David's penis and the Right's Trojan Horse of "parent's rights."

The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

A Florida principal was told to resign or be fired by the elected school board after three parents complained that an art teacher had shown Michelangelo’s statue of the biblical shepherd “David” (1501–1504) to their 11- and 12-year-old sixth-graders.

One parent called the iconic sculpture “pornographic.”

The art teacher’s lesson was part of the curriculum’s mandatory unit on Renaissance art.

The internet has been filled with memes and posts mocking the incident. It is easy to mock.

After all, even the Vatican ceiling has a few penises on display.

But there is more going on here than just a handful of yahoo parents.

The Board Chair of the Tallahassee Classical School — a public and free charter institution — is using the resignation as an opportunity to advocate for “parents’ rights,” a conservative talking point that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis codified with the 2021 “Parents’ Bill of Rights.”

“Parents’ rights” is a Trojan Horse. It is part of the Right’s plan to subvert public education, take over elected school boards and other elected bodies with the financial backing of fascist-minded billionaires with unlimited dollars to spend.

If the current mayoral election in Chicago shows anything it is the millions of dollars that the Right is willing to spend in order to cut into areas of formerly Democratic Party strength.

Like Chicago.

Paul Vallas can declare he is a Democrat, but the evidence is clear even with his own words that he is a Republican, and a fairly right-wing one at that.

Chicago will soon have an elected school board.

A new law will expand the size of the board to 21 members (including the president). In 2024 ten members will be elected from ten geographic districts to four-year terms that will begin in January 2025.

With millions of corporate dollars, Vallas is running a classic Republican law and order campaign that has won him support from Republican areas on the northwest and southwest sides of the city. How hard is it to imagine MAGA dollars flowing into Chicago to win seats on what will be a huge school board?

Just as they have used critical race theory, drag shows, so-called “wokeness” and LGBTQ rights as phony wedge issues, they will use parent rights in the same way. They may not win a majority on the 21 member Chicago board. But they can win enough seats to cause chaos and gridlock.

Since passing the “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” Florida has restricted discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary classrooms and required schools to notify parents of upcoming material that may not be “age appropriate.”

Teachers are not part of the discussion.

The Tallahassee charter school Board Chair Barney Bishop III told the Tallahassee Democrat, that his charter school (which teaches a “traditional, Western civilization, liberal classical education”) was started in 2020 after parents “saw all the crap that’s being taught in public schools.”

“We agree with everything the governor is doing in the educational arena. We support him because he’s right,” he told the Democrat, criticizing the “woke indoctrination going on about pronouns and drag queens.”

To be clear, as a teacher and a teacher union president, I always believed in collaboration with parents and respect for their views.

I was an activist in winning support for an elected Chicago school board.

I was not pleased with the legislation that came from that. I fear it is too large and unwieldy and too easy a target for those with a right-wing and corporate agenda.

Or even Machine politicians with patronage issues.

And, of course, this isn’t just about schools and school board elections. It has implications for other local and national elections.