Recently, I overheard friends chatting about how they’d heard parents expressing concerns that liberal indoctrination is occurring in the public schools. They were giggling and cracking jokes, and inferring the unease is little more than hysteria. But we all know that “global warming,” repackaged and remarketed as “climate change,” (which conveniently covers global cooling, too, you know, just in case global warming is a tax-sucking hoax), is being taught as a foregone conclusion across our nation. There is no doubt that 2012 Hypocrite of the Year recipient Al Gore-zeera has cemented his carbon footprint of global warming hype into our public schools. But that’s just the tip of the is-it-really-melting iceberg.

In Virginia, a group of high school students presented a quilt they’d constructed as a class project to their town’s city council. Each square in the quilt represented an “enlightening experience.”

“‘We got to walk across the Philpott Dam and the small black person represents us before we learned all the information and then the bigger gold person is how he feels after he’s been enriched with all the different knowledge,'” a female student explained.

Immediately, Councilwoman Sharon Brooks-Hodge interrupted.

“Excuse me. Um, why is the small black person the negative image?” Councilwoman Sharon Brooks-Hodge said.

The student was taken aback and tried to explain: “It’s not negative. It’s just showing how much we increased.”

Brooks-Hodge wasn’t buying it: “I take offense to that.”

“I didn’t mean to make it offensive,” another student tried to explain.

Then she went after the teachers.

“Whoever reviewed that to make a small black person the before and the gold which you are afterwards, considering you only talked to 10 percent of black people in a city that’s 45 percent African-American, I take offense to that and I hope that you do not display that.”

Brooks-Hodge showed less interest in hearing about the student’s experiences than silencing them with her sword of political correctness.

In a fourth-grade class in Duval County, following a lesson led by a guest speaker at Cedar Hills Elementary School, students were instructed to pen a note reading “I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure.” Students, possessing little knowledge of what constitutional rights actually mean, are being lead by the nose to believe they are expendable.

In Prescott, Wisconsin, students are taught that “American faith in democracy soured into cynicism because of Reagan’s policies, and that “Conservatives are evil.” A student brought home this worksheet:

Last week, a middle school forced female students to kiss one another, as lesbians, as part of an anti-bullying lesson.

“According to reports, the session occurred last week at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, near Poughkeepsie. A group of students from Bard College led two workshops for the youth, separated by gender. During the workshop for girls, the 13 and 14-year-olds were told to ask one another for a lesbian kiss. They were also taught words such as “pansexual” and “genderqueer.”

And in one of the most egregious examples of liberal bias in recent days was the arrest of an eighth-grade boy in West Virginia. His crime? Wearing an NRA t-shirt to school. In the school’s cafeteria, a teacher demanded he remove the offending shirt, loudly and without regard to his First and Second Amendment rights. When he refused, he was arrested for “obstruction and disturbing the education process” and taken to jail. Jared Marcum returned days later, defiantly wearing the same shirt, with many of his classmates sporting similar attire in solidarity.

“There’s a lot of people wearing this same exact shirt, showing great, great support and I really appreciate it,” Marcum said.

A strong argument could be made about just who was “disturbing the education process.”

Liberal indoctrination in our schools is not a joke. It is happening, and happening at an alarming rate. Every week our kids are forced to engage in things like writing narratives from the perspective of a Nazi, reciting the pledge of allegiance, in Arabic, as “One Nation Under Allah,” designing flags for a new Socialist nation, and attacking Conservative ideology and our alliance with Israel, just to name a few. Our children attend school for limited reasons, not to learn how to spot a transsexual, or devise the most effective way to exterminate ones political foes. As parents and guardians, we must be aware of what our kids are learning when we’re not around. We must remain involved in our children’s educational experiences, and disavow anyone who tries to take away our parental rights and responsibilities and the voices of our children via political correctness. It is no coincidence that the rates of homeschooling have increased, kind of like the hot air trapped inside Al Gore’s head.