Echoes of Youngkin as another parental revolt stirs in Virginia

The current election cycle actually began last November, when a Republican won Virginia’s governorship because parents were infuriated by what they considered government hostility to their primacy in raising their children. Today, as another election impends, another Virginia contest features an issue that makes parents prickly. It echoes a constitutional clash 100 years ago and radiates the distrust now enveloping K-12 education, parents’ most intimate contact with government.

Last November, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democratic former governor Terry McAuliffe after McAuliffe said in a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Coming amid nationwide controversies about “anti-racist” and “gender-fluidity” indoctrination of grammar-school pupils by political activists masquerading as teachers, McAuliffe’s words made many parents incandescent.

Twelve months later, in Northern Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, Republican Hung Cao, a refugee from Vietnam as a child and former U.S. Navy officer, is challenging two-term Democratic incumbent Jennifer Wexton, a children’s advocate and lawyer. The race has been roiled by attention to something that a Northern Virginia state legislator, Elizabeth Guzman, a Wexton friend and supporter, proposed two years ago: legislation to expand the definition of child abuse to include inflicting “physical or mental injury” on children because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature shunned the bill as redundant, adding nothing to existing law against child abuse. Guzman evidently disagrees, otherwise she would not have written the bill. With local school districts riven by woke proposals (e.g., to expel elementary school pupils for “misgendering” other students), Republicans, including Cao, have, with Guzman’s help, made much of the bill as menacing to parents.

When a Washington television reporter asked Guzman about penalties if an investigation “concludes that a parent is not affirming of their LGBTQ child,” Guzman responded, “It could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor.” She did not take exception to the word “affirming.” The reporter asked what she would tell Republicans “who say this is criminalizing parents.” She answered: “No, it’s not. It’s educating parents because the law tells you the do’s and don’ts.” So, parents, too, would be pupils of the state government acting in loco parentis.

Reporter: “Do you think this infringes on free speech or religious freedom at all? There might be some people of different faiths … who … don’t believe in affirmation of LGBTQ issues when it comes to their children. What do you tell those parents … who don’t feel like they want to necessarily affirm what their children are feeling when it comes to their sexual orientation or gender identity?” Answering, Guzman spoke of accepting “everyone for who they are.” Although she stresses that the word “affirm” is not in her legislation, she did not question the reporter’s premise that parental affirmation would be obligatory.

Some critics are politically motivated, and others perhaps are unfair, when they suggest that parental affirmation might require parental acquiescence in gender-affirming medical treatments such as puberty blockers and sexchange surgery. But progressives like Guzman have hardly earned the benefit of the doubt regarding the contraction of parental authority under the pressure of governmental overreach.

Just as many Republicans have unavailingly tried to emerge unstained from transactions with Donald Trump, the Guzman bill has Wexton and other Virginia Democrats in flight from the contamination that comes from imprudent collaboration with especially woke progressives.

Wexton has had to explain that her support for Guzman does not extend to supporting Guzman’s best-known undertaking. And Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a centrist Democrat seeking a third term in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, must be weary of this dance of distancing. After the 2020 election, she gave a salty denunciation of progressives’ suicidal “defund the police.” Progressives are, however, recidivists, and now there is Guzman’s bill.

It is dead, but Guzman’s impulse goes marching on. Fortunately, it collides with the Constitution.

In 1922, Oregon amended its compulsory school attendance statute to require children to attend public schools, presumably to enable the government to equip children with a government-approved consciousness. In 1925, the Supreme Court held that American principles preclude “any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.” This affirmed an unenumerated right (the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) of parents regarding child-rearing.

Wexton says, “I think that parents should always have a role in their kids’ lives.” A role. By the grace of government.