Iranian immigrant blasts Virginia school board: 'These are our children, not yours'

An Iranian immigrant whose children attend Loudoun County public schools spoke before the school board on Tuesday against a recent school board decision to include critical race theory (CRT) in the curricula.

The school board also recently passed rules governing teachers' use of students' preferred pronouns, and inclusion of students in athletics pertaining to their gender identity not their biological sex.

The Loudon public school system has been the subject of widespread criticism recently for imposing the CRT philosophy on students and teachers alike.

"I'm a Chaldean married to an Armenian," the man told the board. "We are minorities of the minorities in this country. Our ancestors and people survived massacres of the Church, and ISIS."

He said "I grew up in Iran as a Christian, and when we went to school — as much as the government wanted to indoctrinate us — the teachers didn't allow it... They didn't try to shove propaganda down our throats like the Ayatollahs did."

"Now in the twenty-first century," he said, "we have social justice warrior so-called teachers who are trying to shove their garbage ideology down our kids' throats."

"These are our children, not yours. Their job is not to raise my child or my neighbor's child. Their job is to teach our kids math, science, biology, literature — and that's it. Not ideology."

As regards the controversial new rules for gender non-conforming students who identify as transgender, the father said "How does that help [the children]? Does that teach them how to add? You want to push that garbage down my kids' throat? I'll make you call my kids 'king' and 'queen.'"

The man has lots of company among parents and teachers who object to the new rules. One of the county's teachers publicly resigned on Tuesday during the same meeting, saying, "School board, I quit. I quit your policies. I quit your trainings. And I quit being a cog in a machine that tells me to push highly politicized agendas on our most vulnerable constituents, the children."

One mom in the district, who grew up in communist China under Mao, told the board: "I've been very alarmed by what's going on in our school. You are now teaching… training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history. Growing up in Mao's China all this seems very familiar.

"The Communist regime uses the same 'critical theory to divide people, the only difference is that they use class instead of race. During the cultural revolution I witnessed students and teachers that can turn against each other. We change the school names to be politically correct, we were taught to denounce our heritage, the Red Guards destroy anything that is not Communist."