NEW YORK – Open your eyes, America! The teachers unions don’t give one damn about the safety of your children, and the sooner we accept that hard fact, the safer the kids will be.

On the one hand, we finally have visible people in our society – like U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey and former CNN journalist Campbell Brown – standing up and demanding that action be taken to address the alarming epidemic of teachers sexually abusing K-12 students.

It’s about time. This horrific and widespread nightmare has been swept under too many rugs for far too long.

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But now we learn that teacher union leaders, who constantly profess their love and concern for our nation’s children, have successfully pressured the Discovery Channel into cancelling “Bad Teacher,” a series based on actual investigations of teachers molesting students.

They have killed a television show that could have educated more Americans about a long-ignored problem that easily rivals the molestation crisis in the Roman Catholic Church.

They have killed a show that could have resulted in fewer teachers raping kids.

Why would they do such a thing?

Do union leaders want to keep everyone ignorant so their members can keep molesting?

Or are they understandably concerned that any sort of serious investigation of this crisis will reveal that the unions have done a great deal over the years to protect pedophile teachers, by helping them avoid legal difficulties and/or secure employment in other schools?

The nation should already be outraged by the union obstruction of federal legislation that would require all schools to do legal background checks on all prospective employees, and refrain from hiring people convicted of certain crimes – like child molestation, for instance.

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The unions say they object to the bill because it would have an unequal impact on minority teachers. What a lame excuse to shoot down a bipartisan effort to protect students.

And now we have the union’s successful effort to bully the Discovery Channel, which canceled “Bad Teacher” after airing only one episode.

“We appreciate the support of the educational community for bringing (objections) to our attention and we are pleased to share that Discovery Communications has decided to immediately cancel this program,” Steve Dembo, a network spokesman, was quoted as saying by the Washington Examiner.

Rhonda Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, could barely contain her glee at the announcement.

“I was surprised to learn, through a barrage of tweets Sunday night after ‘Bad Teacher’ aired, that Discovery would use its brand to promote such an offensive program,” Weingarten said in a prepared statement. “However, I am heartened that it has taken steps to cancel the show and publicly affirm that Discovery Education’s mission is to celebrate and support teachers.”

We doubt very much that’s the case. It’s far more likely, as the Washington Examiner put it, that “the network presumably feared that a backlash from the unions would hurt sales of the many educational products that it provides to schools.”

As always, it comes down to dollars and cents.

It’s ironic that Weingarten called the television show “offensive.” In a way she’s right. The subject matter of the show is highly offensive to all decent human beings.

But sometimes it’s necessary to publicly address very offensive problems, so we can gain the collective awareness necessary to eliminate them.

You know what’s really offensive, Ms. Weingarten?

The teacher in Florida who expressed her desire to sleep with a 14-year-old boy, lost her job because of it, then found a job at a nearby school and became pregnant with the child of a 17-year-old boy.

Or how about the Las Cruces school district in New Mexico, where three teachers have been arrested for sexually assaulting students in just over a year?

Then there’s the teacher in Florida who is accused of repeatedly following a six-year-old student into the restroom and touching her inappropriately.

Or how about the Delaware teacher who was arrested for allegedly performing oral sex on a high school boy while another student stood watch?

Those are just stories EAGnews has reported in the past two weeks. There are hundreds of cases just like those currently pending across the nation. And there are obviously thousands of situations like this that never get reported.

On April 16, Sen. Toomey, the sponsor of the bill that would require background checks on school employees, told the media that 130 teachers around the nation had been arrested since Jan. 1 for sexually abusing students. He begged the media and the public to help him and his colleagues address the situation.

But how can people get on board when they remain ignorant of the problem? And how will they learn more when the mainstream media continues to purposefully ignore the epidemic (there are no priests to make fun of in this story), and the unions bully a television network that had the courage to address it?

There are powerful forces in this nation working to keep teacher sex crimes out of the headlines as much as possible, even if that means more kids will be hurt.

Are we going to let them get away with it?