Recently, the American Civil Liberties Union has threatened to sue Kentucky’s Boyd Country School District for not forcing its students to take part in tolerance training about sexual orientation and gender identity.

This could be the second time that the ACLU would be taking the school district to court. Last year, the district settled with the ACLU to allow for the student group Gay-Straight Alliance to hold meetings on school grounds. As part of the settlement, the school district was required to have mandatory tolerance training for students, teachers and staff.

While I agree that people should be more tolerant, it bothers me that courts and the ACLU are now forcing school districts to make education a secondary concern. Instead of being an institution for learning, activists have turned schools into a moral training ground for their own private agendas. Our nation’s schools are becoming battlegrounds for civil-rights activists.

When my parents sent me to school, they only expected one thing: for me to be educated. They believed that I should be taught the basics. In school, a student is supposed to learn the traditional “three Rs” and perhaps a little bit more. Granted, my school district lacked in a few areas and had – and still has – some bad teachers. But overall, my public-school education did its job to educate me with the resources it had available.

My parents, however, didn’t expect the public school to teach me morality, tolerance or any other form of social etiquette. Teaching such things is simply not the responsibility of the education system. Schools have no right to teach tolerance training to students. If I were a parent, I wouldn’t want teachers telling my kids what type of behavior is “right or wrong.” I’ll raise my own kids, thank you very much. Just stick to the books please.

Now we have schools being sued for ridiculous amounts of money because they don’t force their students to be “tolerant.” The whole situation constitutes absurdity. First, the ACLU believed that a one-hour tolerance-training video would be all that was necessary to make students accept homosexuals. Then, when students raised their own moral objections to being forced to attend such a session, the ACLU had the gall to blame the schools. Yet, if the school forces these students to watch the video, then it could again get sued for violating the student’s religious beliefs. Either way, the only winners here are the lawyers.

The ACLU only has one solution to every problem in society: Sue the bastards! That’ll make them accept us! They demonize our public schools and insult the integrity of administrators and teachers who work in them. The real victims here are not just those few for whom the ACLU fights, but also those they summon to court. The ACLU would rather siphon money and public funds away from schools than let the schools spend what is rightfully theirs to better education for all.

Perhaps I am blind because I don’t see how taking money away from education will make everyone more tolerant. Call me bitter, but I wouldn’t be too pleased knowing that a lawsuit filed against the school was the reason why I didn’t have a new textbook. As a teacher, I wouldn’t be too happy with a smaller pay raise or a larger class size, especially if it was because students with religious objections were forced to watch a video. Everyone please send a thank-you card and fruit basket to the ACLU for making the world a better place.

It’s time that parents stand up to the ACLU and let them know who really should be raising our nation’s children. It’s time that public schools grow a backbone and tell the ACLU to be quiet and let them do their jobs. And it’s time for the ACLU to learn that tolerance isn’t enforced by the judge’s gavel.

Kiyoshi Martinez is a junior in LAS. His column runs Tuesdays. He can be reached at [email protected].