Society is only as strong as its weakest link: Importance of parental rights and school choice
Many people and organizations are fed up with the culture’s increasing disregard of parental education rights. In fact, one website was so frustrated with limited appreciation and awareness of parental rights that it proposed a further amendment, which specifically guarantees parental rights, for our Constitution.
That website is called parentalrights.org. The first section of its projected amendment states that the freedom of parents to educate and nurture their children is one of the most basic human rights. Schools and governments should leave this idea alone, as it is, so that parents will be allowed to raise their own children.
After that, the next two sections assert that parents should be able to retain school choice, and have the ability to educate their child outside of the public school system; the third section purposefully has language that prohibits any government branch’s encroachment upon these rights.
These sections also apply to opt-outs and religious exemptions from some class activities, since opt-outs are related to school choice.
The language from the suggested amendment could be used for parents to seek religious exemptions from activities that violate the family's beliefs. There is even a drop-down menu on parentalrights.org's second section of its amendment, explaining more deeply how it legally affects opt-outs.
In fact, Moms for Liberty, a fellow conservative organization, has developed a manual instructing parents on how to properly opt out from such class assignments, and the Parental Rights Foundation, a sister organization to parentalrights.org, made an opt-out report just last year, after the Mahmoud v. Taylor court case, which ruled that public schools must give parents advance notice and allow opt-outs from lessons involving the left's gay agenda when it violates parents' religious principles. These resources show that parental rights language can hold water with teachers and school boards.
These efforts are designed to stop state governments from executing "nanny state" measures.
We are not intended to be a nanny state
If the government is permitted to use “nanny state” measures on children, then it will peddle to them an immense number of anti-conservative agendas. Essentially the idea that children belong to the state, not the parents to whom they were born, and thereby become free government experiments with this philosophy.
On the flip side, if parents are allowed to raise their own children, or at least influence their teachers' choices, there may be an increase in people supportive of traditional ways of life, because their parents raised them using family values, as well as an increase of emotionally healthier children.
Unfortunately, we have a recent case study of a school applying nanny state-like measures and refusing to allow religious exemptions. In Washington state, one school from the Lake Washington School District did not allow religious exemptions, meaning a Christian student was forcibly exposed to a vast stream of LGBT content, despite his father's numerous attempts to stop this.
That student is in fifth grade, but he first encountered such content in fourth grade, and anyone with a pro-family pulse would consider the content wildly age-inappropriate.
In class, he heard lectures on Pride and the Stonewall Uprising, students allowed to use false pronouns, and expectations of even Christian students to attend "LGBT counseling." The startling slides from one lesson are available to view on Not the Bee.
The colorful graphics appear inviting to children, but the content is more misleading than developmentally appropriate. After this interlude, the boy's father, Konstantin Averkiev, sued the entire school district.
The boy's forcible exposure to such content is a result of the state's and school district's joint banishment of parental rights, and the legal case provides new importance to parental rights efforts across the U.S. We were never created with the Constitutional infrastructure to be a nanny state, and we never want to be one.
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