Updated: California runs roughshod over parental rights

On July 15, 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed the radical progressive law Assembly Bill 2955 into effect. As I discussed in an earlier column, the deceptively named “Support Academic Futures and Educator Today’s Youth Act” advances transgender ideology.

Previously, in September 2022, Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 into law, making California a “sanctuary” state offering shelter to transgender children and their parents who leave jurisdictions restricting access to gender-affirming care to minors. In September 2023, Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill 957, which would have allowed public officials to remove children from the custody of parents who refused to affirm the chosen gender identities of their young.

California enacted Assembly Bill 2955, at least in part, in response to Attorney General Rob Bonta’s having successfully challenged local school board transgender policies. These policies required educators to inform parents if their children asked to be identified in school other than by their biological sexes or genders, be addressed by pronouns not aligned with their biological genders, or be able to use bathrooms not aligned with their genders.

House Bill 2955 runs roughshod over parental rights. It makes California the first state to prevent parents from what it describes as forcibly outing their children in elementary and secondary schools, who identify as LGBTQ+. Rather than provide needed support for unemancipated, mostly minors, as they go through emotional upheaval over their identities and sexual orientations at a time when they need their parents most, this law drives a wedge between children and their families.

Of course, students experiencing gender dysphoria, which is often fueled or influenced by social pressure from educators and peers, need loving care. Yet, this bill tears at the very fabric of family cohesion by forbidding public school officials from informing parents whose children (regardless of their ages and/or emotional states) seek to make unalterable changes as to their “gender identities”.

House Bill 2955 bans “policies that forcibly ‘out’ pupils without their consent [because they] remove opportunities for LGBTQ+ young people and their families to build trust and have these conversations when they are ready.”

The bill maintains that “[p]olicies that require outing pupils without their consent violate pupils’ rights to privacy and self-determination.”

The bill is unintentionally ironic because in paying meaningless lip service to parents, it states that “LGBTQ+ youth thrive when they have parental support and feel safe sharing their full identities with them, but it can be harmful to force young people to share their full identities before they are ready.”

This law undercuts parental rights and the ability of parents to build needed trust with their children at a time when they are in great need of guidance, adding that “[c]hoosing when to “come out” by disclosing an LGBTQ+ identity, and to whom, are deeply personal decisions, impacting health and safety as well as critical relationships, that every LGBTQ+ person has the right to make for themselves” without familial input.

What the bill fails to take into consideration is that by excluding loving, caring parents from the mix, California—and states that follow suit—undermines the very foundation of American society and culture but also the basis of family since time immemorial. As important as educators can be in the lives of children, they are, with few exceptions, neither their families nor parents, even while some are pro-transgender activists. It is astounding that California adopted a statute essentially ignoring parents at a time when their vulnerable children are considering life-altering changes. If this bill remains in effect, how can society, let alone families, function as cohesive units?

The upshot is that, unless stopped, progressive social policy will continue to tear families apart by allowing, if not encouraging, impressionable children to “explore” their sexuality by transitioning socially, leading bifurcated existences excluding their parents and likely other family members from their lives with potentially dangerous consequences for themselves and their loved ones.

Moreover, such social policy completely ignores the Supreme Court’s monumental 1925 ruling in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in which it famously reasoned “[t]he child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

In enacting House Bill 2955, California misused its authority by essentially reducing parents to silent bystanders at best, allowing public school officials alone to direct the lives of their children.

Hopefully, parental rights activists will challenge the short-sighted Assembly Bill 2955 in federal rather than state court. It is imperative that this bill is challenged in federal court because, as noted, California’s judiciary’s already having invalidated duly adopted local school board policies requiring parental notification when their children seek to identify as LGBTQ+ means it is unlikely to protect their interests. Conversely, a federal court should be able to take a step back by upholding the legal primacy of parental rights Pierce so eloquently defended almost a century ago and which has always served as the foundation of family life.

Update (July 22, 2024): 

As anticipated, a challenge has been filed to Assembly Bill 2955. A group of parents in the Chino Valley Unified School District have filed suit questioning the legality of Assembly Bill 2955 on July 16, 2024. The litigation, which was filed on July 16, 2024, a day after Governor Newsom signed the bill into law, seeks to prevent it from taking effect on January 1, 2025.

The parents claimed that the law violates both their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to be informed about what their mostly minor children are doing in school, as well as the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, by denying them access to the educational records of their young. The state has twenty-one days to respond to the suit, which will probably be heard this fall.