| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Freedom of Speech in Schools
00:09:08
|
|
| Hey, everybody, on the special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, brought to you by our partnership with Alliance Defending Freedom. | |
| And again, Alliance Defending Freedom, they need your help. | |
| They need your help to step up to go to charliekirk.com and click on the ADF banner at the top of the page, or you can phone your gift to 888-670-1599. | |
| And look, what do they do? | |
| They come in and support people like the guest on our program today, Monica Gill, who's a teacher at Loudoun County High School. | |
| They come in heroically, they come in courageously, they come in quickly to support the people that are being abused and targeted by the, let's just call them bad folks. | |
| They're not good folks, folks. | |
| And ADF steps up and supports them. | |
| So how do you support ADF? | |
| Well, it's tax deductible. | |
| You go to charliekirk.com. | |
| You click on the Alliance Defending Freedom banner. | |
| Look, these are Christians. | |
| These are patriots. | |
| They are lawyers engaging in lawfare that we need right now. | |
| So our conversation today is about a teacher, Monica Gill. | |
| We talked to her directly about how she is being forced to call people different pronouns against her will. | |
| It is about freedom of speech. | |
| It's about religious liberty. | |
| It's a great conversation, and she has a wonderful message at the end of the episode. | |
| I think you're going to love. | |
| So go to charliekirk.com right now and click on the ADF banner. | |
| I think you're going to really appreciate supporting their great organization. | |
| Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved at turningpointusa, tpusa.com. | |
| And again, check out supporting Alliance Defending Freedom. | |
| All right, Monica Gill is here alongside Tyson Langhoffer, Senior Counsel and Director of the Center for Academic Freedom at ADF. | |
| Buckle up. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. | |
| Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. | |
| I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. | |
| Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. | |
| I want to thank Charlie. | |
| He's an incredible guy. | |
| His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. | |
| We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. | |
| That's why we are here. | |
| Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| We are so honored to have with us today a very important story with someone who is honestly a hero who is standing up against the indoctrination of students in schools across the country, specifically in Loudoun County public schools. | |
| And all of this is made possible thanks to our amazing partners at the Alliance Defending Freedom, which we are doing everything we can to help them out. | |
| You guys can go to charliekirk.com and help out the Alliance Defending Freedom. | |
| There's a big banner there. | |
| We're going to talk about that throughout this episode. | |
| I want to welcome right now to our episode and our conversation today, Monica Gill, who is from Loudoun County Public Schools, who is standing up against what has been happening here and is a teacher in the Loudoun County public school system. | |
| Monica, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| Thank you so much for having me. | |
| I'm very excited to be here, Charlie. | |
| Lots to discuss. | |
| And alongside of you is the wonderful man who helps run a lot of the legal cases at Alliance Defending Freedom, Tyson Langhoffer. | |
| I think I said that right. | |
| Almost. | |
| Yes. | |
| Good. | |
| And welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| Can't wait to dive into this with you as well as you represent this wonderful client. | |
| So welcome. | |
| All right. | |
| So let's get into this. | |
| So at the Loudoun County Public Schools, many people kind of know the outrage that has been happening in recent months, especially over the last year in regards to critical race theory and in all the different kind of measures that have been put forward. | |
| Monica, you are suing Loudoun County public schools in Loudoun County Circuit Court represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom. | |
| What is your complaint against Loudoun County Public Schools? | |
| Well, largely, you know, the issue is just of such a huge magnitude because what's happened here is our school board is pursuing policies that are ideological. | |
| They are not educational. | |
| And this policy in particular, 80-40, is harmful to kids. | |
| You know, we have thousands of teachers and students who interact with each other every day in very loving and respectful ways. | |
| And we can do that without having a policy like this, which forces teachers and students to say things that are harmful to kids, say things that they don't believe and things that are just, quite frankly, not true by just, you know, a kid saying, hey, I want to be addressed by this particular pronoun. | |
| I'm no longer a he. | |
| I'm now a she. | |
| And that's, you know, they're pushing this very radical gender ideology on the entire public school system. | |
