The Wyoming Family Alliance is obsessed with genitals and sex.
The religious fundamentalist group, which is working to sway school board elections this year in Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette, and Lander, sent a questionnaire to all 2024 school board candidates in these areas.
It contains 27 questions.
None of them ask about district budgeting, fiscal management, or teacher recruitment. None inquire about literacy or reading. There’s nothing about mental health or physical education.
Instead, a full third of the questions—nine, in all—ask school board candidates about sex and/or students’ genitalia.
They ask whether sex education in schools should cover “sex acts and pleasures of sex,” whether candidates support “surgical castration” of children, and whether we need to protect students from “sexual grooming,” among other things.
The questionnaire, weirdly, also dedicates three questions to pregnancy and abortion.
It directly asks candidates to disclose their political ideology and religion, and includes commonplace hot button national topics: DEI, guns, eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
No issue receives as much attention as what’s inside people’s pants, and what they do with it.
But no issue—not curriculum nor safety nor student discipline nor even parental rights—receives anything close to the attention dedicated to what’s inside people’s pants, and what they do with it.
An “unhinged” group
The Wyoming Family Alliance is a lobbying group formed in the early 2020s as an offshoot of Focus on the Family, a national organization that promotes far-right Christian causes.
According to Baptist News Global, Focus on the Family was once a mainstream Christian conservative group, but it has become “unhinged.”
Whereas decades ago they dabbled in issues like opposition to gay marriage, today Focus on the Family is the “single most influential driver of anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans legislation now sweeping statehouses across the nation.”
In turn, the Wyoming Family Alliance makes these causes its own, along with support for total bans on abortion and other fringe beliefs that would dictate how people live their personal lives.
No evidence
Of course, lobbying groups often send questionnaires to candidates running for office.
Candidates answer questions to let the organization know whether or not their values and priorities align. In turn, the organization can make decisions about which candidates to endorse.
But that is not what appears to be happening with the Wyoming Family Alliance.
For instance, in their Cowboy State Daily advertisement promoting candidates for the Natrona County School District #1 board of trustees, WFA offers their endorsements based on candidates “supporting teachers, focusing on academic success, and ensuring fiscal responsibility.”
But nothing in the WFA questionnaire addresses any of those topics, and none of the candidates have experience as a school board member. So, how would WFA know?
In fact, WFA’s statewide school board candidate guide appears to simply parrot the endorsements of other far-right organizations, such as the Moms for Parental Rights PAC, which is a spinoff of the Moms for Liberty, as well as the Coal Country Conservatives and outgoing Wyoming Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. John Bear.
Meanwhile, the candidate guide also accuses any group that promotes school board candidates other than WFA’s picks as being “endorsements with liberal worldviews.”
Returning to their obsession with sex, the WFA guide claims—without evidence—that each and every group promoting candidates it opposes “approves of sexually explicit content in school libraries.”
A self-fulfilling prophecy
With more and more influence from groups like Wyoming Family Alliance, running for school board in Wyoming is becoming no longer a question of who will lead our public education system best.
If WFA’s goals were, in fact, to support teachers, promote fiscal responsibility, and ensure academic success, that would be one thing. But WFA’s goals include, instead, tearing down our public school system.
The 2024 Wyoming primary elections showed the way in which groups like the Freedom Caucus, with huge sophisticated national operations funded by incredibly wealthy organizations, can steamroll opposing campaigns in Wyoming run on traditional grassroots boot leather.
Running for school board in Wyoming used to be the sleepiest of sleepy political affairs. The more that groups like Focus on the Family and Wyoming Family Alliance get involved, the more out-of-state money will be spent and the more politicized school boards will become.
If WFA’s goals were, in fact, to support teachers, promote fiscal responsibility, and ensure academic success, that would be one thing. But WFA’s goals include, instead, tearing down our public school system and replacing it with a system where taxpayer money funds private and religious schools with essentially no public accountability or oversight.
As groups like Moms for Liberty get more and more of their members on school boards in Wyoming, they create chaos and distract from the mission of educating students.
Spending countless meeting hours on non-issues like banning books and kitty litter in bathrooms, in turn, makes it harder for school boards to do the real work of running a school district.
This creates a downward spiral and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The WFA is not promoting candidates for school board who will make Wyoming school districts better. They are promoting candidates who will help them burn public education in Wyoming to the ground, so it can be replaced.
In the meantime, WFA really, really wants to know what candidates think about students’ genitals and sex.