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My Point of View by Brad Kramer

Last summer, my daughter wanted a lemonade stand. She chose the style, bought $100 of supplies and we built it together. We put the stand out, and people flocked for real lemonade from a young entrepreneur. On her first day of business, she hired half the neighborhood kids to sell lemonade. I asked her why but decided to patiently teach her later that day. At the end of the day, I taught her to understand labor, expenses, margins and business planning at a level that an 8-year-old could understand and make sense of the world. Kids should learn to successfully navigate the world, so they understand how to trade to get what they need. That is, after all, all a business is.

My daughter does not need to understand all the unnecessary pains of life, including all the baggage that comes with understanding sex. At her age, she is just beginning to ask questions and have the snickering moments with her friends. I shudder to think of the weight we’re putting on our children to grapple with things like sex changes and critical race theory. Understanding at a simple level how to manage money, offer something of value and responsibility seem to me to be far more important. We started homeschooling her during COVID because we refused to make her go through the confusion of in-person, hybrid, canceled, no recess or play, etc. We stayed because it allows her to learn what is most important in life and find who she is truly meant to be, and not in some Pollyannish way where we are ignorant of the world we are preparing her for. 

Which leads me to the Democrats’ message to our young people and how destructive it is. Last week, Jennifer Vogt-Erickson went on a tirade about subjugation and enslavement, while living in what is probably the best time in history to be alive in a nation that has been the epitome of advancing human rights. 

While convincing you that the likely Supreme Court decision surrounding abortion was the work of men subjugating women, she neglected to share that more women than men vote. By a lot. Does this mean that many of those women voters are too feeble-minded to think for themselves and are bound by outdated patriarchal ideas, as I suspect Democrats would imply? Or is it because many women understand the consequences, and bear the brunt of those consequences? For every story of a woman who had an abortion like Jennifer’s grandmother, I hear a story from a woman who was at the doorstep of an abortion and left the clinic in horror at what could have been. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I do know people like Jennifer are selling you a fake bill of goods when we insist on teaching children like my daughter to be uncomfortable with their gender and that they were born racist, while failing to teach things that actually empower her, like understanding business through lemonade. 

This narrative plays out over and over again. Democrats insist that you are victims and need special accommodations. That “oppression is institutional” in a country that has elevated almost every race and gender to positions of power.

In my last MPV, I was making a point of the drastic changes in society in the few generations between my great-great-great-grandfather but missed an editing change and that sentence still hung out there as a seemingly random statement that I had a grandfather in the Union Army. During that period in history, it was almost the expectation that all your children wouldn’t survive to adulthood. Life was such that if a parent didn’t survive, the outcome for the spouse and children was bleak at best. Life is still tremendously difficult, though. 

Goodness is brought by men and women who have strength and character and the life skills around family and business to make the world a better place. I want my daughter to have rights. I want the young men who will come of age around her to be confident in their masculine natures so they can have strength to be protectors and not abusers. As far as I can tell, those types of men are not being produced by the Democrats’ agenda. I hope my daughter grows up in a country where she could be the president. More importantly though, I hope she has the integrity and strength of a woman who would be a good president. So, I’m keeping her far away from Democratic agendas that convince her that she is not enough. If you want to raise strong sons and daughters who appreciate their fundamental nature while forging a new world, there’s a roomful of people like that at our monthly GOP meetings. You are welcome to join!

Brad Kramer is a member of the Freeborn County Republican Party.