Household Tyrants
To empower parents, Florida Republicans would put children in danger. If passed, their Parental Rights in Education legislation, known more commonly as the “don’t say gay” bills, would prevent public-school districts from “encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,” CBS News reports. A proposed amendment would have required educators to report a child’s disclosure about their gender identity or sexual orientation to parents within six weeks.
Republicans haven’t been shy about their rationale. The text of the bills says they allegedly “reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children.” Last year, Senator Josh Hawley introduced a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights, which would include the right to review curricula and to visit children during school hours. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott announced his own Parental Bill of Rights last month. “Parents will be restored to their rightful place as the preeminent decision-maker for their children,” he said at a campaign event held, fittingly, at a charter school. On Wednesday, Abbott told Texas state agencies to investigate reports of gender-affirming care for transgender children.
Parents don’t lack rights in the U.S. They already enjoy the wide freedom to educate their children as they wish, including at home or in private schools. They can raise their children to be Christians or witches or both; the state does not interfere. Liberals are generally satisfied with this state of affairs: There is no appetite to prohibit parents from raising their children in even the most hate-filled churches. Yet the right behaves as if parental rights were under sustained and serious attack, as if the parent has been dislodged from a high place and, as Abbott said, should be restored. The GOP’s position on parental rights isn’t entirely coherent. Any attempt to ban gender-confirming therapy for transgender children theoretically infringes on the rights of the parent, but this hasn’t dissuaded the party from its attacks on trans rights. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton had previously issued an opinion defining gender-affirming care as ‘child abuse.’ Trans children and their families must now fear the long arm of the state, which will reach into their most private and personal affairs
The right’s real ambition isn’t restoration, though, but expansion; they want to create new rights on top of the privileges parents already enjoy. In the party’s view, parental rights both supersede and exist in conflict with the rights of the child. The right insists that what’s good for parents is good for kids. This is not necessarily the truth, as any queer person can say in return. The idea that children are already people, with thoughts and needs independent of their parents, never factors into the party’s position at all. The parental-rights movement isn’t new. As journalist Kathryn Joyce has observed, the concept is associated historically with some Christian homeschool activists, who lobbied for a constitutional amendment that would enshrine the right of a parent to teach their children at home. The language might sound familiar. “The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children is a fundamental right,” it states. But why parental rights, and why now?
Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/02/republican-parental-rights-push-harms-kids.html
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