I’ve been trying to piece together my thoughts that were generated from a friend’s question why judges are ruling that minor children can be mutilated by so-called “gender affirming” surgeries without parental involvement. Shortly after considering the subject, I saw articles about judges saying it was a child’s First Amendment right to witness drag shows, even if the performances contained adult content and/or their parents did not want them to be part of an audience.
The root cause seems to be, in my estimation, what constitutional rights do children have?
Do minors have rights to free speech, to make irreversible changes to their bodies before they are even teenagers? Do they have a right to change their identity without the knowledge or approval of their parents? Do they have a right to read, view and participate in what once was regarded as pornography? Are they of such maturity that they can choose to drink alcohol, take drugs, have sex with adults?
If a child really, really wants to go to an explicit drag show, are parents legally required to buy them a ticket and drive them there or allow a five-year-old girl to decide she is really a boy?
Or on the other hand, are those rights held in abeyance to be protected and exercised for them? I mean we don’t allow a thirteen-year-old to sign legal contracts or drive, buy a gun or take out a mortgage. There is a legal concept called the “age of majority”, a point when children achieve the status of adults and can legally do the things they couldn’t as a child.
Society used to believe that parents were responsible to guide, direct and protect children until they achieved that status. When the parents fail, children can apply for legal emancipation to remove them from parents who are negligent, abusive, or unwilling to protect the child. In a legal construct called “Guardian ad Litem”, which are third parties usually appointed in cases involving disputes over child custody, child support, adoption, divorce, emancipation of minors, and visitation rights.
Even when we send them to schools where school officials temporarily stand in for parents, the several states have enacted laws defining the role teachers and administrators in what they may and may not do while the children are in their care. These laws are based on the legal concept of “in loco parentis”. Originating in old English law, “in loco parentis” is Latin for "in the place of a parent” and refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent according to interests of the parent, not in the interests of the students.
As a protective mechanism for minors, it is undeniable that society has historically believed and accepted that it is right and proper to reserve full constitutional rights for kids under the age of majority, to hold them in reserve until such a time the children are judged to be mature and knowledgeable enough to take full advantage of those rights in a reasoned and responsible manner.
Many, if not all, of the situations I listed above either are, or have been, made illegal through legislation. Parents have historically held sovereignty over their children, enabled to make decisions about what their child may or may not do, see, or say. That’s the traditional role of parents – to rear, to teach, to protect and to decide what freedoms and rights can be supported by the child’s evolving awareness and maturity.
There is absolutely no evidence that “gender affirming” surgeries or allowing tender age children to adopt a sexual identity at variance to their biological identity prevents suicides or is good for the child in the long run. Quite to the contrary, due to the explosion of the transgenderism social contagion in our youth, more data is available today than ever that most children who claim to be something other than their biological sex and are not surgically altered, revert to their biological identity by the time they reach the age of twenty. Follow-up studies of transgender kids have shown that a substantial majority -- anywhere from 65 to 94 percent -- eventually ceased to identify as transgender (Steensma, et al, NIH National Library of Medicine, “Factors associated with desistence and persistence of childhood gender dysphoria: a quantitative follow-up study”).
So, from this we can deduce that the judges and advocates who want to use “constitutional rights” to allow kids to make extra-parental decisions are not rooted in law, any morality, the Constitution, or even in the best interests of the children. Judges handing down decisions that strip parents of the right to act on behalf of their children’s best interests as they see them are essentially substitution the state for the parent.
This is about the programmed demise of the family and parental rights and is nothing less than a Marxist attack on any structure of power that competes with government authority.
In considering all of this, I kept thinking of Marx’s hatred of the family expressed in his Communist Manifesto:
"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”
Since these cultural Marxists have recognized America’s children as a weak spot in the war on Western civilization, it should be no surprise that is where they are concentrating their forces.
Jung Chang's book 'Wild Swans' recounts the destruction of family in Mao's China; history that those of us of a certain age remember happening in our lifetimes. Horrifying to see what is occurring in our country.
Michael, I wonder if there is also a defense here in the case of parents being held responsible for their children's actions. If the same judges making the ruling that parents have no say in their child's actions such as gender-based surgery, then it stands to reason that the same judges cannot rule that it's the parents' responsibility if Johnny or Susie rob, steal, shoot, or in any other way harm a person or society.
My 2 cents.