The D.C. Court of Appeals just upheld a Washington D.C. law that will require that workers providing pre-K child care have at least an Associate’s Degree to provide child care in the city.

The decision comes after a long-running court battle between childcare workers and the city. The requirements were adopted in 2016 and are just now being implemented.

A four-year legal battle over D.C.’s new requirements that many child care workers get a college degree has seemingly come to an end.

Last week the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. dismissed a long-running lawsuit challenging the education requirements, which were first adopted in 2016 and start taking effect later this year after a series of delays. Under the new rules, directors of child care centers will need a bachelor’s degree in early education, teachers will need an associate’s degree in early education, and assistant teachers and caregivers in home-based daycares will need a Child Development Associate’s credential.

The reasoning for the decision is pretty simple: despite the rules being burdensome to people in the industry–the vast majority of childcare providers do not currently meet the standards–the court ruled that D.C.’s requirements had a plausible connection to ensuring that the service provided was of sufficient quality. The court didn’t rule on the wisdom of the rules, simply on the legality of them.

“Even assuming it is irrational to force a hair braider who never dyes hair to sit through a week of training on how to safely use hair dye, an associate’s degree in early-childhood education is self evidently (and rationally) connected to the work of caring for young children,” he wrote in the 23-page decision sustaining a lower court’s ruling in favor of the city. “Although we are sensitive to the burdens that [D.C.’s] regulations impose on daycare workers, our role is not to assess the wisdom of the agency’s policy choices. A conceivably rational justification for the college requirements is readily apparent, and, in this context, that is all due process requires.”

The rules had been challenged by the Institute for Justice, which has won a number of cases based upon the argument that the government imposes regulations in order to “fence” out providers of services through burdensome regulations whose main intent is to restrict the supply of providers and artificially raise prices to consumers and profits for providers. In Minnesota, it requires 1550 hours of formal education to become a licensed hairstylist who can work at the local Great Clips.

A lot of libertarian-leaning scholars are criticizing the court decision based on common sense, which strikes me as the wrong place to attack the problem. The assertion of the court seems self-evidently correct–that it is not obviously irrelevant to the mission of childcare providers that they are educated in early childhood development.

Rather, it is obviously a bad idea, even if legally justifiable. The point, I think, of the DC requirements is not to fence out providers, but to ensure that they are properly prepared to propagandize children in the latest ideological fads, especially gender ideology. As we all know by now the education establishment is fully committed to grooming kids into a sexual identity ideology that is intended to remake our society into a gender-confused sex cult, and the best place to start is just out of the womb.

Requiring childcare providers to be indoctrinated in this ideology is the point, and is far more evil than simply trying to artificially restrict the supply of potential childcare providers.

The rules, by the way, don’t only apply to commercial providers. They also apply to home-based child care providers, ensuring that either these providers close down–funneling kids into the commercialized system–or require home-based providers to get on board with the sex grooming of children.

Writing in Reason, a libertarian magazine, this week, George Mason University Law School professor Ilya Somin similarly criticized the court’s ruling, saying that child care workers don’t need college degrees or credentials to be good at their jobs.

“Any adult with experience in caring for small children knows that it’s perfectly possible to do the job well without having a college degree of any kind,” wrote Somin. “When I was in middle school and high school, I spent hundreds of hours working as a babysitter for toddlers, all without ever feeling the need to for any information that could only be learned in college (indeed, I didn’t even have a high school diploma at the time). Rare is the parent who, in choosing daycare facilities, cares whether the employees have college degrees or not.”

But Mary Harrill with the National Association for the Education of Young Children says that research now shows that additional educational requirements could help improve caregiving for young children and also professionalize the workforce.

“There’s a lot of questions on why does someone need a degree to work with children?” she said. “Part of that is because there is not a recognition of the research base and that there are these specific competencies, and if we want to be taken seriously, having those education credentials is an important part of professionalizing early childhood educators.”

Are my fears about the ideology of pre-K education outlandish? No.

A pre-kindergarten teacher and early childhood professor repeatedly attacked the idea of “childhood innocence” and claimed that early childhood teachers should introduce children to gender ideology at the youngest ages, Fox News Digital found.

William “Willy” Villalpando works at Santa Ana College in California where he teaches early child development. He also indicated on his Instagram that he is a pre-kindergarten educator.

Pre-k teacher attacks idea of 'childhood innocence,' claims toddlers not too young for 'sexuality' discussion https://t.co/xr9t5DGfkr

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 12, 2023

“There is a common mythology that children live in this world of pure innocence, and that by introducing or exposing them to the real-world adults are somehow shattering this illusion for them. Therefore, there is a banning of topics and issues that children should not be exposed to, as if they are not experiencing them already.”

On another occasion, he said, “I’m tired of the ‘Childhood Innocence’ argument… Stop blaming a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.”

He went on to attack the idea that children shouldn’t be exposed to “sexuality,” claiming that “such a view is a very white, Christian, upper-class, cis-gendered, and hetero-centric.”

Yes, this man teaches others how to do pre-K education. In California, in this case, but he is surely not alone. We have all seen what has been invading our schools, and the establishment wants the gender ideology spread to the youngest children.

It is no accident that Washington D.C. is one of the first in the nation to require the professionalization of child care. That is where the elite–who likely will never send their kids to any of these daycares and opt for a nanny instead–can most easily set the agenda. But it will spread to every corner of the Blue parts of the country.

We are ruled by degenerates. Time to wake up and fight back.