Parent’s Rights

The War on Children is real and intensifying. We can interconnect many culture war fronts with the War on Children. Undermining parental rights, the LGBTQ agenda including grooming and transgender activism; education wars, including Critical Race Theory, the false history of the 1619 Project, woke and leftist teachers; and the sexualization of our children, including pedophilia.

The first post in this series I looked at the history of the war on children, defined it and the objectives of this attack on our children, identified the aggressors, and introduced the battlefronts in this war.

In the most recent post in this series, we considered how the war on children is being waged in education, primarily in our public schools.

In this post, we will look at how parental rights are under increasing attack from public school indoctrination, state, local and the federal governments. While the government has a role to play when children are not properly cared for, the government or the schools should never replace parents.

Given that the destruction of the family is central to the Marxist agenda, now adapted by the radical left in our nation. It is no surprise that undermining the role of parents is one of their priorities.

Parental Rights—The Source 

From the time God created the family of Adam and Eve, parents have the responsibility of raising and nurturing their children. With this responsibility, God gave them certain rights as parents.

First, parents have a fundamental right to determine how their children will be raised and educated. While many people, including coaches, teachers, pastors, and other family members, influence our children, parents have the deepest and most enduring influence.

Second, this means parents have the right and responsibility to teach children the ways of God and how to live God—pleasing lives.

Third, the Bible has much to say about the relationship between parents and children. Here are some examples.

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. (Psalm 127:3–5)

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Eph 6.4).

 Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged (Col 3:20–21).

Parental Rights Defined Today 

 Parental rights are the inherent rights of parents to decide and take actions on behalf of their children. These rights include deciding for their children regarding education, religious instruction, and medical care and treatment. With parental rights comes parental responsibility to protect and insure the well-being of their children.

Parental Rights—The Christian Perspective 

The Family Research Council (FRC) provides several resources on parental rights and how they are being assaulted today. The following excerpts are from FRC materials.

Family Research Council affirms that children belong first to their parents and families, not to their communities or governments. The primary responsibility and authority over a child’s moral upbringing, discipline, education, and health care lies with the child’s parent or guardian. Government should minimize its interference with the exercise of parental authority, except in cases of demonstrable abuse or neglect.

 

We believe that parents have the fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their own children. Parental rights are fundamental to the family and a healthy culture. If no child is to be left behind, then no parent should be left out. The first step in recognizing parental rights is respecting and supporting their rightful role and their fundamental rights.

 

Parents’ fundamental rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children have been repeatedly recognized and protected by the United States Supreme Court. When creating the U.S. Department of Education, the United States Congress enacted statutory law that states “parents have the primary responsibility for the education of their children,” and that “states, localities, and private institutions have the primary responsibility for supporting that parental role.

 

Parents are the best protectors of children and have the natural right and duty to care for their children. We seek to protect governmental encroachment on parental authority. We oppose the evolution of children’s “rights,” which undermine parental rights and allow outsiders to usurp the natural and constitutional rights of parents. Children are naturally incapable of exercising self-government until reaching the age of majority.

Why are the Woke and Radical Left (including the Biden Administration) Working to Diminish Parental Rights?

Given the long-standing interest that radical political traditions have in undermining or even abolishing the family, the nature of modern sex/gender education makes it a first-class means by which the natural relationships of the family can be challenged, weakened, and ultimately dissolved. Historically, sexual codes are closely connected to how the concept of family is understood. Demolish them, as any Marcusan revolutionary or cyborg feminist will tell you, and you can truly revolutionize the world. And revolutions rarely, if ever, come without warfare and bloodshed.

What are the goals of the radical left (those who want to remake Western Culture in the image of Marxist Socialism) regarding our children?

• Remove or at least distance them from the influence of parents, family, and church.
• Conform them to radical, socialist, and Marxist thinking.
• Mold them in the image of the radical elite of our culture.
• Force them to violate conservative and religious principles to conform to the “world.”
• Create future supporters and even leaders of a Marxist World Government.
• To reach their goals, the radical left needs to bypass parents.

