Shanel Soucy: The PornHub Lawn Sign Candidate
Anyone but her please
Consider this post a follow-up to last week’s, in which we looked at Richard Cipro, an active duty police officer running for City Council, and all the problems inherent in that. Generally speaking, Cipro is riding a wave of resentment against City Hall for the decision to remove cops from the public schools, and he’s doing surprisingly well. A little more on that later.
Our main focus today is the School Committee race, which has really been tragically under-covered in general, by both the whole of local media and myself (sorry). In that race there exists a candidate posing a similar threat to Cipro, riding a similar wave of conservative resentment. But, unlike Cipro, School Committee candidate Shanel Soucy can more easily pass as a regular person—a PTA type, wrapped in a motherly what’s-best-for-the-children affect. She’s anything but.
In her public-facing campaign literature, Soucy describes herself as someone who can “identify with Worcester's diversity, but truly understands, (sic) the cultural complexities and challenges our children and community face, not just during the school year, but all year.” The three pillars of her campaign are “bolstering family engagement,” supporting vocational education pathways and “common sense health education.” All three are, on their face and to the average voter, sensible positions. But the devil is always always always in the details. A closer look at her third position—the “common sense health education”—reveals her true intentions and the true core of her campaign.
Soucy is a key organizer in the “Opt-Out” movement here in Worcester. You may have seen the lawn signs. They read “Opt-OUT” in the style of PornHub and they say describe the city’s sex education program as “pornographic.” This movement is a right-wing backlash to the city’s decision to finally implement a comprehensive sex education program. It has huge fundamentalist Christian overtones and aims to cast a sex education curriculum which is non-judgmental and inclusive of LGBTQIA issues as grotesque.
The group organizes in part on Facebook, in a private group called “Informed Worcester Parents on Sex Ed.” There’s over 200 members. Soucy is a moderator and, it turns out, quite the prolific poster. With a little help from a friend and a little trickery I managed to sneak my way into the group hehehe to see what they were saying and hoo boy!! It’s bad!
“I made the decision along with my son who is in 11th grade today to opt him out,” she said, referring to the clear and easy process you can follow to take your child out of sex education, which is there for people who morally object to it and should be the end of the story for anyone uncomfortable with the curriculum, but it’s not, because the people who oppose this curriculum are not so much concerned for their children as they are with imposing their morality on the rest of the population. Anyway, she continues:
“I have been so focused on the younger grades and hadn’t really looked in the higher grades. I read through last night and I just can’t believe what I’m reading. I also found what I believe to be critical race theory along with all other sorts of beliefs that are not fact based or health for my sons (sic) life or mental state. This excerpt is an exercise, in my opinion, that is pretty much brainwashing, using meditation tactics to undo thinking patterns and then create new ones. What I am most disturbed about is the idea of negative influencers on gender and gender identity. Parents are listed as an option for someone who might be a negative life influencer. Then it discusses how they can reduce these influencers in their life. This is absolutely incredible to me. I’m mind blown.”
She attaches screenshots of the exercise in question, which is honestly something I wish I had and my classmates had when I was in high school. It’s an exercise about understanding your sexual identity and orientation, and understanding who makes you feel comfortable in that identity and who makes you feel uncomfortable. In the “lesson rationale” guide for teachers, the author states “Often people will think, believe, or hold attitudes regarding all aspects of life without understanding why they feel or think the way they do. This lesson aims to allow students to analyze how the people, communities, and our personal identities can impact so much of what we believe.”
How—really, HOW—is that at all a bad thing? How is that, as Soucy states, “brainwashing” and not entirely the opposite? It’s literally an exercise in un-brainwashing? Examining your unconscious biases and how you impose them on other people? It’s a lesson in how to not be a bad person to people who are different and how to understand when people are being bad to you, even if they don’t mean it.
That’s just a small part of real, good sex education should accomplish. It’s not just about safe sex but feeling safe in who you are and the people you surround yourself in and in the decisions you make. It’s necessary and far more important for a child’s mental development than learning who was the president in 1923 or the difference between animal and plant cell membranes. No slight to biology or history but you know what I mean. I see nothing wrong with a curriculum that gives children tools to navigate the awkward and uncomfortable period of sexual awakening. I see a whole lot wrong with people who object to it.
