In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in Troxel v Granville, 530 U.S.57, that, "the interest of parents in the care, custody and control of their children—is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests.” An issue playing out in several Southern California school districts puts that principle to the test. While many other issues assuredly deserve our attention, the government’s attempts to disrupt the parent-child relationship is in my view a far more profound and dangerous issue for all of us.1
The issue is whether public schools should be required to inform parents when a student indicates a desire to change the outward manifestations of the student’s sex. That may happen if the student wants to be known by a different gendered name, or chooses a pronoun not consistent with the child’s sex at birth. The premise of the issue is these things happen at school and the parents are unaware of it and, if they do not approve of the child’s choices, then they should be kept in the dark about it.
The controversy has arisen in the Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County and the Murrietta Valley Unified School District in Riverside County where the school boards adopted policies that protect parental rights by requiring them to be notified if their child begins going by a chosen name, preferred pronoun, or wants to use restrooms that align with their “gender identity” instead of their biological sex. And a federal court in San Diego just granted two school teachers in the Escondido Unified School District a preliminary injunction, citing Troxel v Granville, barring the district from imposing discipline for notifying parents of students who want to change their gender.
Governor Gavin Newson is fighting parental rights with taxpayer funds. According to records found by Open the Books, an organization that investigates government conduct by asking where the tax money goes, state contract grants to an organization called Gender Spectrum advance the cause of non-binary sexuality beginning at the kindergarten level.
The organization’s ideology is one of radical liberation from the gender binary, encouraging youth to invent their own genders that parents are urged to “affirm”. And the governor has resorted to pending and threatened litigation against those districts, like Chino, who refuse to go along with the program.
Those who favor keeping such information from the parents call it “outing” the child. In one of many examples of the distortion of language that George Orwell warned us about in his novel, 1984, not too long ago outing used to be a public shaming of private life. Fortunately, we are well past those cramped views of life; today, outing means to inform the parents when everybody at school is well aware of the child’s behavior.
In the Chino suit, California Attorney General Bonta claims the child’s “right to privacy” is more important than the parents’ right to raise their children as they see fit. He claims the child’s parents may oppose the child’s decision, endangering the child who should be protected from his or her parents if that happens. They claim the schools know better than the parents what is in the child’s best interest. It is an unacceptably arrogant usurpation of a parent’s constitutional and moral right to determine the care, custody and control of their children, the oldest of our fundamental liberty interests.
This effort to disrupt the parent child relationship follows hard on the heels of one of the guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement: to disrupt the nuclear family. Its founders were avowed Marxists. And it was Vladimir Lenin who said, “give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” In today’s post-modern language, the nuclear family is seen as a location of male dominated oppression that must be liberated.
The effort to keep those parents who disagree with this new ideology ignorant of what is happening at school is not some alt-right conspiracy theory advanced by Christian ultra-nationalist activists, and it is the subject of disagreement across the nation. One prominent dispute in the Montgomery County School District in Maryland has seen Muslim, Jewish, and Christian parents join forces to resist the indoctrination of their children.
All they want is the right to opt out of gender lessons. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
We don’t allow children to make contracts, drink alcohol, drive, vote, or serve in the military for good reason. They are no more competent to decide to change their gender without their parent’s knowledge. Public schools give the government a captive audience of youth. If the schools are to survive, they should cease attempting to disrupt the parent child relationship and, instead, concentrate on teaching the children reading, writing, maths and critical thinking.
A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Desert Sun newspaper on October 6, 2023. https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/contributors/valley-voice/2023/10/06/schools-should-stop-disrupting-the-parent-child-relationship/70932414007/
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Not sure what “liberty rights” . . . are.