California’s bills ensure Pride marches continue beyond June.

The Ongoing Battle for Parental Rights in California

The infernal provocation that is Pride Month might be over, but the marches continue through the legislature in California. They are here, they are queer, and they are coming for your children — legally.

Multiple bills at various stages in the California legislative process proclaim who ultimately has authority of your kids, and it’s not you. Some have understandably garnered much media attention, but SB 407 is working its way through the Assembly without much fanfare or discussion.

SB 407 would require all potential foster families to demonstrate their capacity and willingness to facilitate pharmaceutical and surgical interventions for “gender-expansive” children. Even if the child seems to give no indication of such inclinations at the time, the resource family must be assessed with the understanding that need for such care could arise at any stage of development.

Sen. Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) in introducing the bill, claimed it would protect children from being placed in “hostile foster homes.” Hostile homes are the homes of any foster families who are unwilling to commit to actively supporting gender transition interventions for minors. SB 407 effectively institutionalizes a prohibition against orthodox Christians as well as other religious believers.

It also effectively prohibits secular foster parents who think it unwise to allow the mutilation of perfectly healthy body parts on minors. Religious revelation is not required to recognize the reality at hand. Minors in the foster system are, by definition, in crisis. Times of crisis are inopportune times to make permanent, grave decisions especially when the decision-maker has not yet developed his full-frontal cortex. According to SB407, this entirely reasonable perspective should be redefined as a hostile one.

Current and historic data give us insight into the demographics of those most prone to foster non-related babies and minors. Barna Group’s research shows that Christians engage in adoption, foster care, and other ways of aiding vulnerable children more than the average. “Practicing Christians (5%) are more than twice as likely to adopt than the general population (2%). Catholics are three times as likely. And evangelicals are five times as likely to adopt as the average adult.” Practicing Christians are also nearly three times more likely to have seriously considered foster care, and 65% of non-kin foster parents attend religious services weekly — compared to 39% for the general population.

This is unsurprising given the Christian mandate to care for the widow and the orphan. My experience with friends who foster supports the data; devoutly religious people who foster largely do so out of a sense of calling and compassion, animated by a heroic willingness to act. I spoke with a mother of seven, and sometime foster mom, Amina Bancroft, who commented “The primary role of a foster family is to provide a temporary safe place for a child whose previous environment was unfit, dangerous, and consequently at-risk for a poor outcome.” This bill inevitably affects her possibilities at fostering again. “In what should be interim care, ideally focused on love and nurturing, we are now up against a state focused on forcing decisions that would cause irreversible damage to youth who are already up against so much.”

In any just world such families willing to stretch themselves to help kids would be sought after, not precluded from the foster system. However, the only families fit to foster, according to the supporters of this bill, are those who give full assent to the most radical tenets of gender theory. What is obvious to most everyone (except the bill’s authors) is that such ideological assent signals a willingness to reject sexual boundaries. It is that rejection that makes sexual chaos far more likely in the home, not less. Is that the goal? If minors can consent to invasive transitioning interventions, what can they not consent to?

There is also the reality that SB407 is hardly the only bill in California attacking parental rights.

SB 107, passed and was signed into law in September of last year, allowing minors to be brought to the Golden State against the will of a parent if it is for the sake of seeking gender transitioning.

In-state parents are not really calling any shots either, according to AB 957 which puts parental custody in jeopardy absent the guardian’s support of their child’s “gender identity.” Absent full support, which is not defined in the bill, a parent can be charged by a court with child abuse. The age at which the child’s desires to begin transitioning must be accommodated is not mentioned, but the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City) used an example of a seven-year old in arguing the merits of this bill.

Whose Kids Anyway?

At a recent speaking event I attended for the Awake Americans launch, some protestors carried a sign that read, “We don’t co-parent with hate groups.” Bemused, a few of us commented that obviously we don’t want them to co-parent with us either, so…no problem. But their meaning was more sinister. It was not that they would not co-parent our kids with us, it was that we are unfit to co-parent our own kids with them. They see our kids as theirs to parent and ours to lose.

Biden said as much out loud recently, “There’s no such things as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.” There’s no such thing as someone else’s child. In no situation do normal people act as though that were true. I do not decide when to speak to other people’s children about sex, nor take them home with me at will. I don’t even know their food allergies much less make pivotal decisions for them. Someone could dismiss Biden’s words as an empty platitude or incoherent ramblings except that they reflect a real perspective that is incrementally creeping into policy.

Another video widely circulated recently of Pride marchers in New York City chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.” Amidst the fallout, NBC rushed to reassure their audience that activists have been chanting as much for years and that it is one of many provocative expressions used to “regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people.”

In other words, it’s not that we’re not coming for your children; we’re just making fun of how you think we are coming for them.

This is a classic example of what Michael Anton coined the “celebration parallax. “It’s not happening and it’s good that it is.” A thing is happening or not happening based on whether the person acknowledging it is an ally or not. In other words: listen, paranoid parents, we are not coming after your children! But hey allies, here we are doing just that. Genital surgery on minors is a far-right conspiracy! But obviously, we are doing them and isn’t it brave?

Targeting children furthers the cultural revolution in two ways: it undermines the authority of parents in favor of the state, and it creates a generation of wounded and enraged foot soldiers who will support progressive power and the pharmaceutical industry.

What happens in California won’t stay in California. If left unchallenged its long march will twerk its way well past this state’s borders, and we will all look back fondly to when the marches were limited to the month of June.

Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology and co-author of the Theology of Home series. She is an editor at TheologyofHome.com and a wife and mother of six children.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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