Moral collapse in Loudoun County

Bathroom graffiti has gotten strange here in Loudoun County, Va., and now the feds are once again investigating the Loudoun County public schools.

Loudoun schools have infamously gone full woke, which has produced a bevy of scandals. In the most notorious case, the school district covered up a sexual assault by a skirt-wearing boy who was in the girls’ bathroom—even letting the culprit attend another school, where he assaulted yet another girl. In another instance, the school district punished boys who were illegally recorded in the bathroom by a girl who identified as a boy.

The most recent incident, and the cause of new trends in high school bathroom graffiti, is that a student at Freedom High School was allegedly recording boys under the bathroom stalls. Charges have been filed. According to Nick Minock, a dogged local journalist, this has reportedly been going on for 3 years with more than 40 victims. Minock also shared allegations that school officials having been aware of this for much longer than they are letting on, and that the culprit is a boy who identified as transgender. All of this has led to the boys at Freedom High using bathroom walls to conduct polls on how many of them were victimized.

Of course, Loudoun is not the only problem spot in the nation, or even Northern Virginia. Next door in Fairfax County an adult illegal immigrant was allowed to attend high school, where he groped many minor girls over several months. And sexual predator Richard Cox was allowed to loiter, leer, and expose himself in female locker rooms at swimming pools across Northern Virginia because he claimed to be trans. Parents here now have to worry that if we send our daughters into public bathrooms and locker rooms, there will be a convicted pedophile waiting for them with the full blessing of local authorities.

It is possible to find examples of predators and their misdeeds in schools and other institutions all over the country. And, in fairness, some other recent Loudoun incidents, such as the pedophile elementary school teacher or the trans-identified substitute teacher arrested for threatening mass murder do not seem to have involved cover-ups on the part of Loudoun officials.

But the cover-ups are revealing, because they show what people care about—and what they don’t. A teacher turning out to be a creep reveals the teacher’s hidden perversity, but administrators who keep covering up for sexual predators reveal much more.

Parents in Loudoun and elsewhere should note that woke school officials do not care about the well-being of the children entrusted to them—or at least, something else matters more to them. Their cover-ups are not, at least at first, about protecting officials or even their institutions, but about ideology. Predators who can claim to be oppressed get protection. Those identified with the rainbow flag, or the flag of a foreign nation, get special privileges, and the rules don’t apply to them the same way they do to everyone else.

Here in Northern Virginia, pushing ideology outweighs protecting children from sexual predation. And this reveals the malevolence of wokeness. It has become common to describe the woke phenomenon as consumed by empathy run amok that has become toxic or suicidal. Sometimes that may be true, though there are also many instances where people follow the dictates of wokeness out of fear. But wokeness is not just about empathy and intimidation. We should not overlook the role of malice.

This is vividly illustrated by the transgender movement, which is built on lies about the human person. And these falsehoods induce hatred toward those who will not pretend to believe them. Gender ideology is not about compassion, but about domination, trying to reshape reality and society around private fantasy. Thus, trans activists constantly demand social validation for the lies they tell themselves and eagerly seek to punish those who dissent. Thus, the transgender revolt against God’s creation order goes hand in hand with revolt against the justice of the moral order, for rebels against God perceive reality as an oppressive infringement.

We see this over and over again in Loudoun County schools. Rejecting the truth about our embodiment and complementarity as male and female leads to an inversion of good and evil, and the subversion of justice. This is the root of the malice that leads them to enable and protect sexual predators, from bathroom stall videographers to locker room pedophiles. It is not that they are incompetent but that they are in rebellion against our created nature and the natural law.