Ryan Walters Doubles Down on Harming Students, Denies Responsibility

CHINO, CA – Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is walking down a path well-worn by extremist agitators in doubling down on his political crusades in the wake of Nex Benedict’s murder while denying he played any role in establishing a school environment tolerant towards bullies and hostile toward students he doesn’t believe exist. “There’s not multiple genders,” Walters told the New York Times following Benedict’s death. “There’s two. That’s how God created us.” 

Our Schools USA and more than 350 national, state, and local LGBTQ, civil rights groups, and public figures signed an open letter released today calling for the immediate removal of Walters and investigate what “policies and actions” in the Oklahoma Department of Education have led to this point. In 2022, Oklahoma passed a bathroom bill and a ban on trans students from participating in school sports.   

Rainbow Youth Project USA, who hosts a national crisis hotline for LGBTQIA+ people in need, reported that of 987 crisis contacts that have been made from Oklahoma, 894 had been received since Nex Benedict’s death made national news on February 16, 2024. 

Oklahoma is not unique as the same dynamic played out in California following the passage of a forced outing policy by the Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) in July 2023. Our Schools USA and the Rainbow Youth Project USA partnered and launched a dedicated crisis hotline that  fielded 648 crisis contacts from California as of November 20, 2023, and according to Vice News, prevented at least one suicide. CVUSD Board President Sonja Shaw, who spearheaded the forced outing policy and joined Walters on a Family Research Council panel in September 2023, described the hotline as “dangerous.” 

Both Lance Preston, the executive director of the Rainbow Youth Project, and Our Schools USA’s Kristi Hirst, spoke about the hotline and the harm students are being subjected to  at the CVUSD school board meeting on February 1, 2024. 

Shaw, when interviewed by CBS News for a documentary that has since been nominated for a GLAAD award and confronted with the harm she was causing, replied using language commonly associated with conversion therapy that has been banned in 22 states and Washington, DC. “Whoever is telling them that is wrong and they’re not getting them the right kind of help,” she said. “A Nation in Transition” can be viewed online here.

The New Republic, reporting on the forced outing being pushed across the country, ended with a scathing conclusion that fits neatly into the denials issued by Walters and Shaw: “The people helping support youth, rather than the “concerned parents” harassing them, are being cast as the danger.” 

Like Walters, Shaw has doubled down on her crusades and went further by adopting a book banning and classroom censorship policy in November 2023. While Shaw presented both forced outing and book banning polices as her own, and according to the LA Times, “denies collaborating with [Southern California Megachurch Pastor Jack] Hibbs on parental notification or other policies.” Since then it’s become known that Karen England, a Tennessee-based religious homeschooling fanatic and “dear friend” of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Megachurch Pastor Jack Hibbs, authored both Chino’s forced outing policy that is currently under a court order and the book ban and classroom censorship policy. England, and Hibbs’ top staffer, Gina Gleason, can be seen together gleefully “raising the roof” in a school board meeting as a Chino teacher spoke out against banning books and censoring classrooms. 

Both England and Gleason are found on the most recently published membership list of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP), along with Christian homeschooling zealot Michael Farris, TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk, and the Bradley Foundation – itself a funder of one of the law firms defending Chino’s forced outing policy in court, the Liberty Justice Center – and Leonard Leo, “the man behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority.”  

CNP, which was created by and is deeply intertwined with the Heritage Foundation, are the entities behind “Project 2025,” an alarming conservative policy wish list to be implemented should President Biden lose re-election that includes a national forced outing policy as well as a number of policy proposals that would fundamentally alter the rights and freedoms currently available to American citizens.  

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