| And quite frankly, they're using our kids as pawns in a political battle, which is just wrong. | |
| It is completely heartbreaking to me. | |
| And, you know, I can't be a party to that because these are our most vulnerable. | |
| And so that's one of the reasons why I wanted to get involved in this case. | |
| And so the school board adopted a policy that will harm students and is based on unsettled science that basically now forces you to say something that is anti-reality, anti-science, and could violate your very basic rights. | |
| So I want to ask a question here just about kind of the legal aspect of this, of the law. | |
| And I guess I'll start with you, Tyson, is that kind of where does the law, like where do you think this case can be most effective? | |
| In essence, kind of what, where has the school board overreached the constitutional limits when it comes to teachers' rights? | |
| Sure. | |
| What it's done, Charlie, is, as Monica said, it adopted a policy, which is this kind of one-size-fits-all policy, which essentially grants students the complete right to dictate what everybody else, both staff, teachers, and students at school get to, you know, how they are referred to these other students. | |
| And so what it's doing is it's forcing teachers and staff and other students to say things that they think are untrue by essentially saying, you know, referring to a boy as a girl or a girl as a boy, or using up any number of the hundreds of made-up pronouns that any student wants to come up with and acting as if gender is this social construct as opposed to a biological reality. | |
| So what it's doing is it's violating the freedom of speech of teachers and also their free exercise of religion under the Virginia Constitution. | |
| Yeah, and so they push this measure. | |
| Can you just more detail either of you, what does that measure say and what are the penalties associated with that? | |
| Sure. | |
| You know, it's a very broad policy, Charlie. | |
| So it addresses a number of things. | |
| But essentially what it says is that any student without any substantiating evidence can go to the school and tell them what they, you know, how they want to be treated. | |
| And if they are a boy, they can be treated as a girl immediately without any substantiating evidence. | |
| That is for all bathrooms and locker rooms. | |
| That's for all sports. | |
| And that's also for language. | |
| And so essentially what it does is it puts the school and school administrators at the mercy of children, many of those children who are suffering from gender dysphoria and other mental issues. | |
| And it's doing that without any parental involvement and without any medical diagnosis. | |
| And it allows them to change that at whim. | |
| They can do it one way in one class and another way in another class, do it one day, one way, and then change the very next day. | |
| And teachers are expected to abide by those demands and cannot question it. | |
| And the punishment is up to termination. | |
| I want to remind everybody back a couple years ago, four or five years ago, then an unknown man, Jordan Peterson, warned that what was happening in Canada, which was, I think, Senate Bill 26 or something with a six in it, that was he was a college professor at the University of Toronto and was being forced to call his students by a certain pronoun, exactly the same type of policy. | |
| Jordan Peterson then went out into the streets and was heckled. | |
| And the video went viral. | |
| No one had heard about Jordan Peterson before that. | |
| He's obviously now a household name, sold millions of copies of books. | |
| But the critique from the American media was that this would never happen here. | |
| I mean, come on. | |
| And that's the Canadian Constitution, right? | |
| They don't respect the Bill of Rights. | |
| And Jordan Peterson was trying to say, you don't understand this is going to be the decline of the West if we do not have the ability to recognize basic fundamental science. | |
| And also, as soon as you control my speech, you force me to do something, then you are picking up the gun on the table and you are becoming the autocrat and you are becoming the tyrant. | |
| So Monica, walk us through in as much detail as you're comfortable sharing, what compelled you from hearing this policy to now wanting to sue your employer? | |
|
The Gender Mandate Problem
00:15:30
|
|
| Well, you know, obviously it was a long process coming to it, but, you know, I think the thing that really gets me the most is that there really is an honest debate going on right now about how best to care for kids who suffer from gender dysphoria. | |
| And our school board has essentially picked one side in that debate and they have mandated it for everyone, for the entire school system, making all teachers and students complicit in that. | |
| And it's completely wrong. | |
| It is not the job of government to mandate things like that. | |
| It's not their job to mandate care. | |
| It's not their job to mandate speech. | |
| It's not their job to mandate how I interact with my students. | |
| And so again, this whole notion of they're going to mandate what is supposed to happen between me and my students is just completely off. | |
| That is government overreach. | |