I’m getting so riled up about this as I’m making my case here. I am big mad right now. Let’s take another look at how Soucy tries to frame this particular lesson plan. Let’s really think about it here. Soucy is “disturbed” by the idea that there could be “negative influencers” on gender identity. And she’s doubly concerned that parents could be negative influencers. I got news for ya, Shanel: parents are probably the best example that exists of negative influence on a person’s sexual identity. I’ve got the mass grave of all of human history’s children who would rather take their own life than approach their parents with their sexual identity to prove it to you. I struggle to read Soucy’s remarks in a way that isn’t inherently biased against LGBTQIA children. Soucy is aghast that a student might come to understand that parents are a negative influence on their sexual and gender identity. She’s “mind blown” that a student may for their own mental well being distance themselves from oppressive parents.
This is just one of the dozens of posts Soucy is a part of on that particular organizing group. A person who thinks like that is not a person I want to hold power in my city. It is not someone I want making decisions for this city’s children. Couch it in whatever moralizing language she wants, hers is a position that is hostile to any child in the city who does not conform to her narrow morality.
It took Worcester a long, long time to pass the Three Rs sex education curriculum. Past iterations of the School Committee have had enough people like Soucy, who actively rail against Planned Parenthood and aboriton and sex education, that they’ve been able to forestall, undercut and scuttle proposal after proposal. I’ve been covering this subject for a long time, and I’ve got the receipts.
We can’t now, after just narrowly summoning the political will to get a sex education program past the anti-abortion folks, let the board slide back into that territory. It is obviously not enough for people like Soucy to have the option to opt their children out of sex education. They won’t stop until they get the program removed.
Unlike Cipro, we really have no idea how Soucy is going to track in the Nov. 2 general election. With only four challengers, the School Committee did not have enough candidates to trigger a preliminary election. But the wave Cipro rode to success in the preliminary election—beating the incumbent, Sean Rose, and getting the most votes of anyone in the contest, small as it was—is very much the same wave Soucy is catching.
Though their issues du jour are different, Soucy and Cipro both represent a reactionary brand of townie conservatism with a strong presence in Worcester. Think outrage over “critical race theory” in schools, cheap moralizing about abortion and sex education, “thin blue line” propagandizing and outrage at the Black Lives Matter movement and its demands. Think of the recent quickly-deleted post on the Worcester police union facebook page depicting Mayor Joe Petty with a poorly photoshopped Hitler mustache—an attempt to draw a parallel between the horrors of the Third Reich and Worcester’s decision to reinstate a mask mandate.
These are the sort of people who went to the QAnon rally in Auburn over the summer, celebrating the “Heroes” of Jan. 6.
They live in a different reality. They cannot be reasoned with. They see standard Democrats like Joe Petty as Marxists or fascists or both and anyone to his left as Antifa thugs waiting to break into their home and replace all their family photos with pictures of Peppa Pig dying a horribly violent death. They don’t understand politics and they don’t want to. They just want an “outsider,” a Trump-like carnival barker, who they see as outside some vague machine.
Worcester City Hall, over the past few years, has implemented a few modest, well-intentioned reforms. The City Council voted narrowly to replace school resource officers with a public safety plan that does not require the constant presence of armed police officers. The School Committee, after years and years of buck-passing and sabotage, finally found the political will to implement a decent comprehensive sex education program after a decade plus without any sort of sex education whatsoever. These two reforms have, in the months since, ignited the city’s right-wing reactionary townie set, and that anger is being funnelled into right-wing candidates like Cipro and Soucy. On the other hand, these reforms were so tepid and came so late that they haven’t inspired much enthusiasm at all from the city’s left, and the city’s left is already a whole hell of a lot smaller than the city’s right.
It’s entirely possible we’re looking at an election in November which turns the city’s executive boards rightward, effectively nullifying the tepid progress we’ve made in the last two years under Petty and City Manager Ed Augustus, Jr. While only a possibility, it’s a decent freakin’ possibility. There are a handful of candidates for City Council and School Committee running good campaigns that challenge the status quo from the left, buuuut it is historically a lot harder to get people to show up for the polls for those sorts of candidates than for candidates like Cipro.
Soucy’s candidacy has benefited from a lack of press attention. Her wingnut views on sex education and her activity in organizing against it have gone unreported, and she gets to face the public as someone who’s merely concerned with “strong families.” What’s worse, her candidacy was lent major legitimacy by a recent endorsement from the local chapter of the AFL-CIO.
