It’s official: In California, schools must keep secret from parents information about children who have decided to “change” their “gender identity” (words and phrases I put in scare quotes because they are objective nonsense). No one should be surprised. Going back at least as far as Hillary Clinton, the increasingly radicalized Democrat party has made no secret about the fact that the government wants your children.

In 1996, Hillary famously said that, when it comes to children, “we have learned that to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a family. It takes teachers. It takes clergy. It takes business people. It takes community leaders. It takes those who protect our health and safety. It takes all of us. Yes, it takes a village. And it takes a President.”

It was very apparent that the village Hillary envisioned wasn’t an organic local community but the highly inorganic “community” of the government. And lest you think I’m reading too much into her words, at the same time, Hillary published It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, which is still in print. The favorable Wikipedia synopsis says it all:

The book emphasizes the shared responsibility that society has for successfully raising children, by looking at a number of angles... Clinton describes herself in the book as a Moderate, which is evidenced by a combination of advocating for government-driven social reforms while also espousing conservative values. (Emphasis added.)

A moderate. Right. Two paragraphs later, the synopsis gets to the nitty-gritty of Hillary’s village:

Some of the goals and institutions that Clinton advocates for in the book include: the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, Community Policing, the Brady Bill, Amber Alerts, immunizations, State Children's Health Insurance Program, financial regulation, expanded Child Tax Credits, Minimum Wage increases, Universal health care, personal responsibility, uniforms in schools, Goals 2000 academic framework, music warning labels, sexual abstinence, Plan B contraception, family planning, and marriage.

The “village” is called Big Government, and there’s no room in it for parents.

Seventeen years later, in 2013, MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris-Perry was more explicit about the fact that parents need to butt out of raising their children and leave it to the government:

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children,” she says in a spot for the network’s “Lean Forward” campaign. “So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

With gender madness now the name of the game, Democrats have been increasingly aggressive about removing parents from their children’s lives. They insist that parents cannot love or know their children as well as the state does and that the state’s beneficent, objective understanding of children’s needs far outweighs the narrow, hate-filled view of parents resistant to seeing their daughter claim to be a son or vice versa.  

As is so often the case with the Democrat party’s push to the extremes of leftist ideology, California is leading the way. Today, Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 1955 (the “SAFETY Act”), which mandates that schools must keep secret from parents the fact that a child may have announced that he or she wishes to have an alternative (i.e., imaginary) “gender identity.” As the bill expressly states:

(a) All pupils deserve to feel safe, supported, and affirmed for who they are at school.

(b) Choosing when to “come out” by disclosing an LGBTQ+ identity, and to whom, are deeply personal decisions, impacting health and safety as well as critical relationships, that every LGBTQ+ person has the right to make for themselves.

(c) Parents and families across California understand that coming out as LGBTQ+ is an extremely personal decision and want to support their children in coming out to them on their own terms.

(d) Parents and families have an important role to play in the lives of young people. Studies confirm that LGBTQ+ youth thrive when they have parental support and feel safe sharing their full identities with them, but it can be harmful to force young people to share their full identities before they are ready.

(e) Policies that forcibly “out” pupils without their consent remove opportunities for LGBTQ+ young people and their families to build trust and have these conversations when they are ready.

(f) LGBTQ+ pupils have the right to express themselves freely at school without fear, punishment, or retaliation, including that teachers or administrators might “out” them without their permission. Policies that require outing pupils without their consent violate pupils’ rights to privacy and self-determination.

(g) Pupils have a constitutional right to privacy when it comes to sensitive information about them, and courts have affirmed that young people have a right to keep personal information private.

There’s more, but the gist is that parents are dangerous and teachers are safe.

Currently, the law is framed so that it protects teachers who hide from parents information about their children. Those teachers cannot face any negative consequences for their actions. However, what’s implied in the law is that teachers who speak to parents will face drastic consequences for violating a child’s “right to privacy.” (And yes, this extends to the Kindergarten set, where kids still believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus).

Also, expect that, with this success, the LGBTQ+ radicals in California will again pass a bill saying that parents can lose custody of their children if they refuse to accept the child’s purported new gender—which is, in fact, a form of organic or coerced mental illness. The last time the law passed, Gavin Newsom, with an eye to the White House, vetoed it. Now that his chances at the White House will have to wait at least four years, expect him to be more favorable to the idea a second time around.

I keep hearing in my mind’s ear that famous early internet meme: “All your base are belong to us,” a clumsy translation of language in a Japanese Sega video game. That was funny. However, in Democrat hands, that phrase has been revamped to “All your children are belong to us,” and there’s nothing funny about it.

Image: A “Pride” parade in a Texas school. X screen grab.