 An Example of How Parental Rights are Being Trampled in Our Public Schools 

The following excerpts are from The Battle for Our Children and Their Minds by Janet Levy in The American Thinker, August 15, 2022.

In late June 2021, a video went viral of a father being tackled and dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia by burly cops, his t-shirt torn, his hands cuffed, his mouth apparently bleeding. Scott Smith, 48, had committed the heinous crime of protesting the board’s woke policy of gender-fluid bathrooms because his daughter was sexually assaulted in one, at Stone Bridge High School, by a boy who “sometimes wears a skirt.”

 

The sexual assault was later confirmed, and the assailant arrested. He was also charged with one more sex crime at another school and is now at a juvenile detention center. But during the meeting, woke board members and some parents just wouldn’t let Smith speak. Board members said they knew of no assaults in trans-friendly bathrooms and that the “predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.” For losing his cool at this blatant denial, the cops, says Smith, swooped on him like a “SWAT team.”

 

Smith now stands vindicated and is suing the school district. The media and reasonable people are hearing him out and criticizing the board’s cover-up in pursuit of a political agenda. Smith’s story stands out starkly, for it shows how leftist woke ideas are being quietly but relentlessly injected into schools and how those who oppose them risk being silenced, canceled, or treated like terrorists.

Educators against Parental Rights  

Soon after Florida and Texas took actions to support parent’s rights to have a say in the education of their children, the American Federation of Teachers (second largest teachers union in the United States) took to the offensive.

Responding to the parental rights bills enacted by both states, union president Randi Weingarten likened encouraging parents to get involved with how their kids are taught are the way “wars start.”

In response to Weingarten’s comments, theologian and historian Carl Trueman observed:

Actually, no, it isn’t. No war has ever started because parents did not want their kindergarten children taught about sex, let alone the weird and not so wonderful rainbow of sexual acts and incoherent gender identities now becoming a standard part of our cultural toolkit. As such, it might be easy to dismiss Weingarten’s asinine comment as a sad sign of the times concerning the language of public discourse and the sloppy thinking of our leadership class.

In the same article, Trueman continues to assert the “state has no right to oppose or present itself as an equal—or even a superior—to the family and its network of relationships.”

The state, teachers, school boards and leftist do-gooders cannot replace parents.

Why Woke Educators Believe They Have the Right and Responsibility to Bypass Parents 

In researching her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier spoke with school administrators and activists educators and found a pervasive attitude of condescension toward parents. These educators believe they understand children and are certain that parents do not. They believe they have the responsibility to impose their values on our children.

Reflecting on Shrier’s findings, William Kirkpatrick adds:

Many educators are, in effect, indoctrinating children to reject their parents’ beliefs about sex and sexual identity. But they don’t look upon it as indoctrination. Rather, they believe they are simply helping the child to draw out his or her potentials.

The Anti-Parent Biden Administration 

Writing in National Review, Jack Wolfsohn writes, “The Biden administration has been so busy trying to placate the far Left and cater to every intersectional interest group that it has blatantly ignored the interests of parents along the way.”

(You may not be able to access this article without a subscription, so I will summarize the key points.)

First, the day after the Supreme Court struck down Roe V. Wade with the Dobbs decision, the “Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release recommending a website called AbortionFinder.org that helps women and, importantly, girls find abortion providers. . . . The Biden administration is thus endorsing a website that seeks to ensure that girls younger than 18 can get an abortion without consulting their parents first. No matter what a parent’s stance on abortion is, most would want to be informed and involved if their daughters were making such a life-changing decision.”

Second, through Dr. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services, the Biden Administration continues to push the transgender agenda by “encouraging the use of puberty blockers and gender-reassignment surgery for young people who are questioning their gender identity.”

