Teachers have the National Education Association. Seniors are represented by the AARP and gun owners by the National Rifle Association. Other interest groups have their political action committees and industries their lobbyists.
Families need their own champion, said Terry Schilling, who helped create Big Family to counter the teaching of transgender issues and critical race theory to children, along with other policies and ideas that he claims harm families.
“In D.C., everyone’s got a lobbyist in the Capitol or a political action committee to defend their interests and take out their enemies and help their advocates — except for the family,” Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “We want to change that. We want to get families organized and engaged in politics.”
“It’s really this reorienting the family to become a political institution as well as a social [one],” he said.
Underpinning Big Family is a rejection of the notion that politicking on social issues is a losing strategy for conservatives, Schilling said.
“It’s sort of just been embedded in the conservative movement even, and not just the Republican Party, that social issues aren’t winning issues,” Schilling said, pointing to the GOP’s “autopsy” following the 2012 loss of Mitt Romney, which posited that the party had off-base messaging and tone on social issues.
“These aren’t just issues that fire up the base,” said Schilling, whose father Bobby served one term as congressman for Illinois’s 17th Congressional District during the 112th Congress. “They do fire up the base, and they get us going, but they also speak to a lot of, you know, Catholic Democrats, socially conservative Democrats who like Social Security, like Medicare. They’re probably a member of a union, but they go to church on Sunday. They own guns, they don’t like abortion, and they don’t want their 3-year-old becoming transgender because the school told them that they were transgender.”
HERE’S WHERE CRITICAL RACE THEORY STANDS IN CLASSROOMS AND TRAINING ACROSS THE COUNTRY
School curricula devoted to teaching children about sex and transgender issues are among the foremost social issues against which the group plans to advocate.
“I think anytime that you start to talk about issues pertaining to sex, when it comes to kids, I think that’s a role for parents,” Schilling said. “The people that want to talk to your kids about sex, like the people that go to college to get the degrees to talk to kids about sex, are exactly the weird types of people that you don’t want talking to your kids about sex.”
“When you’re telling young children that they were born into the wrong body, it’s very harmful. You’re telling them they were a mistake from the beginning,” he said.
Critical race theory (which, according to a seminar developed by Fordham Law School’s Center on Race, Law, and Justice, argues that “racism is a normal and ordinary part of our society, not an aberration”) is another of Big Family’s targets.
A more extreme expression of critical race theory, or arguments made by some supporters of the theory, is that all white people contribute to racism.
“It’s very hard when you’re telling little kids that they’re racist because they’re white, and they’re evil because they’re white and that their family, their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great grandparents” are racist, Schilling said.
“They are dividing children against their own parents, who, by the way, pay taxes in the school districts and pay the salaries of these teachers,” he added.
Big Family’s immediate task is advocacy and educating families on these issues, said Schilling, who also revealed that the group is planning “family meetings” with elected officials to discuss issues, the first of which will be with Republican Sen. Tom Cotton on Monday.
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The group’s long-term plan is to crowdsource campaigns and support candidates for local offices such as school board positions, which Schilling said have a major impact on families and where he said the political Left has been especially successful.
“These local races impact you a hell of a lot more than Joe Biden will ever,” he said.