| I mean, I'm not the expert that my lawyer is on the First Amendment, but I am a government teacher and I know enough to know that it is always wrong and it is always harmful for government to force and mandate people to say things that they don't agree with and to be complicit and participate in activities that they think is wrong. | |
| And so again, you know, we have to stand against this. | |
| This is not right what our school board is doing. | |
| And it's trickled down to this local level. | |
| And it just, it means we have got to stand against it or we lose everything, just like you said. | |
| And so you've taught transgender students in the past and you've had great relationships with them. | |
| Tell us about that. | |
| So I've definitely had transgender students in the past. | |
| I have loved and respected each one of them. | |
| I think that those feelings were very much mutual. | |
| And when I've had them in the past, if they wanted to go by a different name, I certainly would call them by that name. | |
| But I never affirmed to a boy that he was a girl or to a girl that she was a boy because it's just, it's not true. | |
| But, you know, even though I can't affirm that a boy is a girl or that a girl is a boy, what I can do is what I've been doing for the last 26 years. | |
| And that is embracing with open arms and having love and respect for every single student who walks across the threshold into my classroom. | |
| And I really feel like that's my mission, Charlie. | |
| I mean, I have painted above the threshold of my classroom. | |
| You are loved. | |
| I tell my students that I love them all the time. | |
| I say, you know, goodbye, guys. | |
| Have a great day. | |
| Mrs. Gill loves you. | |
| I put it on all their papers. | |
| I give them a bonus question on every quiz or test that says, Mrs. Gill loves me. | |
| A, true, B, false. | |
| And the whole point of that is that, again, this is my mission. | |
| I know how hard it was to be in high school, to have yourself just trying to figure out your identity, to be pushed in little boxes by your peers. | |
| And I just want these kids to know that they're seen and they're loved. | |
| And it doesn't matter what little boxes they're shoved into by their peers. | |
| It doesn't matter what their peer status is. | |
| It doesn't matter what grades they have, if they have an A in my class or an F in my class, that they hear at least once in the day that somebody loves them unconditionally. | |
| And I treasure being that voice to them. | |
| So I guess the question is then, is this a solution in search of a problem? | |
| Was this a widespread problem in the school district? | |
| Was where there were a bunch of men who think they're women who are suffering from a very serious mental problem, gender dysphoria, which you're right. | |
| They deserve care and compassion for deep-seated mental issues, which I think they should be given that. | |
| But was this some sort of massive crisis? | |
| Or is this something that was proposed to either provoke a response or to try and micromanage somebody's speech, either of you? | |
| Well, I think, Charlie, one of the things you're seeing, you guys are, you know, TPUSA, I know you guys are involved in these school board issues across the country. | |
| And what you're seeing is this is not an isolated issue, but it's not because there is a huge problem. | |
| It is being driven by outside influences who are coming in and trying to mandate a radical ideology and trying to change people's beliefs. | |
| That's what they're doing. | |
| It is a goal to indoctrinate with an ideology because what we see across the country is teachers. | |
| I get calls from teachers across the country saying, I love my students. | |
| I want to remain in the classroom. | |
| I want to continue to communicate the truth to them, but I am being forced to lie to them. | |
| And that's what we're seeing. | |
| We're not seeing some problem out there where there's these teachers that are abusing children. | |
| That's not the issue. | |
| The issue is outside forces trying to mandate one ideology. | |
| And one thing that's really important, Charlie, to understand is this. | |
| The law that caused this in Virginia specifically says that they must adopt a policy that's in accordance with evidence-based best practices. | |
| That's in the statute. | |
| And instead of doing that, the Department of Education adopts this model policy, which literally allows a kindergarten student to tell their teacher that they want to be referred to as a different gender without any parental involvement, without any medical diagnosis, and then forces all teachers to participate in this social transition. | |
| And we know that social transition will lead to cross-sex hormones, to hormone suppressants, and then on to surgery. | |
| But if they are allowed to go with, you know, they are treated and assisted and not going through social transition, 80 to 90% of them by puberty will choose their biological sex. | |
| That's what the evidence says. | |
| But the Department of Education has ignored all of that. | |
| Loudoun County has ignored all of that and is instead forcing teachers like Monica to participate in this social transition, which is going to harm their students. | |