Third, “Attorney General Merrick Garland notoriously directed the FBI to investigate parents attending school-board meetings whom the National School Boards Association likened to domestic terrorists.”

Fourth, “The administration also flouted parents’ concerns when it continued to support masking kids in schools despite the minimal risk Covid posed to children and evidence suggesting masking harmed learning and social-development processes.”

Wolfsohn’s conclusion is spot-on, and we cannot ignore if we care about our children.

The Biden administration has made clear that it is heavily influenced by lobbying from left-wing activist groups and that it will put the progressive agenda ahead of policies supported by parents. This seems to be an obvious political miscalculation. If parents continue to see this administration catering to far-left interest groups, often to the detriment of their own children, they will find it difficult to vote for Biden’s party this fall, or in 2024.

More from the Biden Administration—Title IX Regulations and Parental Rights 

Title IX ensures and protects access for women and girls in education, including athletics.

Enter the transgenderified Biden administration’s proposed 700 pages of new rules that redefine sex to include gender identity, ignoring the biological reality of sex.

Not only will these rules limit our daughters’ opportunities to participate in sports and lead to dangerous violations of their privacy, but they will erase parental rights and free speech in favor of state-centered authority.

Biden’s Woeful Attempt to Reach Out to Parents

When Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona announced the new “National Parents and Family Engagement Council” skepticism was the immediate reaction given the Biden administration’s anti-parent bias (see above).

Conservatives are skeptical because of the past history of Biden officials, including Secretary Cardona, targeting parents who expressed criticism of COVID policies, curriculum and book choices, and transgender bathroom rules. Cardona coordinated with several National School Boards Association (NSBA) leaders to draft a policy that likened education activists to domestic terrorists.

Unsurprisingly, those who will sit on the Council are not known to be parent-friendly.

“The best (funniest?) thing about this ‘parents council’ is that it includes people who publicly defended the letter that called parents ‘domestic terrorists’ and were vicious towards those who publicly called the letter out,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education (PDE), tweeted on Tuesday. She did not respond to a Twitter message on Wednesday.

 

“This is too little too late from this Administration, which has made abundantly clear through its actions that it views actual parental input as an inconvenience,” Nicole Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education, told The National Desk. “I would have hoped the Biden Administration would realize the importance of bringing many perspectives to the table—but I am not surprised that other voices are not welcome.”

The Rubber Meets the Road—The Ultimate Attack on Parental Rights

The left-leaning California legislature passed and woke Governor Gavin Newsom signed the most egregious attack on parental rights yet seen in the United States.

This bill will allow courts in California to take custody of minors from other states who come to California to gender transition surgeries and hormone treatments. And it doesn’t matter what the wishes of the minor’s parents.

How, more blatantly, can the state usurp parental rights?

There is Hope

We can fight back against the woke elites. We will address this in more detail in a future post, but here is an example of what we can do. Click to read the article.

Florida’s Parents Re-Take Their School Boards 

In the next post in this series, we will look at the woke sexualization of our children. Perhaps the most troubling front in the war on children.

Related Reading: 

Teachers’ Union Resorts to Smear Tactics in Ad to Demonize Parents Who Object to LGBT Agenda

WaPo Shames Parents Seeking Help For Gender-Confused Child Washington Post – even the liberal press is involved.

Teachers’ Union Creates Badges to Identify LGBT-friendly Educators, Website to Promote ‘Sex Acts’

Virginia Orders Schools to Stop Hiding Trans Students’ Health Information From Their Parents

Public School Indoctrination Is Out of Control. The Parents Bill of Rights Would Start Fixing That.

Biden’s New Title IX Proposals Will Codify the Gender Derangement of the Left

Newsom Signs Bill That Removes Children from Parents Who Oppose Transgender Treatments

 

Please comment and let me know what you think about the War on Children.

³ For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. ⁴ For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. ⁵ We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3–5 ESV).

 

Featured Photo by Emma Bauso