Local and federal officials have used pandemic relief in numerous cases nationwide to generously fund controversial liberal priorities that some people would say have nothing to do with recovery from the coronavirus or preventing an economic disaster, the Washington Examiner reported on Wednesday.
The latest example took place last week, when a school district near Manchester, New Hampshire, used $4,000 in coronavirus relief funding to pay for a Pride event that was scheduled to include drag performances for children, the NH Journal reported.
In Utah, state education officials used pandemic funding to create a video for informing teachers how to introduce "gender play" and explorations of gender identities to their classrooms, according to 2KUTV.
State officials and parents became upset in February when the video's contents and the source of its funding were revealed.
Other schools have spent pandemic funding on building gender-neutral bathrooms to accommodate transgender students, while some schools used the money on the implementation of critical race theory curricula or on having teachers go through progressive "equity" training.
In Oregon, plans for spending the $1 billion it received in pandemic relief funding involved "an equity-informed, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive lens [that] weaves throughout all of the response strategies."
In addition, its guidelines for reopening schools with federal funding included requesting that teachers boost "LGBTQ2SIA+ focused groups," "mitigate risks for immigrant students and families who may be undocumented," and "provide counter narratives to biased representations of race, culture, gender."
The federal government also targeted pandemic relief funds for progressive cultural causes through the National Endowment of the Arts, which offered multiple rounds of grants to help artistic groups keep their doors open during the pandemic after receiving $75 million from the CARES Act and $135 million from the American Rescue Plan Act.
One such example, among many, was that the Center for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Art & Culture, an organization that also goes by Queer Cultural Center, received $150,000 from the American Rescue Plan.