| I just want to remind everybody, if you are moved to try to do something about this tragedy, go to charliekirk.com, Alliance Defending Freedom Banner. | |
| It's a way that you guys can get in on that. | |
| We're going to get into how ADF has kind of come to the rescue here in a second. | |
| I just want to remind everybody, because this is so important, because the other side, they have the ACLU, they have all these groups, unlimited resources to go sue on the other side of this, right? | |
| So where I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Palatine High School kind of became ground zero for the bathroom issue. | |
| Tyson, you probably know it very well. | |
| And the ACLU came in with millions of dollars and PR campaign and all of it. | |
| So now men can go into female restrooms in Palatine High School, female locker rooms, and basically the end of female sports as we know it. | |
| ACLU does that all the time. | |
| And ADF really is our equivalent of doing what needs to be done in the courts and otherwise. | |
| So everyone can check out charliekirk.com and click on the banner there. | |
| And please consider contributing to the Freedom Fund. | |
| It's incredibly important. | |
| So I want to ask Monica again about kind of dive deeper into this. | |
| Suing is a big deal. | |
| Did you try to get this fixed in other ways first? | |
| Well, I have been actually speaking to the Loudoun County School Board for a couple of years now, really since August of 2019 when they started this whole equity, diversity, and inclusiveness initiative. | |
| And I've been speaking about all of it, from critical race theory to the transgender policy. | |
| And honestly, it has been pretty much met with silence, which is very frustrating. | |
| And when it got to the point where Tanner Cross was put on leave for the things that he said, that, of course, just got me even, you know, more, you know, fire in my belly over this issue. | |
| And I've known Tanner also for a long time. | |
| So when the opportunity came and I was able to be a part of this, I just said, I have to take a stand along with Tanner, my brother, you know, and Kim as well. | |
| So it is a big deal, I can say, that it wasn't really a hard decision, actually, because after two years of really fighting and being frustrated and not being heard, | |
| to finally have someone come and say, hey, you know, we've got you on this and we have the resources and the manpower and the knowledge and everything that you need to actually take this fight to the next level and God willing win, I was on board. | |
| So I want to just kind of catch our audience up. | |
| Tanner Cross is a PE teacher or was at Leesburg Elementary School and spoke out against a proposed policy at a public school board meeting. | |
| And then two days later, he was put on administrative leave and his actions were labeled as disruptive. | |
| Now he's suing the school board for violating his freedom of speech and free exercise of religion and has been temporarily reinstated to his position while the case continues. | |
| Since this meeting, the policy has been adopted and forces teachers and school officials to violate their deeply held religious beliefs by saying things they don't believe and are untrue. | |
| And so let me ask a question, Monica, and then I have a question for you, Tyson, which is on the ground in Loudoun County public schools, are parents starting to get fed up with this? | |
| Are they really starting to rise? | |
| I mean, we're seeing the images, we're seeing all of that, but the critique is like, oh, that's just a minority of parents. | |
| Is that true? | |
| No, I don't think it is a minority. | |
| I think we have a huge groundswell of parents. | |
| And interestingly enough, it is parents who run across the political spectrum. | |
| It's not just the Christian conservative parent or the Christian conservative teacher. | |
| We have parents and students and teachers from across the entire political spectrum who are looking at this and saying, this is wrong. | |
| This is harmful to kids. | |
| We should not stand for it. | |
| And that has been heartening to see. | |
| I have had many parents who come up to me or send me emails saying, thank you. | |
| You're fighting the good fight. | |
| Fellow teachers as well. | |
| But I think for me, the most heartening thing has been the students who have come to me and said, thank you so much, Mrs. Gale, for taking a stand for us. | |
| And I think the important thing about what they're saying is they realize that the stand is for them. | |
| That as much as it is about, you know, my free speech rights and my, you know, freedom of religion and Tanners and kins, it goes beyond that. | |
| This is really about these kids and what's best for them. | |
| It's the larger picture of my fiduciary responsibility as a teacher who loves them to do the things that are right and best for them. | |
| Well, and you've been doing a wonderful job of that, but the school district feels as if they need to insert themselves into your way you're teaching students. | |
| I'm not joking. | |
| Soon they will say that you're not able to tell your students you love them because you told me that's what you say, because that's the next thing. | |
| Tyson, is that a bridge too far? | |
| No, you know, that's absolutely true, Charlie, because Monica is not the only teacher we represent. | |
