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Pledge of Allegiance required by legislation

This week the House passed House File 415 which requires each classroom in public schools and accredited private schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance each day and to display the USA flag during the recitation. The bill includes protections for those with religious objections by a student or their parents. In these trying times, I believe it is critical that we promote the civics lesson that our Pledge of Allegiance provides.

This week we also passed House File 435, a bill that requires the Dept. of Transportation to maintain a voluntary emergency contact registry for use by the DOT and law enforcement. Citizens will be able to register when they obtain or renew a driver’s license. This registry will give the authorities the tool they need for faster contact with loved ones in such emergencies.

House File 489 dealt with changes to the sex offender registry laws, bringing Iowa into compliance with the Adam Walsh Act. The bill extended the time that a person on the registry must wait before being able to apply for modification of their registration. The waiting period for Tier I offenders extended from two years under current law to 10 years under this bill, and Tier II and II offenders extended from five years to 25 years.

One of the troubling trends nationwide that has come to my attention is the use of a “Black Lives Matter” curriculum, and this trend has come to Iowa. The Ames Public School District used this curriculum in early February as part of “The Black Lives Matter National Week of Action”, raising concerns of many parents. The Government Oversight committee will be meeting with the Ames Public School District next week to discuss the matter. The curriculum is problematic in many ways, serving not as an historical lesson, but as socio-political indoctrination. The curriculum presented thirteen “Guiding Principles” such as the idea that “We are committed to disrupting the Western prescribed nuclear family structure.” And the curriculum was devoted to teaching K-12 students about “trans-affirming” and “queer-affirming” behaviors, including that the students had the right to decide their own gender and pronoun. These gender identity agendas have nothing to do with Black History Month and are not appropriate for our public schools. Clearly, this curriculum not only taught political views as facts, but also injected unrelated gender identity ideologies into the schools. It is wholly inappropriate for our public schools to be using our taxpayer dollars for imposing these kinds of political and social ideologies on our children.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you.

——

Dean Fisher is the state representative

for District 72. Contact him at

dean.fisher@legis.iowa.gov.

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