Every time I see a headline about legislation purporting to preserve “parents’ rights,” I ponder what rights I, a parent, would most like to have codified into law. My inevitable conclusion is that I’m not the target audience for those bills. I’m over here waiting for someone to make it illegal for my kids to say they hate dinner before they taste it, while lawmakers are way over there, drafting proposals to protect my “right” to talk to my kids about gender identity, review what they’re learning in school, complain about their library books and pretend that racism isn’t real.
And those are things I either have no interest in, or things that I, a parent, am already allowed to do. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t actually need lawmakers to give you permission to talk to your kids about sex or ask what they’re learning in school. You can just … do all of that, all on your own.
The Big Takeaway
You can pretty easily trace the push for “parental rights” back to right-wing vitriol over critical race theory, a graduate-level academic construct that examines institutional racism in America. It isn’t really taught in K-12 classrooms, but Republican lawmakers have made it their mission to ban it there anyway. Once that succeeded, they expanded their aim.
Today, their efforts include legislation that bans classroom discussions of race, gender and sexuality, and bills that make it easier for dissatisfied parents to complain about lessons, censor books they find offensive and even seek retribution against their children’s teachers. (That’s a formality, really — even legislation that doesn’t explicitly take aim at teachers still ends up targeting teachers.) In total, lawmakers this year have filed more than 80 so-called “parental rights” bills, many of them seeking to codify privileges that parents already have.
But even the redundant proposals contribute to an environment that increasingly emboldens parents to make demands, often well outside of their children’s classrooms. One mother in a small northwestern Kansas town asked her local library to ban a children’s book about a boy dressing in his mother’s clothes, a plot she considered LGBTQ-friendly and “did not like,” the Kansas Reflector reported.
The book in question, “Fred Gets Dressed,” tells the story of a little boy who runs through his house naked and ends up in his mother’s closet, where he tries on her clothes, jewelry and makeup. When Fred’s parents find him, they (and the family dog) join in the dress-up fun.
The Oakley Public Library Board of Trustees considered the woman’s request at a meeting in April and will decide this month whether to remove the book from circulation. Library staff said it was the first time in at least 25 years that a patron filed a formal complaint about a book. Peter Brown, the book’s author, said it was the first time he’d heard of an attempt to ban his work, though he wasn’t particularly surprised by it.
“Given the political climate of America these days,” he told the Reflector, “I figured it was only a matter of time.”
That climate was on display in New Jersey on Monday as parents derailed a Senate committee hearing with outlandish objections to new health and sex education standards. One grandmother told lawmakers the standards, which incorporate lessons on gender identity and expression, are “illegal, obscene and pornographic.” A parent added that they go against “Judeo-Christian values.” These are all great and super-normal things to say in a public meeting of the Senate Education Committee, which didn’t draft — and can’t repeal or amend — the standards, per the New Jersey Monitor.
Monday’s hearing theoretically focused on two bills, only one of them — a measure to increase curriculum transparency — related in any way to the uproar over sex ed. The bill would require schools to allow parents to review and ask questions about the new curricula before they’re submitted to school boards for final approval. It would also require districts to post curricula online at least two weeks before classes begin, and reiterate a 40-year-old state law that allows parents to opt their kids out of the lessons altogether.
This is, for all intents and purposes, the legislative equivalent of a highlighter — it simply repeats some rules that already exist. Parents pounced on it anyway, turning a public comment period into an airing of grievances about the standards themselves. State Sen. Vin Gopal, a Democrat and the bill’s main sponsor, repeatedly begged audience members to stay on topic, telling one woman that the bill had “nothing to do with ideology. It has to do with transparency.”
Other politicians made no such claims. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill establishing “Victims of Communism Day” in the state’s public K-12 schools, then spent the bulk of a press conference complaining about college campuses, the Florida Phoenix reported.
“There are probably more Marxists on college faculties in the United States than there are in all of eastern Europe combined,” DeSantis said, adding that young people “don’t really know that much about what communism meant in practice.” (He did not, of course, cite statistics to bolster those claims.)
The governor ranted for a while, whining about college students wearing Che Guevara T-shirts (legal) and saying the legislation was necessary to “make sure that Florida, every year, will be able to speak the truth” about communism (already legal). Eventually he ceded the microphone to Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, who brought the event full circle by championing other efforts to restrict curriculum and classroom discussions of real events like slavery.
“By the actions we’re taking today, along with the actions we’ve already taken – like removing CRT, woke ideology from our classroom … to empower parents to make decisions for their children – we will always ensure that our students are getting the best education,” she said. “Free of socialist ideology, and CRT and woke terms that we will not allow.”
Allowable terms: (Montana) ‘Parent rights’ candidates lose school board races, union ‘aggressive’ in wins … (New Hampshire) Measure to protect enslavement-era gravesites of African Americans defeated by House … Michigan Republicans backing LGBTQ+ rights say GOP’s anti-gay push is too familiar … Ohio’s fight for LGBTQ+ protections
From the Newsrooms
- (New Mexico) Demonstrators demand immediate review of COVID vaccine for youngest children in the U.S.
- (Nevada) Election reform initiative creeps toward ballot qualification, opponents become vocal
- Hopes dwindle that Missouri lawmakers will extend postpartum care for new moms
- Feds threaten to pull certification from Oregon State Hospital’s Junction City campus
- A few glitches raise eyebrows in record-setting Georgia early voting
One Last Thing
Elon Musk said Tuesday he’d reinstate Donald Trump on Twitter once he owns it.
This edition of the Evening Wrap published on May 10, 2022. Subscribe here.
