Betsy DeVos meets with anti-LGBTQ groups after pretending to care about equality
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos met with radical anti-LGBTQ groups and a millionaire right-wing conspiracy theorist who has spent his career attacking teacher rights.
Betsy DeVos is one of Donald Trump’s most dangerous, destructive cabinet members. And she is listening to people who support her radical right-wing agenda.
On Thursday, DeVos invited representatives from Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council to the Department of Educations’s “Engaging Families and Fathers” event.
Both groups promote extremist antigay propaganda, and the Family Research Council is classified as a hate groupby the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Its president, Tony Perkins, has lobbied against anti-bullying initiatives and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, claims homosexuality is “disgusting” and tries to “recruit” children, promotes “conversion therapy” programs that abuse LGBTQ kids, and bought the mailing list of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
In her recent testimony, she said, “Discrimination in any form is wrong. I don’t support discrimination in any form.” While of course refusing to commit to refusing funding to schools that do discriminate.
On Tuesday, DeVos also held a private meeting with Missouri-based millionaire and Trump donor Rex Sinquefield, a self-styled school “reform” advocate and conspiracy theorist who despises public schools.
Sinquefield has claimed public schools were a plot by the Klan to “hurt African-American children,” and says his personal mission is “rescuing education from teachers’ unions.” In Missouri, Sinquefield spent $750,000 on a campaign to end public school tenure protection, and gave millions to the right-wing Show-Me Institute, a think tank which conducts “studies” blasting public schools and promoting policies to subsidize private and parochial schools for rich families.
These are the kinds of people and organizations DeVos is consulting to run the Department of Education.
Over the past few weeks alone, DeVos proposed ending a program that forgives student loans for low-paid public Betsy DeVos meets with anti-LGBTQ groups after pretending to care about equality - Shareblue: