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.