National
Review Online
Monday,
March 27, 2023
Last week,
Republicans in Congress passed the Parents Bill of Rights, 213–208.
Critics will dismiss it as a messaging bill, but the message it sends about
Democrats’ priorities is unsettling in the extreme.
Consider:
The bill requires schools in receipt of federal funding to publish their
curricula and to provide parents with a list of books and materials accessible
at the school library. It also contains provisions that require schools to
notify parents of any planned elimination of gifted-and-talented programs, to
alert parents to any violent activity that took place at school, to provide
parents a forum to speak at school-board meetings, and to offer two in-person
meetings between parents and teachers in each school year. It requires parental
consent for any medical exams or mental-health and substance-use screenings.
Crucially, it establishes for parents “the right to know if a school employee
or contractor acts to . . . change a minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or
preferred name; or . . . allow a child to change the child’s sex-based
accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms.”
As you
can guess, each one of these provisions relates to the rash of controversies
swirling around public schools in the news the past few years, including the
introduction of critical race theory and sexually explicit material for young
readers and the treacherous subterfuge of school districts’ making major
psychological-health decisions for students while deliberately keeping parents
in the dark.
There is
legitimate debate about whether the federal government ought to assert itself
this way upon locally controlled school districts. But that was not the
substance of objections from Democrats.
Progressives
tended toward hysterical fictions. “Extreme MAGA Republicans don’t want the
children of America to learn about the Holocaust,” alleged Hakeem Jeffries,
absent any evidence.
Or they
outright took the side of the state usurping the proper role of parents. “This
Republican bill is asking the government to force the outing of LGBT people
before they are ready,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on the
House floor. “When we talk about progressive values, I can say what my progressive
value is, and that is freedom over fascism.”
Here we
must reassert a truth so primordial it predates conservatism as a political
philosophy: Parents are the primary educators of their children. Taxes are
raised (or fees collected) and schools are established only to assist them in
this task, not to take it over. Civilized nations deprive parents of this role
or limit it only when there is established criminal neglect.
Democrats,
by their universal opposition to this bill in the House, in the Senate, and
from the White House, are the ones sending a message. They are the party that
wants to treat normal parental oversight and curiosity as a conspiracy against
the state, as presumptively seditious, and as dangerous for children. It is the
most noxious Marxist conviction that the American Left cannot shake: that
normal family life itself ideologically deforms children, and that only the
strong checking and supervisory role of the state can save them from the
baleful influence of Mommy and Daddy.
Luckily,
even most parents who think of themselves as progressives reject the Democrats’
view. Every Republican candidate should loudly and joyfully campaign against
this radicalism.
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