How can an administration claim to be so committed to the idea of families … and so oblivious to the rights of parents to care for and protect their own?
To be sure, the president and his team don’t lack for projects designed, ostensibly, to help the families of America. In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, the president outlined a near-exhaustive list of objectives, including replacing “poisonous lead pipes,” providing “clean water to drink at home and at school,” reducing the costs of energy and pharmaceuticals, cutting the costs of child care, and extending the Child Tax Credit.
He even claimed to support an end to the shutdown of schools, saying “our kids need to be in school”—a remarkable turnabout from what he, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and teachers unions have pushed for years. Indeed, Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still pushes to quarantine healthy kids, despite the earnest pleas of countless parents.
The president pledged to develop COVID-19 vaccines for children under the age of 5—despite abundant medical evidence that youngsters face extremely low risk, and even as teachers unions use this as an excuse to keep kids masked while elderly politicians schmooze maskless. He said he wants us to work to improve children’s mental health (damaged by his party’s own “keep-‘em-home from school” policies), even while supporting school curricula coast to coast that subject boys and girls to sex education and gender-identity training, virtually from infancy.
These and so much more in the president’s laundry list of goals, if somehow accomplished, might give the president the inside track to become the patron saint of American families, but for a few advocacies he managed to slip through amid the dialectical onslaught.
The president continues, for instance, to push for the “constitutional right” to kill unborn babies, even as the current Supreme Court considers arguments in the Dobbs case that may soon expose Roe v. Wade as a disastrous misinterpretation of the Constitution.
He is also advocating for the Equality Act, which seeks to revise the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. As Alliance Defending Freedom has explained, the bill, if passed, would likely bring on co-ed showers for student athletes, enforce more transgender encroachments on women’s sports, compel churches and Christian ministries to hire staff whose beliefs contradict the Bible-based tenets of the organization, and in general wreak legal havoc and pose tangible threats to women’s health and the practice of faith.
In short, it would force every American to agree with government-imposed ideology on sexuality or be treated as an outlaw.
The president promised “younger transgender Americans” that “I’ll always have your back … so you can be yourself and reach your God-given potential.” It’s a pledge that hints at an even stronger effort to force-feed Americans an activist LGBT agenda—even as that agenda coerces millions of Americans to violate their beliefs, and scientific evidence increasingly shows that children usually outgrow transgender urges if allowed to do so.
President Biden’s imposition of that agenda leads him to oppose allowing parents a voice in their own children’s education. Biden made no mention of parental rights in his speech this week, despite evidence that this may be one of the major political issues of this election year. This administration has been accused of “declaring war” on parental rights, and the subtext of the president’s address reinforces that charge.
One thing the president did affirm in his opening was his belief that Americans, whatever their political bent, share “a duty to one another.” At the end of his remarks, he declared this to be a moment which “[the] character of this generation is formed.”
Both of those sound like good reasons to respect the rights of parents—who are the primary people forming “this generation”—so they preserve the life and health of their children, practice their religious faith, and speak to the ideas being taught in our public schools. But when public schools’ ideas align with the current administration’s politics, parents take a back seat.
Members of the Biden administration clearly want parental prerogatives for their own children—every other American family deserves no less.
Matt Bowman is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom(@ADFLegal).
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