It’s extremely disappointing that the AFL-CIO would do this and, in the context of who did and did not get endorsed this year, it reeks of skullduggery. Maybe more about that in another post, once I have more solid information on the endorsements and how they were made. For now something to keep in mind is that District 2 City Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson’s husband, Joe Carlson, is the union chapter president and the endorsements kind of seem like they fall along the lines of who dared and who did not dare to critique the Worcester Police Department.
Anyway, there are a couple really strong candidates in the School Committee that deserve your vote. Jermoh Kamara is the most exciting challenger in the race, and she’s got my endorsement. Sue Mailman would be a competent and welcome addition to the board.
As far as incumbents go, you need to vote for Tracy Novick. She’s an expert’s expert on education and we do not deserve her. Laura Clancey and Molly McCullough are fine. Dianna Biancheria, on the other hand… it’s hard to overstate her incompetence and obvious lack of grasp on the issues facing the district. She is one of the dimmest public servants I have ever had the misfortune of listening to. It would be great if she were removed from the board.
Wherever the election ends up, there’s going to be a big change. Jack Foley and John Monfredo, two longtime members of the board, are retiring. Assuming all incumbents take back their seat, the challengers who fill those two spots will greatly reshape the board.
If the two seats are filled by Kamara and Mailman, we’ll have a much stronger board. If Soucy takes one of the seats, we’re basically replacing John Monfredo—ever the moralizing anti-Planned Parenthood type, and a deeply problematic one at that—with a younger female John Monfredo.
We need to show up on Nov. 2 and make sure that doesn’t happen.
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I have a couple quick updates on the Cipro situation while I’ve got you here, and it’s a real good news/bad news situation.
First, the bad news. Cipro has a lot more money on hand than Rose does heading into the last month of the campaign. He’s got $20,000 to spend.
Rose, on the other hand, has about $11,000.
You will also notice if you read these two reports carefully that Rose greatly outspent Cipro over the past few months and he still did worse. So that’s uhhhh... that’s pretty bad.
But there’s good news! Cipro’s ethical situation vis-à-vis his employment as a police officer in the City of Worcester is worse than I initially thought. Not only would he be barred by state ethics law from voting on anything related to the police department, he would not be able to review the city manager or take any action related to the city manager’s employment. Reviewing the person who hires your department head, it turns out, is unethical. So in reality Cipro’s candidacy would be even more functionally useless than we thought. He would still have the platform afforded an elected official to say whatever he wants, though. And we really don’t need that. Not at all.
The strike at St. V’s passed its 200th day this week, so that’s great. It’s getting so bad that the governor of the state is tweeting that they need to wrap it up. It was disappointing as it is telling that doctors at Saint Vincent released a letter this week directed at the nurses, not the hospital’s management, calling for an end to the strike. The letter calls for a return to work as COVID cases spike and tacitly blames the striking nurses for an untenable situation at the hospital. Framing like this should be expected from the hospital’s management, but to see it come from the doctors is disheartening. In a sane world, these doctors would be standing with the nurses and using their bully pulpit to pressure Tenet, the hospital’s management company. But alas, ours is not a sane world.
The thing to really keep in mind with this languishing strike is that the hospital could end the strike right now, right as I’m typing this, if they just agree to give all the nurses their jobs back. The company is refusing to do that. Tenet is refusing to give all the nurses their jobs back, even as a worsening pandemic comes crashing down on a hospital they have already understaffed in an effort to cast the nurses in a bad light. These people are monsters.
Highly suggest attending one of the two community input sessions coming up this week about how the city should spend the $150 million it’s getting from the federal Rescue Plan money. It would be nice if you showed up and just screamed “Housing housing housing invest it all into affordable housing!!” There’s one on Monday at 6 p.m. at the Int’l Brotherhood of Electrical Workers building at 242 Mill Street and one on Thursday at 6 p.m. at Worcester Tech, 1 Skyline Drive.
On a lighter note, it’s been a real delight to follow all the Breen’s drama and worship on the “Worcester Eats” Facebook page over the past couple weeks. Sparked by one somewhat bad review of the dive bar as confusingly named, dingy and staffed by rude bartenders, hundreds of people have been writing in with glowing comments about the food. Breen’s is a great dive bar and perhaps the best place in the city to watch a Boston Bruins game. The food is actually pretty good too. It’s nice to see Worcester Facebook be a little wholesome for once.
I’ll leave you with this thought: where would Worcester be if not for its dingy, rude, and confusingly named institutions?