| We currently represent a teacher, Peter Vlaming, who was a teacher for eight years in Williamsburg, Virginia. | |
| And he was fired as a French teacher because he wouldn't refer to a female student as a male. | |
| And he had a great track record. | |
| They were trying to not only dictate how he referred to the student in her presence, but said that outside of her presence, he must do that. | |
| And if they heard he was avoiding the use of a pronoun and using her name, he would still be fired. | |
| So they're trying to control everything. | |
| This isn't just about interaction with the students. | |
| It's all of your language everywhere. | |
| We currently represent Professor Nick Merriweather, who's a 20-year philosophy and religion professor at Shawnee State University. | |
| He was punished for not referring to a male student as a female. | |
| And they argued that his speech is not at all protected. | |
| He had no protection in the classroom at all. | |
| They were trying to dictate everything he said in the classroom. | |
| That's completely contrary to everything that the Supreme Court has said about what professors they said we have to protect the marketplace of ideas of our schools. | |
| They said that our nation will shrivel up and die if we begin controlling what the teachers are able to say in the classrooms and their interactions because we can't explore truth. | |
| We can't explore these big ideas and the solutions to our big problems if the government comes in and starts saying what you can say in those classrooms. | |
| Yeah, and that's exactly where we are headed on that. | |
| So Tyson, I want to follow up. | |
| What is the status of the case? | |
| You guys filed it back in August. | |
| Where does the case stand? | |
| Yeah, so there's the good news is we filed on behalf of Tanner initially. | |
| We had a hearing. | |
| The court granted the injunction, reinstated Tanner to the classroom. | |
| He was able to finish out the year, which was great. | |
| They appealed that to the Virginia Supreme Court. | |
| And about three weeks ago, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the injunction and held that the school had likely violated Tanner's rights and that he was rightly reinstated, which is very encouraging. | |
| We then added Monica and Kim as plaintiffs to challenge the policy directly. | |
| We filed a motion for a preliminary injunction. | |
| We're asking the court to order the school to not force these teachers to speak messages that they disagree with. | |
| And we're waiting on the court to schedule that hearing. | |
| So we're hoping within the next week, the court will schedule a hearing and we'll hoping to have a ruling on that within the next couple of weeks. | |
| And so, Monica, I want to ask you just a broader question because speaking out is not something many people are comfortable doing. | |
| Talk a little bit about some of the backlash you've received. | |
| I'm sure some of the negativity, because so many people email us on our podcast, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| They say, Charlie, I don't know if I could do it. | |
| You know, I want to live my comfortable life. | |
| I don't want to lose friends. | |
| I want to be popular. | |
| I want to remain wealthy. | |
| And I do want to see the country saved. | |
| But, you know, I want to be loved. | |
| I want to stay in my country club. | |
| And I like, we actually get emails like this, and that's fine. | |
| They can make their own decision. | |
| You know, George S. Patton said that moral courage is the most necessary yet absent characteristic in men. | |
| As Aristotle would say, courage is the ultimate virtue because without it, there are no other virtues. | |
| Where did you get your courage from? | |
| The Lord, to be honest with you. | |
| I spent many years being afraid of speaking up, being afraid of speaking up about my conservative values at school, even to a certain extent among my colleagues about my faith. | |
| I've always been pretty open about being a Christian in the classroom with my students. | |
| But when they pushed this initiative, when they started to push this equity, diversity, and inclusion initiative in August of 2019, all I can say to you, Charlie, is that literally I went from a place of fear to righteous anger, you know, that like be angry, but don't sin and saying, okay, well, then now what do I do? | |
| And literally, I just felt the Lord remove all my fear. | |
|
Teaching Character Amidst Culture Wars
00:04:54
|
|
| And since then, I just said to him, I'm going to be obedient. | |
| Anything that you ask me to do, any door you ask me to walk through, I will walk through it. | |
| And, you know, now I'm on the Charlie Kirk show. | |
| Well, there you go. | |
| And the Lord will bless anyone that stands courageously in his name. | |
| Monica, I do want to ask you to expand on a little bit because we've been focused on your lawsuit and your complaint on the gender kind of tyranny, which is really important. | |
| The pronoun language tyranny, I should be more specific. | |
| Talk more about this equity, diversity, inclusion, because that has actually been the majority of the outrage from some of the public pressure, at least what I've seen. | |
