Parental rights not a new rallying cry

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This article was published 23/09/2023 (766 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While health care and cost of living remain top issues for Manitobans going into the Oct. 3 provincial election, no issue has proven as inflammatory as “parental rights.”

The description of parental rights offered by its advocates is rather neutral: that parents have a right to know, and have input, into what their children are taught in schools. Certainly a parent should know whether or not their kids are being taught improperly or poorly.

But this is not about whether science class is properly instructing students in the scientific method.

Premier Heather Stefanson, whose party is promising to enhance parents’ rights if the Progressive Conservatives receive another mandate, has thus far refused to offer details about that pledge.

Advocates say the term is not a dog-whistle to signal opposition to pro-LGBTTQ+ policies in schools. But it’s hard to make that case given the rhetoric’s history.

The so-called parental rights movement has been set in motion not by concerns over reading, writing or arithmetic but by the existence of LGBTTQ+ literature in schools (including sex education materials which include LGBTTQ+ people), and by policies which state teachers have no obligation to inform parents if their children alter their pronouns or other identifiers while at school. This has incensed some parents, who believe they have a right to be told if their child adopts a different gender identity while at school. Critics of parent’s rights activism say forcing teachers to out LGBTTQ+ students to their parents may expose them to harm at home.

Rhetoric about “parents’ rights” has a long history among social conservative communities, usually in protest of increasing diversity.

In her 2020 book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristen Kobes Du Mez — a history professor at Michigan-based Calvin University and Christian author — writes about similar rhetoric being used to push against the racial desegregation of U.S. schools following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

“In the wake of Brown, for example, many southerners turned to private Christian academies to maintain segregation, and when the tax-exempt status of these ‘segregation academies’ was revoked in 1970, evangelicals defended their right to whites-only schools by arguing for the authority of the parents to make decisions about their children’s education, free from governmental ‘overreach,’” Du Mez writes.

In the 1990s, social conservatives were gripped by a panic over “the gay agenda” suggesting that LGBTTQ+ people’s fight for civil rights had some nefarious purpose. In 2005, James Dobson, then director of the Focus on the Family organization, said the aims of the “homosexual activist movement” included “indoctrinating children and future generations through public education.”

An Angus Reid Institute poll released in late August showed 49 per cent of Manitobans surveyed believed parents should be informed and be given the power to consent regarding their child’s chosen identity at school. Another 27 per cent said they believe parents should be informed.

Those surveyed could represent a vast array of feelings on the issue. Some may believe there is no harm in letting parents know. But even if most parents would not harm their children for their mode of expression, that some might should be sufficient reason for schools to remain a safe haven for children to exercise their personal independence without their parents being privy to every detail.

Because the fact is, children have rights, as enshrined by the UN and ratified by Canada. But parents don’t. A parent has legal custody of their child, but that’s not the same thing as ownership. What a parent has is responsibilities to their child, not absolute power over what books they read, or people they talk to, or what they choose to talk about.

Therefore, it is important that “parental rights” language be looked at closely. It has been used, going back more than 50 years, to justify parents isolating their children from pro-diversity environments. It is part of a long pattern of demonizing public educators as a means of ensuring parents maintain total control over young minds in their homes.

And if you’re an LGBTTQ+ student, teacher or administrator, the rhetoric isn’t neutral or sensible — it’s sinister.