Tim Walz / X screenshot
The Federalist | Joy Pullman - August 27, 2024
Effective July 2025, teacher licensing rules passed last year in Minnesota under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz will ban practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in public schools. Walz is now the presidential running mate of current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. His resume includes a stint as a high school social studies teacher who sponsored a student queer sex club in 1999.
Starting next July, Minnesota agencies controlled by Walz appointees will require teacher license applicants to affirm transgenderism and race Marxism. Without a teaching license, individuals cannot work in Minnesota public schools, nor in the private schools that require such licenses.
The latest version of the regulations requires teachers to “affirm” students’ “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to receive a Minnesota teaching license:
The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves (emphasis added).
Last spring, administrative law judges finally approved these pending changes The Federalist reported one month before they were finalized. Universities are also affected: starting in 2025, they must either train their teaching students to fulfill these anti-Christian requirements or be banned from offering state licensing — and thus the ticket to the vast majority of teaching jobs — to their students.
Since 2020 in Minnesota, teachers renewing their licenses, which is usually required every five to seven years, must demonstrate “cultural competency” similar to the requirements imposed in 2025 on new teaching licensees. Teachers renewing their licensing must “Show[] evidence of self-reflection and discussion of” topics that include “Gender Identity, Including Transgender Students” and “Sexual Orientation.” They must also show they understand “bias” in themselves and their students related to race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other cultural Marxist categories.
Queer Totalitarianism Forces Religion Into the Closet
Some Christian universities in the state will obey these regulations, said Doug Seaton, founder and president of the nonprofit Upper Midwest Law Center, located in Minneapolis. Some Christian universities will not, but so far those UMLC has reached out to that plan to disobey these state commands to violate their faith will do so quietly and only sue when the state finds and punishes them, Seaton said.
“Some are not willing to do it [file a lawsuit] until they actually have their college programs tagged for noncompliance or their graduates actually not licensed as a consequence of not adhering to these standards,” he said in a phone interview. This comes even though UMLC, as a public interest law firm, would undertake the litigation and pay the vast majority of its expenses thanks to their donors. Three Minnesota Christian universities The Federalist reached out to did not return inquiries on whether they would enforce the new licensing rules.
Faithful members of the world’s largest and oldest religions cannot in good conscience “affirm” non-heterosexual sexual orientations and gender identities. Christians who do so publicly deny their faith, something Jesus Christ said endangers a person’s soul and eternal bliss after death: “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32, 33).
Minnesota’s teacher requirements therefore force Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents to other religions to violate their faith and endanger their hopes of eternal life in order to work in government-run schools.
Forcing people to testify to beliefs they don’t hold, often called compelled speech, is clearly unconstitutional, he said: “They’re essentially requiring people to affirm these ideas that they don’t really believe, in many cases, as a condition of being a public school teacher or being part of a program to be a licensed public school teacher. You can’t force that kind of speech, you can’t require adherence to ideas that aren’t believed.”
The 13-member board that made these changes is appointed by the governor, whom for the last six years has been Walz. So, Walz is poised to make similar bigoted, totalitarian, and unconstitutional policies across the United States should he be elected vice president.
Marinating Kids In Anti-American Propaganda
As I reported last year, Minnesota’s new teacher requirements also “require teachers to agree that the taxpayers supplying their salaries and the people who created the school system that will employ them are racists, and affirm other cultural Marxist beliefs.”
“For example, Standard 6C requires that ‘The teacher understands the historical foundations of education in Minnesota … that have and continue to create inequitable opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for learners … especially for … students historically denied access, underserved, or underrepresented on the basis of race … gender, sexual orientation.'” That “standard” remains in the latest version of the regulations, under the same number.
Recently in The Wall Street Journal, Katherine Kersten examined curricular changes Minnesota is making under Walz’s administration in “ethnic studies” that mirror these changes to teacher licensing requirements.
Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to ‘identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power’ and ‘use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.’
Fourth-graders must ‘identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.’ High-school students are told to ‘develop an analysis of racial capitalism’ and ‘anti-Blackness’ and are taught to view themselves as members of ‘racialized hierarchies’ based on ‘dominant European beauty standards.”
The new teacher requirements are also rife with demands to agree with race Marxism, as Child Protection League analyses detail. Below are just a few examples.
Walz’s first executive order as governor was to install a “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, council. Former Minnesota state legislator Allen Quist notes that “The radical Walz administration Department of Human Rights has also forced school districts to report student discipline by race and require equal outcomes (equity) in discipline. The results have been horrific chaos and violence.”
During Walz’s governorship, student achievement in Minnesota has gone from among the best in the nation to declining more sharply than anywhere else in the nation, according to the Minneapolis-based Center for the American Experiment. The most recent scores show Minnesota fourth graders dipping below the national average in reading for the first time ever recorded on the well-respected Nation’s Report Card.
Research has found for decades that there is no link between teacher certification and student achievement. People who enter teaching with a degree other than in education tend to have significantly higher personal and student academic performance.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is "False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America." A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include "Classic Books For Young Children," and "101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation." An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books.