There’s a bill on Gavin Newsom’s desk right now that would not only invalidate the First Amendment, but also strip parents of their most basic rights and responsibilities toward their children. The question is not if California’s far-left governor will sign it, but when.
The bill, the Transgender, Gender-Diverse, and Intersex Youth Empowerment Act (AB 957), which passed the Senate last week and then, on a party-line vote, the Assembly, requires courts to “affirm gender.” child custody disputes must be taken into account. The soon-to-be-enacted law states that courts must consider “a parent’s confirmation of the child’s gender identity or expression” when determining the “health, safety and welfare of the child.”
While some Democratic apologists in the media claim that it is absurd to believe that conservative parents would ever lose custody of their children because they hold conservative values, that does not mean that judges side with loving, accepting parents must, you are hateful Rubi! – We know how this will turn out. It’s California crying out loud.
But we don’t need to extrapolate much. Other media outlets have dropped the façade and told us exactly where this bill will lead. Here is CNBC:
Under the proposed law, parents who do not acknowledge and support their child’s gender transition could face potential consequences, including loss of custody to another parent or even the state itself. Proponents of the bill argue that it is in the best interests of children and aims to create a more inclusive and positive environment for gender diverse youth.
The quiet part is said out loud: A mother or father who chooses not to grant their child mental illness, who uses the child’s first name, prohibits the use of puberty blockers, or advises against sterilizing hormones or surgery, could not only harm the child to them losing the other parent, which is outrageous enough – but to the state.
As Sarah Parshall Perry, senior counsel at the Heritage Foundation, pointed out, this law would undermine the Constitution’s guarantees of free speech and free exercise of religion. It would “muzzle” parents and prevent them from raising their children in accordance with their deeply held beliefs – beliefs, incidentally, that until about 2000 were held by both Christians and non-Christians as fundamental natural laws and fundamentals civil society were viewed five minutes ago.
But this is more than a legal dilemma for constitutional scholars and gender studies fooling around in mahogany rooms and shabby amici. If it feels more nefarious and personal, that’s because it is. We’ve seen it before.
It’s classic Democratic emotional blackmail. It is the left that wages psychological war against its ideological opponents with thinly veiled threats. Oh, you want to see your own child? Well that’s interesting because Xir needs some hormones that Xe says you won’t provide. They don’t seem too worried about Xir’s health and safety.
This form of emotional blackmail has already been tested and perfected with the suicide card. That is, the aforementioned gender studies “experts,” medical professionals, journalists, and other “Very Smart People™” have decided, based on little to no evidence, that medical intervention on transgender people is the only acceptable course of action for confused children. In fact, anything short of full “confirmation” is fatal, they say.
With that conclusion in mind — and at the expense of mounting evidence that pro-trans policies cause the most harm — they have developed “research” that Democrats then portray as unassailable. The methodology of these biased studies is extremely problematic. Pro-trans ideologues commonly equate correlation with causation, fail to treat gender dysphoria as a mental illness and ignore underlying mental health issues such as depression, neglect the possible role of false sex hormones in unhealthy beliefs, and ignore hard facts about the way puberty ultimately progresses solves almost every dysphoria in minors, ignores widespread social factors and turns a blind eye to the growing chorus of defectors who have fallen for left-wing lies and are now filled with despair.
[READ: Telling Kids To Hate Their Biology Might Be What’s Actually Killing Them]
But never let bad science get in the way of an agenda. Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?, they manipulate. A lack of acceptance has driven up suicide and self-harm rates among transgender people.
Such an unconstitutional law will inevitably end up in court. And I think we should be grateful that there is still a way out. But if all conservatives are on their side and have to wait for the courts to finally give California lawmakers a slap on the wrist, they’ll have nothing. In fact, that is exactly what Democrats expect, that legislation opposed by the Republican Party will be entrenched in the slow corridors of the court system. They expect it. The more they can employ conservatives and lawyers, the more radical laws and policies they can continue to push out. We can’t stop them all. How many poor parents and children will be victims in the meantime?
But don’t lose the human element in the legislative games. Rabid ideologues and iconoclasts who want to remake America and its children in their own image are not afraid to use the weakest among us as pawns. Self-censorship will only be the beginning. It’s emotional blackmail, pure and simple. Do what we say or else.
Kylee Griswold is editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as an editor at the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She has a BS in Communication Arts/Language and an AS in Criminal Justice and writes on topics such as feminism and gender issues, religion and media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
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