THE LEFT COMES FOR THE PARENTS’ RIGHTS MOVEMENT:

Surveying the effect of British education on families, G.K. Chesterton wryly observed in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World: “The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” Little more than a decade later, the compulsory public education movement was to pick up steam across the United States, often presented as a necessity for the protection and wellbeing of American children.

History, Mark Twain might say, is rhyming.

In response to initiatives to curb the influence of LGBTQ+ ideology on young people — such as Texas’ attempts to investigate parents who encourage their children to get “sex-change” procedures or Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill — liberals are employing a familiar rhetorical tool: parental choice. Children’s welfare must be protected from the ideologies of self-interested politicians, they say. It’s an ironic twist, given that it’s almost word-for-word the same language that conservatives have used in recent education-related battles over race and sex.

Texas mother Amber Briggle in an op-ed for the Washington Post defended her decision to allow her daughter to identify as a boy as having given the child “a huge boost in self-esteem and confidence.” Briggle denounced Texas Republicans for “stripping the rights of parents, including me, to raise our children as we see fit.” The WaPo had earlier cited Jennifer Solomon, whose eleven-year-old son Cooper Solomon has a female “gender expression,” meaning he wears dresses and does “girl things.” Cooper, says his mother, is “happy, healthy and successful in school.”

In other words, conservatives should butt out of parents’ choices for their children. It’s a clever tactic, given that last year there was a groundswell of political momentum from parents angered over schools’ mishandling of all manner of decisions regarding their children’s well-being. From incoherent and illogical pandemic-related health guidance to “anti-racist” curricula that is actually quite racist to policies that enabled a “gender fluid” boy to sexually assault two different kids, parents fought back against school boards and superintendents. But two can play at that game.

This political jiu-jitsu does raise an important question: is parental responsibility for children absolute? And if not, where do parents’ rights end and the state’s responsibility to swoop in and protect children begin?

The answer exposes just how severe the disagreement between right and left is on this issue.

To be fair, we’ve known where Comcast stands on this issue since 2013: