James Marshal, Republican Candidate, House District 84

Martin Luther in 1520 venomously warned that universities and schools would become “wide-open gates leading to hell” if they did not focus on the Holy Scriptures.  While the battle rages on within our society between public school indoctrination and homeschooling freedom, I would like to share a story of a mother in House District 84 and what happened to her child in public school.

My interpretation of this accounting, as it was shared with me, is as follows. 

Everyone can relate to the awkwardness of teenage adolescence.  Every day you look into the mirror and are startled by a body that is changing almost beyond recognition overnight.  With that daily uncertainty, social awkwardness sets in, like being lost in the wilderness, traveling in circles, and not being able to find your original path.

Who hasn’t struggled to make friends and feel like they are connected to their peers throughout adolescence?  Kids who never thought about sports decide in high school to give them a shot.  Maybe they were introverted and decided to join speech and debate.  Maybe they enjoyed Harry Potter as a younger child and wanted to explore the theater.

This mother’s child asked one day if she could join the theater in her sophomore year of high school. Her mother consented.  This young lady, with long hair and a joyful smile that had recently been relieved of braces, was enthusiastic about making new friends.

Shortly after joining the theater, the child began to exhibit behavioral differences, and by the end of her sophomore year, she became abnormally withdrawn from her mother and family. She started to dress differently. Dresses and feminine attire were being pushed to the back of her closet.  She always had beautiful, long hair, and suddenly wanted to cut it off to a shockingly short length.  Mood swings were becoming more erratic.  Instead of her jovial interpretation of the world, she was becoming bitter, her voice and body reflecting it.

By the end of her Junior year, she wasn’t just a teenager trying to come into her own.  She hated the only mother she would ever have. One day, the young lady proclaimed to her mother that she was bisexual.  This completely caught her mother off guard, as just months before, she had made the usual teenage comments that were a glowing recommendation of a male teenage heartthrob.  Where was all of this coming from?  The stepfather suggested it was her participation in the theater and possibly drug usage.  The mother couldn’t believe it.  She could not fathom that her once beautiful and loving child was a willing participant in all this vile behavior that conflicted with the Christian upbringing of which her daughter knew. 

Entering her Senior year of high school, she decided she was no longer the person her parents had named her and chose a different name for herself.  Having gotten her driver’s license, she was routinely going to the public library to “work” on school projects.

Every interaction with her had turned into bitterness.  Her screaming, yelling, slamming door tantrums had everyone in the home on edge.  Her loving and kindhearted mother was not equipped for this kind of abuse from her child.  Her stepfather, an ordained minister and Servant of Christ, sought common ground with his stepdaughter. He attempted to establish an atmosphere where everyone could live in the home together, only to find that her newfound disdain for her mother and stepfather’s Christian faith became the new focus of her behavior. Later, she would become part of a conspiracy to discredit and defame her stepfather for his Christian faith.

Her mother entered her daughter’s bedroom one day to put her clean clothes away and found a flyer from an LGBTQ organization.  Turns out that the trips to “work” on school projects at the County library were rendezvous with members from the organization.  But where did this flyer come from?  How had this once beautiful young lady come to be in possession of this invitation to join them?  Upon further investigation over the next week, her mother found out that this group had access to her daughter through high school without her consent or knowledge.

It would later be revealed by a tattling younger sister that her erratic mood swings would be the result of marijuana and mushroom usage and that the source of these substances was the theater teacher and other parents of theater students. This could also explain the abnormal behavior of candy purchases and consumption.  One day, she returned home with bags full of candy from Walmart.  When questioned about such an odd bulk purchase of candy, the young lady became verbally aggressive, yelling and physically provoking.  She stepped into her mother’s personal space and proclaimed that she had bought it with her own money and that it was none of her mother’s business.

Ultimately, her daughter decided to move into her father’s home for the remainder of her senior year and cut off all contact with her mother.  When she went off to college, she spoke poorly of her mother and stepfather as some crazed religious zealots who would not accept her gender dysphoria as truth and decried that God had created her in cruelty and had her breasts removed. End of story.  A child’s innocence lost to public education…….

Ask yourself, who has the “rights” to our children’s influence beyond the basics of math, science, reading, etc.?  If I am elected to Montana’s Legislature, I will work to help parents protect their children from being indoctrinated by such evil and pave a path away from John Dewey’s school of indoctrination that Martin Luther in 1520 so vehemently described as becoming  “wide-open gates leading to hell”.   Isaiah 49:24-26.

James Marshal, Republican Candidate, House District 84