Part of the Democrats’ MO has been to get between children and parents, which Townhall reports regularly. This month, the state of Oregon unveiled a bill that would make the state a “safe haven” for children wanting to undergo transgender health care. Minnesota Democrats also came out with their own “trans refuge” agenda. And now, one liberal state wants mental health professionals to have the ability to remove children from their families if their parents do not approve of their “gender identity,”
A new bill introduced in California would allow mental health professionals to take children as young as 12 away from their parents to undergo care without parental consent, according to the Washington Free Beacon. California Democrats advanced the bill, which would allow the children to check into group homes even if the child had not claimed abuse or neglect (via the Washington Free Beacon):
The bill instructs counselors to determine whether or not to inform a patient's parents "after consulting with the minor." The bill's authors say their bill is meant to address recent increases in suicide among "youth, particularly Black and Latinx youth."
"For LGBTQ+ youth, the rejection from parents, harassment in school, and the overall LGBTQ negativity present in society can lead to depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol use, and other negative outcomes. Over one-half of surveyed LGBTQ+ youth reported that not being able to get permission from their parents or guardians was sometimes or always a barrier to accessing mental health services," the bill reads.
Critics say these provisions reveal the bill's true intention: helping lawmakers and mental health professionals take custody of children whose parents don't support their efforts to change genders.
"This bill is state-sanctioned kidnapping," Erin Friday, a San Francisco lawyer, said during a Tuesday committee hearing. Friday, a longtime Democrat, helps lead Our Duty, an international support network for parents of the growing number of children who think they are transgender.
Friday and another witness, clinical social worker Pamela Yeager, told lawmakers that the law would empower school counselors to send children straight to a group home if the children say their parents don't approve of their transgender identities.
Erin Friday told Fox News this week that the legislation is “terrifying” and could cause a ripple effect across the country if passed.
"This is an abrogation of parental rights once again, and here in California, it's almost as if we get to parent our kids until they're age 12, and then the state gets to take them," Friday said in an interview with the outlet on Wednesday. "So I call this bill the state-sanctioned kidnapping bill, because there doesn't need to be any allegation of abuse against a parent or a serious threat of suicide of the child before a school counselor can unilaterally decide to take that child and place them in a residential facility."
"In the world of transgenderism," Friday added, "that means that a child who goes to a school counselor and says that they are transgender and that their parent won't support them, that child can be whisked off to a LGBTQ community facility and not come home from school that day. This bill is terrifying, and it should terrify every parent in the country, because what we do here in California gets passed along in other states."
The Free Beacon noted that opponents of the bill pointed out that since the state has allowed children to seek psychiatric care on their own, teen suicides have escalated.
