Senate Education and Health Committee Votes Against Parents
If there was any flicker of a doubt that the LGBT machine has a death grip on Virginia’s Democratic legislators, the Senate Education and Health Committee’s actions this morning completely extinguished it. After several days of subcommittee and committee hearings on several common sense parental rights bills, the discussion ended with a rare display of emotion from Senator Lucas. The chairwoman visibly recoiled as she mentally recalled the heartrending story of a public education system that failed to inform a troubled teenager’s parents about their child’s struggle with gender dysphoria and the chain of events that followed: a system that shockingly cast the parents as an enemy, to a frightened child running away from the state into the clutches of sex traffickers, to that child’s blessed reunion with her parents, thanks to the intervention of the Founding Freedoms Law Center. And yet…Senator Lucas put those emotions aside, bent the knee to the LGBT machine, and led a 9-6 party line vote to kill HB 2432 (LaRock), Sage’s Law, which would have ensured a school informs parents in a timely manner when a child has any communication with a school administrator that asks for the administrator’s participation in a gender change.
The unfortunately not-so-shocking disregard of parental rights permeated discussion of these bills over the last couple days. In yesterday’s Senate Public Education Subcommittee hearing, public school librarians raised objections to HB 1379 (Anderson), which would require schools to identify every item in a public school library that contains graphic sexual content, as defined in the bill, to be marked as such in an electronic catalog, and to allow parents access to that catalog. One librarian remarked that labeling these items, already curated by librarians for use in a public school library, would require too much work, that parents can review the items in the catalog themselves. As if parents have the time to review thousands of books to determine whether any of them might be objectionable for their children to review.
It's also worth mentioning the lack of participation by members of this subcommittee since only two of the five members – Chairwoman, Senator Ghazala Hashmi (D-Henrico) and Senator Mark Peake (R-Lynchburg) - were present to listen to nearly all the bills being presented. There is something fundamentally wrong with our legislative process when Senators can leave a proxy vote in subcommittee, then vote on that bill again in the full committee without any further debate.
Several other parental rights bills were similarly discussed in subcommittee yesterday and ultimately killed in committee today on a 9-6 party line vote. HB 1448 (Orrock) would have required the Department of Education to make recommendations to the General Assembly, the Board of Education, and local school boards by September 1, 2024, on the adoption of model policies for selecting and removing books and audiovisual materials available to students in public school libraries. HB 1507 (McGuire) would have ensured that schools recognize the fundamental right of parents in the Virginia code and provide a written explanation for any policy that affects parental rights.
On the off chance this might penetrate the LGBT shield surrounding their craniums, here is a reminder of the rights of parents embedded in Virginia’s code: “A parent has a fundamental[emphasis added] right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.” It’s okay at this point if the code isn’t breaking through. I’m sure it will sink in once Virginia parents let legislators know this fall what their willful disregard of that code means for their political futures.
