The horrid history of ‘parental rights’

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/10/2023 (737 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a recent immigrant to Manitoba from the southeastern United States, the “parents’ rights” agenda of the Progressive Conservatives is disturbingly familiar to me.

And as a pediatrician and graduate student in public health, I’ve witnessed the very real harm that is done by the dangerous and divisive ideology disguised by these seemingly benign words.

For decades, conservatives in the U.S. have used “parents’ rights” as a cover for white supremacy and bigotry. One wave of “parental rights” activism led to the creation of hundreds of “segregation academies” in the 1960s and 1970s as public schools were being racially integrated. These were private schools founded by white parents explicitly to keep Black students away from their children.

During another “parental rights” movement in the 1990s, conservative parents reacted to public school sex education programs intended to prevent HIV infections, demanding that their children — and everyone else’s — be “protected” from protection itself.

More recently, a campaign for “parents’ rights” resulted in the passage of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, in 2022. This law forbids public school teachers and counsellors from discussing topics that are “not age-appropriate.” As the bill’s nickname implies, some of the most common topics parents have objected to relate to the LGBTTQ+ community.

Florida lawmakers passed another bill in 2023, allowing the state to take custody of transgender children whose parents seek gender-affirming medical care. The same conservatives fighting for “parents’ rights” voted to allow the state-sponsored kidnapping of children whose parents don’t share their political or religious beliefs. The rights they want, it seems, are only for a specific subset of parents.

Laws like these cause tremendous harm to LGBTTQ+ children, who are already at much higher risk than other children for mental health disorders and suicide.

This increased risk is not because something is wrong with them, but because they are not affirmed and supported by those around them.

For some students, teachers and school counselors are the only people they feel safe talking to or asking questions about these issues. And “parents’ rights” advocates want to take that safe space away not only from their own children, but from everyone else’s as well.

“Parents’ rights” activists cruelly and inaccurately label members of the LGBTTQ+ community as “groomers” or “pedophiles,” which often leads to verbal and physical violence against them. And the same groups have worked to ban books they deem inappropriate from schools and public libraries, frequently because they include gay characters or honestly discuss racism.

The role of public schools is not only to educate students, but also to produce informed, culturally competent members of society.

As two Canadian education officials wrote in 2017, public schools have a responsibility “to guarantee equal opportunity for all children,” “to unify a diverse population,” “to prepare people for citizenship in a democratic society,” and “to improve social conditions.” The beneficiaries of public education are the students and society, not a specific subset of ideologically motivated parents.

The “parents’ rights” movement isn’t about parents keeping pictures of their kids off of Instagram or ensuring that they are notified of bullying incidents.

That is simply the palatable pretext used to get the votes they need to launch an assault on civil rights. What parents’ rights activists really want is to solidify in the next generation the same bigotry that permeated their own schools decades ago. They want the right to unilaterally decide what rights other people deserve.

I can’t vote in the Oct. 3 election, so I’m doing what I can.

If you’re a Manitoban that can vote, I’m begging you to recognize the PC “parents’ rights” agenda for what it really is and vote accordingly. Let’s be better than Florida, not just a couple years behind it

Chad Hayes is a previously-practising pediatrician, now pursuing a master’s of public health degree at the University of Manitoba. His primary area of interest is the intersection of religion and public health. He writes at schadhayes.substack.com.