“We’re always there for these kids. These are our kids and we need to make sure that we are lifting them up,” a hyperventilating Sen. Scott Wiener said a few weeks ago inaugurating Pride Month. He was busy conflating school notification policies that keep parents engaged in raising their kids with (as Wiener puts it) “outing gay and lesbian kids.”
“As we fight all the nasty people out there who are trying to harm us – and we’re going to beat them – we’re going to win. Let’s celebrate,” he concluded.
Who are all the “nasty people” he’s fighting?
You: Parents.
Wiener’s hardly alone. California’s ruling class – from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta and state schools chief Tony Thurmond through the state legislature and your unfriendly neighborhood teacher’s union – is an anti-family cabal.
They sincerely believe that parents pose the greatest danger to their own children. If there were enough dollars in the state coffers, they would assign a unionized bureaucrat to monitor and control everything you do around and for your children. Though constrained, they will stop at nothing to take away your rights over your children and, instead, permit the exercise of debauchery upon your child while in school – without your knowledge or consent.
The anti-family cabal pretends to care about your children in townhalls and campaign mailers while defaming you in legislative hearings when they think you aren’t paying attention.
Listen to Aurora Regino and Erin Friday – two women, both Democrats who never believed that their own party would come after their children with such viciousness – testify against the defining bill of our time, Assembly Bill 1955 by Asm. Chris Ward of San Diego County.
Last year, Gov. Gavin “whether-you-like-it-or-not” Newsom signed into law AB 1078 stripping authority from parents and local school boards to remove hyper-sexual and obscene books in schools.
He also signed AB 665 allowing a child under 18 to leave home and put themselves into a state-run residential shelter if their parents refuse to “affirm” their gender transition with the help of a school counselor or state-sanctioned activist.
Now, AB 1955 sits on his desk.
There are two bizarre assumptions in the bill – parents are uniquely dangerous to their own children, and government workers are invariably better positioned than parents to deal with the difficulties of adolescence. Contrary to the bill’s assertion, children do not have a right to privacy that transcends their parents’ well-established constitutional rights to care for them.
Public schools are meant to support – not subvert – parents in their efforts to educate their children.
To be clear, none of the parental notification policies adopted by California school districts require a teacher or administrator to tell a parent if their child is gay. They only require parental notification if a child affirmatively asks a teacher or administrator to change their name or pronouns in class (usually to a different gender), at school or on official or unofficial records.
AB 1955, on the other hand, instructs teachers and administrators to keep such a change secret from parents. In other words, the whole school and all of your child’s peers know your child by one name and gender, but you – the parent – are intentionally kept out of the loop.
Teaching kids to lie to their parents while encouraging them to discuss sexuality with teachers and school administrators opens the door to exploitation by sexual predators. Last year, plaintiff’s attorney John Manly, who successfully represented abused children in some of the nation’s highest profile cases, said:
“You’re telling kids to keep sexual secrets, including gender issues, from their parents. It’s a bad idea. I’m telling you, sending that message to kids is a very, very bad idea. I can’t tell you how many more cases there will be where adults are telling children – their victims – ‘This is our secret.’”
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Yes, bad parents exist. No sane advocate would excuse child abuse or neglect. But the law already provides remedies for their incompetence or evil. The legislature should not impugn the many because of the dangerous few. They are in no position to cast judgment.
So why do our legislators have a predilection for sponsoring legislation that protects predators, not parents? It won’t be long before parents are blackballed from every conversation involving their children.
In Plato’s Republic, there’s a serious discussion about who should govern us and how they should be chosen. It’s an enduring debate that bears paraphrasing.
“The punishment of parents who refuse to take part in the government is to live under a government of family assassins.”
It’s time for more action and less apathy, to take your kids back from the cabal. Parents need to roundly repudiate the bill’s proponents and set a curfew for these reckless politicians: the general election in November seems reasonable.
Get out and vote as if the lives of your children depend on it…because they do.
Lance Christensen is vice president at California Policy Center.