(Feb. 9)
The deep soul sickness of Democratic Party orthodoxy was on full display Feb. 7 when all 48 Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates voted against a bill preventing teachers from hiding children’s sex transitions from their parents.
In a sane world, no such bill would even be necessary. And although bitter experience has proven the bill necessary, no morally reasonable legislator could have come close to voting against it. The fact that it passed the House only by a 50-48 majority is a sign of a stunning inversion of the most elemental human norms.
The Daily Caller reports that the bill, called Sage’s Law (prematurely, since it’s not law yet, alas), “is named after a 14-year-old girl who was sex trafficked twice and raped after the state removed her from her parents’ custody to protect her from so-called ‘misgendering.’” The school had refused to tell the parents, before an ethically degenerate judge removed Sage from their care, that the school was complying with Sage’s request to be treated as if she were a boy named Drago.
The horrors inflicted upon Sage as a consequence comprise an extreme case, of course. But even if Sage had not been removed from her own home or abused, the school was way off base in hiding her “identity change” from her parents to start with. No matter what school officials think about their own power, parents, not the officials, ordinarily have ultimate authority over how to raise children. Absent a court finding of abuse or severe abandonment, parental authority is sacrosanct.
Somehow, a bizarre notion to the contrary has taken hold across school bureaucracies and among most Democratic officeholders to the effect that “gender identity” somehow trumps the ordinary presumption of parental responsibility and authority that has existed not just as long as humankind but also in almost every observable animal species on Earth…. [The full column is at this link.]
