It felt surprisingly cloak-and-dagger, as if I had wandered into the secret war room where the top brass was formulating the plan of attack in a righteous holy war — and was allowed to stay.
The Tustin-based California Policy Center’s “Parental Rights Virtual Open House” last month was a how-to pep rally on precisely how parents can bypass hopelessly liberal lawmakers in Sacramento (“useful fools”) and seize control of the levers of government.
“OK, let’s take it to the local school boards because they can’t stop us there,” said Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Corona, whose bill (seeking to require school districts to notify parents if their child changes pronouns or seeks to play on sports teams misaligned with their biological gender) ignited a firestorm.
The bill was crushed, but courage is contagious, Essayli said. Parents’ rights warriors pivoted to Plan B, encouraging local school boards to step up and embrace policies the legislature refuses to consider. The latest iteration comes to Orange Unified on Thursday, Sept. 7, but it has also played out to dramatic effect in Murrieta Valley and Chino Valley, and percolates up and down the state.
“You see that spreading now,” Essayli said. “What’s the other side doing about it? Nothing. They can’t do anything about it. They can’t sue — there’s no law (the school boards) are violating. The attorney general, all he can do is saber-rattle and send nasty-grams….
“The left wants you to think you’re powerless. ‘Don’t even try. Don’t even vote. It doesn’t matter,’” he continued. “School board races, a lot of them are won by like a dozen votes or so. Every vote matters. Get involved. Seize control, and that way we can push back on this woke agenda.”
(It’s worth noting here that the attorney general actually sued the Chino Valley school board, arguing its policy endangers LGBTQ+ kids who haven’t told their parents for a reason, and the San Bernardino Superior Court issued a temporary restraining order on Wednesday, Sept. 6. That will halt the policy while the matter is before the court.)
‘Perversion’
The parental notification policy was enthusiastically championed at Chino Valley Unified by board President Sonja Shaw, who urged parents to actively engage with officials and push them to vote on these issues to put “bad votes” on the record.
“That helps you get to the goal of making sure your next elected officials support parental rights, and stopping the perversion of children,” she said.
Greg Abdouch, founder of Not on Our Watch, evoked the Pilgrims. “We’re developing an organization that has God first,” he said. “We came here because we wanted religious freedom. We came here because we wanted to serve God. We’ve lost sight of that. And so we are focusing heavily on that.”
And so it went. Now, like-minded folks banding together to ensure their voices are heard, and that the government works for them rather than the other way around, is exactly how democracy is supposed to work. So why did many of the speakers at this open house make me feel ill-at-ease?
The givens many of them took for granted — that the people in power who don’t agree with them were not only fools and useful idiots, but sometimes actual purveyors of evil seeking to “pervert” children — was disturbing.
Hey. I’m the mother of two girls. They’ve always been in public schools. I’ve been on PTAs. I’ve volunteered in classrooms. If my 12-year-old was struggling with gender identity, I’d hope against hope she’d feel comfortable talking to me about it. I’m on her team and always will be, no matter what.
But if she didn’t tell me first — if she was frightened of my reaction, if she confided in a teacher or counselor instead — would I want to know?
Yes. Yes, of course, I would. My child is safe with me.
But what about kids whose parents are the evil ones? I think of Gabriel Fernandez, the 8-year-old from Palmdale who was tortured and murdered by his mom’s boyfriend, who suspected him of being gay.
I’ll venture to guess that parents as heinous as Gabriel’s are about as common as teachers who “pervert” children. Creeps lurk in every walk of life, certainly, and schools are no exception — but, after reporting on child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts of America, the conviction that public schools are uniquely prolific incubators of evil seems, at best, misguided.
A child in my daughter’s kindergarten class had decided to become a girl before fifth grade. The child’s parents were fully invested, fully aware and fully supportive. Some of us were surprised, but the kids — honestly, they didn’t seem to care a whit.
Every generation seems to grow more tolerant of those who march to that different drummer. Tolerance seems to be the virtue our public schools are stressing. Some fuzzy line between tolerance, and enabling without a parent’s knowledge or consent, appears to be the fault line here.
“There’s a lot of parents who just feel like they’re stuck,” said Lance Christiansen, CPC’s vice president for education policy and host of the online event. “They really want to help their child, they want to be there for them, but they also know that the child’s brain and emotions — it’s going to take a decade or so for them to come to a place where they really understand what’s happening.”
He counseled parents with kids facing identity trauma to “be there, be firm and empathetic, and work through these issues.”
‘Weirdly arrogant’
The California Policy Center offers a handbook and training videos teaching parents how to run for office. It coaches newly elected officials on sticking to small-government principles and avoiding being seduced by big government. It recently launched a “Parents Rights Pledge” — “I recognize that when a child is born, the family is the primary and responsible governing body for that child” — and it wants every candidate and elected official to sign.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. He’s an enormously talented writer and erstwhile editor of the tragically defunct OC Weekly, which kicked some serious official booty on Swaim’s watch. (We offer up Swaim as proof that all journalists don’t actually hide Marx and Lenin texts under their pillows, though he did suffer delusions about all that and is trying to make up for it, he said.)
Honestly, said I. Fewer than 1% of public school kids in California identify as transgender, according to data from the California Department of Education. Is this really a thing?
Just the other day, Swaim said, he spoke to a mom on the Central Coast whose 13-year-old is struggling with gender identity. The child had changed her name at school. When a teacher offered to take the child to a doctor to discuss hormone blockers, the child decided to confide in her mom.
That’s where the blood starts to boil.
“The thing infuriating to parents is that this information is being deliberately hidden from them, the idea that it’s OK to lie to your parents about this,” said Swaim, suddenly animated despite a case of COVID.
“You don’t have a conversation like that with my kids without my permission. My kids couldn’t get an aspirin from the school nurse without permission — yet this (expletive) happens all the time. So routinely that I’m shocked by the regularity. So I think that accounts for some of the radiation you hear in these conversations.”
Reasonable people can disagree on gender issues, he said, but the intrusion of the state into the parent-child relationship, asserting that it knows how to parent better than the parent does, is an outrage beyond.
“I may not like the way you’re raising your children, but barring abuse, that’s your right,” he said. “What makes these teachers think that they’re somehow in a better position to determine what’s good for a child than their parents are? If they think a child is likely to be harmed by a parent, they have recourse. They are mandated reporters. Call the police.
“I just don’t understand the default to ‘government,’” he continued. “This is the libertarian thing in me. Why are human beings so flawed they can’t be trusted with their own children, but the government is somehow different? It’s weirdly arrogant at best, and I’ll use the word evil at some level, where parents can’t be trusted but teachers can.”
Swaim and Co. helped create the policy that will go to Orange Unified on Thursday. It doesn’t stop parents from celebrating their child’s identity, it doesn’t force them to adhere to the gender of their birth — it simply requires parents to be told what’s going on, he said.
“Be a partner. Don’t try to supplant parents. Assume best intentions from all parties first. Isn’t that the core of all political trauma, the built-in assumption the other side is vile?” he said.
The Orange Unified board may be leery given the San Bernardino court’s suspension of the notification policy, but Swam isn’t much worried.
“The attorney general smuggled in the idea that children have a right to privacy that supersedes the right of parents to know what their children are doing,” said Swaim. “It’s garbage.”
Source: Orange County Register
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