Orwellian California SAFETY Act Isn鈥檛 Safe for Parents or Children
In his novel 1984, George Orwell writes of the dystopian totalitarian state Oceania, and that its children were recruited to spy against enemies of the state. Although they “adored the Party and everything connected with it,” their ferocity against thought criminals was such that it “was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”
Writing in 1949, Orwell was not painting on a blank canvas. At the time, the Soviet-era Young Pioneers were actively indoctrinating Russia’s children in communist ideology. This example illustrated Orwell’s point that totalitarian regimes always seek to consolidate power by interfering with the parent-child relationship.
This same totalitarian impulse is alive and well today as evidenced by the recent passage of . Duplicitously named the SAFETY Act, the bill announces a new statewide policy that California public school districts may not require that school staff “disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent.”
This is effectively an all-out endorsement of a practice that has come to be known as “secret social transition.” This practice, which Alliance Defending Freedom is contesting in , involves public school officials aiding and even encouraging minor students to adopt new gender identities by using new names and pronouns and giving them access to restrooms and locker rooms reserved for the opposite sex.
Courts are increasingly finding these policies are inconsistent with the fundamental right of parents to oversee the education and upbringing of their children. Indeed, a California federal court recently a local school district’s policy to facilitate secret gender transitions as being “as foreign to federal constitutional and statutory law as it is medically unwise.”
And yet, this unlawful and unwise clandestine behavior is precisely what California law now defends. How can the state justify this approach? One need look no further than a “” issued on Jan. 11, in which California Attorney General Rob Bonta explained why, in his view, parents have no right to know when their children are being steered by school officials into secret transitions.
Bonta argued that parental notification policies, which he dubbed “forced disclosure policies,” are automatically suspect because they “target transgender and gender nonconforming students” and therefore constitute “sex discrimination.” Moreover, Bonta asserted that such policies merely advance “outdated social stereotypes” that gender non-conformity is a mental illness requiring parental intervention. “To the contrary,” Bonta continued, “local school districts (which are agents of the State for purposes of operation of our public school system) have a duty of care to protect, and a compelling interest in protecting, all students, including transgender and gender nonconforming students, from emotional, psychological, and physical harm, including from a parent.”
In other words, California had to pass the SAFETY Act because it is obligated to protect students experiencing gender confusion from their backward-thinking parents.
The astonishing hubris in this reasoning is not isolated to California. In a Kansas teacher’s challenge to a school policy that required her to deceive parents about their child’s “transition” at school, the local district defended its policy on grounds that it wasn’t the school’s job to “out” a student to skeptical parents. The court that excuse. Pointing to parents’ constitutional right to guide the upbringing of their children, the court observed: “It is difficult to envision why a school would even claim—much less how a school could establish—a generalized interest in withholding or concealing from the parents of minor children, information fundamental to a child’s identity, personhood, and mental and emotional well-being such as their preferred name and pronouns.”
Of course, the radical—and increasingly totalitarian—gender ideology behind California’s AB 1955 says otherwise. Much like the rulers of Oceania, its proponents seek to harness the power of the state to prevent parents from standing in the way of its program to rewrite reality by eradicating the categories “man” and “woman” regardless of the very real and punishing costs borne by the children who embrace its teachings.
Fortunately, unlike the fearful fictional parents of Oceania, American parents are armed with a fundamental constitutional right that says otherwise. That right springs from the truth that parents, not the state, are vested with the high duty to oversee their children’s upbringing, health, and welfare. And that foundational truth—and legal reality—is something even the autocrats in Sacramento cannot legislate away.