| Right. | |
| So that is, you know, just the larger umbrella of things that are falling under the policies that they're pushing, which are, again, ideological. | |
| So it includes the policy 8040 as well as their critical race theory agenda, which essentially is using our teacher training as an opportunity to indoctrinate teachers with the basic ideology of critical race theory and then expecting, you know, implicitly expecting that to trickle down into the classroom. | |
| And of course, we're seeing the impact of that as well. | |
| So again, this school board is pressing policies that are ideological. | |
| They are not educational. | |
| And we have to stand against this. | |
| This really is definitely Marxist ideology being pushed on our kids. | |
| They are trickling it down into the classroom to indoctrinate them. | |
| And as I said, we're seeing the interactions with kids intensify in ways that are negative because of both critical race theory and the transgender policy. | |
| And this is not the way to do education. | |
| This is not the way to teach kids how to interact with one another and how to navigate relationships. | |
| And again, that would be why I'm, you know, so thankful for Tyson and ADF. | |
| And as I said, the Lord putting me here, not just on the Charlie Kirk show, but in this court case and giving me the opportunity to fight for the kingdom. | |
| So let me ask you one other question, Monica, about that. | |
| How many years have you been teaching in Loudoun County Public Schools? | |
| So I believe this is my 20th year in Loudoun, but I did teaching for 27 years. | |
| So let me ask you, as someone who's been teaching for 27 years, you know what you're doing. | |
| You know how to build people of good character. | |
| How has education changed from the top down where you've seen it go in a direction that you probably never thought it would go? | |
| Yeah, that's a great question, Charlie. | |
| I can say that I've really watched the culture in education shift dramatically. | |
| And I would say in the last five years, it has been very dramatic in terms of the kid culture and just the number of kids that I have now who suffer from all kinds of mental health issues, anxiety, depression, versus the number of kids that I had when I first started teaching 27 years ago. | |
| It's just astronomical. | |
| The number of kids who suffer from gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction, again, I may have had a handful of those in my first few years teaching. | |
| It's, you know, so many more now. | |
| The number of kids who suffer from, you know, suicide ideation now compared to 20 years ago. | |
| Again, all of these things increasing. | |
| I think a lot of it probably has to do with the level of time they spend on their phones and social media and being influenced by that wider culture. | |
| But within education itself, I slowly started to see things kind of wear away at teachers and our ability to really instill good character. | |
| I think it's important to understand like in education, we keep saying, oh, we have to teach character, but you don't teach character. | |
| You actually develop character. | |
| You build character. | |
| How do you do that? | |
| Well, if you don't put your name on your paper, you get a point off. | |
| If you're late for class, you get a penalty. | |
| If you're late doing your assignments, you have a penalty. | |
| If you cheat, you have a penalty. | |
| And over the last probably 10 years, I've noticed all of those things started to kind of trickle away. | |
| You know, we had a time period where, you know, we can't grade homework. | |
| We, you know, we can't create anything that would be considered a behavior, like not putting your name on your paper, which seems like a very simple thing, but those little things all taken away add up over time to now, you know, you have expected me in this classroom to not only educate kids, but also instill good character in them. | |
|
Winning Public Advocacy Battles
00:02:29
|
|
| But you've taken away all of the tools that I have to be able to do that job well. | |
| So it's pretty rough. | |
| Yeah, that's unfortunately the state of American education, I hate to say. | |
| So in closing, Tyson, talk broadly about ADF and how ADF charges clients nothing. | |
| You come in and help people that are under attack and you elevate them in all sorts of different places. | |
| You not just elevate them, you support them. | |
| And it's charliekirk.com. | |
| Click on the ADF banner. | |
| Tyson, tell us even more about ADF. | |
| Yeah, ADF is the world's largest law firm that focuses on the protection of freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, marriage and family rights, parental rights, and the right to life. | |
| And we've had phenomenal success thanks to the Lord's blessings. | |
| We've had 13 victories in the last 11 years at the U.S. Supreme Court. | |
| We've participated in our 25 years in more than 64 victories at the U.S. Supreme Court in some way or another. | |
| And we've got more than 70 attorneys that are working every day providing free legal advice to people like Monica and Kim and Tanner, because these cases many times will last for years and they incur millions and millions of dollars in fees. | |
