CV NEWS FEED // The California Legislature is considering two bills that, if enacted, would severely limit the rights of parents to raise their children in the state.
The text of AB 957 states that it “would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child.”
As the California Globe reported, the bill could cause a parent to “lose custody for not ‘affirming’ or agreeing to a child’s claims about gender identity.” This would apply in custody disputes in which one parent wants to “affirm” the child’s confusion about gender, and the other does not. For example, in a case such as the custody battle between Jeff Younger and Anne Georgulas over the divorced couple’s nine-year-old son, AB 957 would require judges to side with the parent who favors “affirming.”
The legislation’s sponsor Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, D-CA, stated: “Affirming a child’s identity about gender is in their best interest.” When parents do not “affirm,” she argued, they are “rejecting that child.”
AB 957 is currently under consideration by the California State Senate. It passed in the State Assembly in March.
A related bill, AB 665, passed in the State Assembly on April 10 and has also made its way into the Senate chambers. If signed into law, it would allow a minor as young as 12 to be emancipated from his or her parents and transferred into state custody without a court order.
Former San Diego City Councilman and two-time Congressional candidate Carl DeMaio, R-CA, is leading the charge to oppose AB 665. He said the bill “effectively takes children away from their parents if they aren’t ‘woke’ enough.” DeMaio added: “The worst part is that the bill permits even counselors and interns to make and facilitate decisions to allow the state to take these kids away from their parents.”
DeMaio is the chairman of Reform California, a conservative political action committee he founded 20 years ago.
If one or both pieces of legislation were to pass the State Senate, where Democrats hold an 80% majority, the bills would head to the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-CA.
Both bills were notably co-authored by State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-CA, who last year proposed an unsuccessful bill that would have allowed giving children COVID shots without consent from their parents. Wiener, who has no children, also once joked about offering a class on “drag queens” to elementary school students.
Many California parents are decrying these bills as the end of parental rights in the Golden State.
One of these is Karen England, president of the Capitol Resource Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Sacramento, CA, whose stated mission is to “educate California citizens on the importance of practicing faith in the public arena.”
In an interview with Virginia Allen on the Daily Signal Podcast, England said that the “erosion of parental rights” in California “really started” when the state passed a law mandating K-12 “Sex Ed.”
“They took away all local control saying no school district is going to be allowed to do an opt-in,” she said. “So that’s where we saw them starting when they mandated some really radical curriculum and then made sure that local school districts couldn’t give parental rights back in that area.”
Allen asked England:
If these bills become law in California, and let’s say a 10-year-old girl says to her mom, “I feel like I’m a boy.” And that mom says, “Okay. Well, you might feel like that, but you’re a girl,” that could be considered “child abuse” and the mom could lose custody of her child?
The mother and activist replied:
Absolutely… They know what they’re doing. You must affirm their perceived gender and it’s harmful if you don’t. And that’s where they’re operating from. And so this is going to be very, very serious moving forward.
She referred to the dispute between Younger and Georgulas, adding that the latter, who favors “transitioning” their young son, has moved with him from Texas to California.
While the bills in question only targeted California families, England had some words of warning for parents raising their children in other parts of the country:
We say what happens in California doesn’t stay in California, and that’s true. And so people really need to be paying attention because if you see it in California, a year or two later, they’re going to be trying it in your state.
