLC ran out of actual hate to track, so their remit has expanded to encompass anything objectionable to American elites. Moms sharing information about existing federal laws and legal precedents are ‘hate’ because the new civic religion of Pride hates those laws and precedents.

“Their playbook includes banning books that discuss LGBTQ+ or BIPOC issues,” the Courage Campaign blithers on, “blocking trans athletes from playing sports, and preventing everything from sex ed to the history of slavery from being taught in classrooms.”

Translation: Moms for Liberty has succeeded in removing pornographic Queer Theory indoctrination books from elementary school libraries, protecting female sports from male cheats by telling the boys to compete against other boys, and calling attention to the vast range of utopian political projects masquerading as educational pedagogy these days.

“Moms for Liberty is funded by a handful of right-wing political families,” they continue, not mentioning Jennifer Pritzker, transgender scion of the wealthy Chicago politcal family and a prominent Republican who funds a vast network of gender identity evangelism that includes ‘educating’ America’s schools and institutions to their very same ends.

Nope, that doesn’t fit ‘the narrative.’

Courage Campaign is totally unafraid of right wingers if they are the right ones. If Jennifer Pritzer gave them a million-dollar contribution they would happily cash the check. Courage Campaign is wetting their pants in words because this supposed ‘hate group’ is funded by the wrong right-wingers, and becomes more influential than them steadily, day after day, because they have better advice for school boards.

Which, to be fair, is a side effect of Moms for Liberty being grounded in established American constitutional-federalist principles instead of activist hokum and pseudolegal mumbo-jumbo.

As Michael Torres noted a few weeks ago at City Journal, policies to conceal a child’s new ‘gender identity’ from parents create massive legal exposure. Moms for Liberty are saving school boards from huge, embarrassing slam-dunk litigation if they follow the very bad advice of outfits like Courage Campaign.

“The legal theories pushed by activist groups to legitimize secrecy policies are baseless,” Torres writes. For example, “Congress enacted FERPA to enhance parents’ right to receive information about their children at school, not to have it withheld.”

More importantly, a federal right of minors to privacy from their parents does not exist. “A minor’s right to privacy is traditionally held by the parents,” Will Estrada, president of the Parental Rights Foundation, said regarding a policy enacted by a California school district. He cited the 2000 Supreme Court case Troxel v. Tommie Granville, in which Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, citing the Fourteenth Amendment, affirmed, “The liberty interest at issue in this case—the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children—is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.”

Ironically, this same ruling dismantles the transgender activists’ own Fourteenth Amendment claim, because, as O’Connor explains, it is that very amendment that protects against “government interference with certain fundamental rights,” like those of parents. Thus, districts violate parents’ constitutional rights by deceiving them about their children’s professed desire to transition.

The gender activists are simply wrong about Title IX. They are wrong about Bostock. They are getting the law wrong, consistently, all the time, in every way they can as they lobby for state-sponsored grooming.

School board officials can read. They can see who is actually right, and who is banging on with policy prescriptions that end in sadness.

“California has more than two dozen chapters” of Moms for Liberty, the email continues in full fluster, “including in Los Angeles and San Diego. And slowly but surely, these extremists are making gains in our state.”

Oh! So the tide is turning even in California because of the efforts of Moms for Liberty? Tell me more, good people of courage. (Pulls up a chair.) Tell me more.

“In Inland Empire, the Chino Valley school board was California’s first to start forcibly outing trans students to parents.”

Right out of the gate in their list of recent grievances, obeying federal law is framed as “forcibly outing” a child. Once again ‘trans’ is presumed to be ‘the new gay,’ and medicalized self-harm the new homosexuality.

Moms for Liberty will likely not find this idiotic talking point as noxious as we do here at The Distance. The Courage Campaign is calling Moms for Liberty homophobic while endorsing the new conversion therapy for gay and lesbian kids. We object.

Parents are the enemy in this blinkered agenda. Family structure is the very thing that Queer Theory aims to annihilate, so violent parental rejection of a child’s declared ‘gender identity’ is presumed in advance. Mom and dad will beat their poor trans kid, it’s ‘settled science.’

“Forceable outings literally put lives at risk,” they claim, “considering that 80% of trans kids are abused or neglected by a family member.”

To support this assertion, Courage Campaign cites a paper, “Self-reported Rates of Abuse, Neglect, and Bullying Experienced by Transgender and Gender-Nonbinary Adolescents in China,” a title which informs us that the contents of the actual paper contain no evidence whatsoever of imminent harm to students of schools in Chino Valley, California.

On the contrary, anyone familiar with the heartbreaking stories of parents dealing with rapid-onset gender dysphoria will know that the angry outbursts and shunning behaviors always come from the children, most of whom were groomed by adults, and all too often by adults in positions of educational authority.

The Courage Campaign is engaging in fraud. Moms for Liberty is not harming anyone and their success is driven by the grassroots backlash to the woke education agenda of groups like Courage Campaign.

Of course, words are harm now, so the Courage Campaign is terrified of words. “I hear ignorant adults telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I talk about my own feelings,” they quote a ‘trans child’ in San Ramon. “It might not seem like it hurts us, but it does. It hurts us badly.”

Your words are hurtful, they are harm, they are violence, you must be stopped before you kill me with words. Because you are a wizard, Harry.

The “Orange Unified School District’s new Republican-majority board fired the superintendent without cause and is now pushing an anti-LGBTQ+ ‘parents’ rights’ agenda,” the Courage Campaign cries, putting the established legal and poltiical rights of parents in scare quotes.

“Temecula’s school board rejected a curriculum that named LGBTQ+ icon Harvey Milk as a hero and also banned any curricula that discussed systemic racism,” they continue.

Of course, putting Harvey Milk’s name on any, even a giant rotten pile of garbage, makes it unimpeachable. His name is magic, you see.

The same goes for anything ‘anti-racist,’ expecially if it aims to racially conscientize students. We have to make them more racist, and systematically, otherwise they will never overcome all the systemic racism.

So far, the right wing has been lockstep in their extremism, but progressives haven’t had a cohesive plan to stop them. That’s why Courage California is convening groups from across the state this week to hear from school boards who have fought back these attacks on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC students so we can get on the same page about stopping them. And we are devoting significant resources to educating the public about the harms Moms for Liberty and groups like it are doing, as well as helping to organize people to stop them in their own districts.

What a promise. The Courage Campaign wants to lean into the sports issue against the growing supermajority of public opinion. They want your money so they can tell more people about Moms for Liberty, as well as all the great and popular work those moms do to inform American parents about their rights as Americans.

This is a self-marginalizing campaign, in the long run. May they succeed in this design, though without our help.