| Even almost nobody can afford to do that because we're not talking about damages. | |
| Monica's not going to recover any damages for this. | |
| This is just standing up for her legal rights. | |
| And the important thing about this is Monica stands not just for her. | |
| It's for every teacher across the country. | |
| It's for every parent across the country who doesn't want their student to be forced to speak messages they disagree with. | |
| These are broad principles that are going to protect everybody. | |
| And Monica's willing to stand for that. | |
| And that will benefit everybody. | |
| And so, you know, we are an organization that says we're standing for fundamental rights and we're doing that because we think it's right. | |
| And so we would love your listener support. | |
| You know, financially, it would be great because we can, there are more, far more requests than we can ever do with. | |
| And as you've said, the opposition has a lot more resources than we do. | |
| Yes, they do. | |
| But finally, I just want to add one last thing, Charlie. | |
| Not only can they do that, we need to win the legal battles, but we have to win the public opinion battles. | |
| We have to win public advocacy. | |
| And one of the things about courage is that it becomes less courageous the more people that say it. | |
| You know, they said Tanner was courageous. | |
| He said three things. | |
| I love my students. | |
| I don't want to lie to them. | |
|
Words Stamped Inside Us
00:02:31
|
|
| And I don't want to call a boy a girl. | |
| The vast majority of Americans believe those three things and would say they're good, but they said he was courageous for saying it. | |
| Why did they say that? | |
| Because very few people are willing to say that. | |
| They may believe it, but they're unwilling to say it. | |
| So if more people would say that and speak it and tell why and educate themselves, it wouldn't be so courageous. | |
| And it would be much easier for each one of us to speak those messages that we know deep down we believe, but we're too afraid to say. | |
| Well said. | |
| CharlieKirk.com, check out the EDF banner. | |
| Tyson and Monica, thank you so much. | |
| Monica, yes, final comment. | |
| Yeah, can I just add like one last thing in terms of just sort of a broad 10,000 foot view of this issue? | |
| And that is that, you know, we have sort of got to get back to the basics of language, that language matters, that words have meaning, that words convey meaning. | |
| And so if teachers and students are forced to use a pronoun for another student that is not in alignment with their biological sex, then we're conveying to that student that gender is fluid. | |
| And that's not true. | |
| That's not in alignment with science. | |
| That's not in alignment with their inner biology. | |
| And that's not in alignment with reality. | |
| So the best thing that we can do to love and care for any individual is to speak to them in language that is true, precise, and in conversance with reality. | |
| And if we really think about it, I think these kids in some ways are in rebellion against the fact that every single one of us, we actually have a word stamped inside of us. | |
| The word stamped inside of us, the abbreviated version is either XX or XY. | |
| But if you unravel that abbreviation, you get the human DNA strand, which scientists say is 3 billion letters long. | |
| If you stack those letters up, they are 7,000 times taller than the Empire State Building. | |
| How then can as human beings, we have the audacity to look at that word, the longest word known to humanity, and think there's no author behind it. | |
| There's no precise definition behind that word. | |
| We could define that word however we want. | |
| When we do that, we're actually living in a lie and we've lost ourselves. | |
| And I think heartbreakingly for me, what I see with many of the transgender kids that I've had in the past is that that's what's going on with them. | |
|
Living Authentically Without Lies
00:01:15
|
|
| They think that they can redefine who they are. | |
| And that's not reality. | |
| They have lost themselves. | |
| You'll hear them say things like, well, I'm just trying to be my true and authentic self. | |
| And my question is always, is that really what's happening? | |
| Are you really trying to be your true and authentic self? | |
| Or are you in rebellion against your true and authentic self? | |
| The word stamped inside of you and the adults around them are doing them no good service by pushing it, saying, yes, go this direction rather than equipping them with the tools they need to embrace the reality of who they are. | |
| They're actually erasing who they are and losing their true identity rather than embracing it. | |
| That's beautifully well said. | |
| Everybody, ship into the Freedom Fund at CharlieKirk.com. | |
| Thank you, Modica and Alliance Defending Freedom and Tyson. | |
| God bless you guys. | |
| Talk to you soon. | |
| Thank you. | |
| God bless you. | |
| Thanks so much for listening, everybody. | |
| Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Go to charliekirk.com and support ADF Alliance Defending Freedom. | |
| God bless you guys. | |
| Speak to you soon. | |
| For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com. | |