Wanna Start a Civil War? Declare Your Enemies ‘Unfit Parents’ and Take Their Kids Away
Are faithful Christians, Orthodox Jews, and others who reject the LGBTQ vision of sexuality unfit parents who might deserve to lose custody of their children? That’s what the Colorado House of Representatives (aping legislatures in other blue states) just voted for. Check out this report from The Daily Signal:
The Colorado House of Representatives passed a bill Sunday that would remove kids from parents’ custody for behaviors like “misgendering” and “deadnaming” after Democrats cited the Southern Poverty Law Center to justify excluding parental rights groups from discussion on the bill. …
“After preventing us from the ability to debate, Colorado House Democrats rammed through HB 1312,” [state Rep. Jarvis] Caldwell told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “It’s codifying into law that if their ideology confuses your child, and you don’t affirm that delusion, you’re committing child abuse and can lose custody of your child.
“We have now crossed the Rubicon of parental rights with this bill,” he added. …
According to the bill summary, HB 1312 defines “coercive control” as including “deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health care services.”
“A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child,” the summary adds.
These provisions would effectively require parents to endorse gender ideology in order to maintain custody of their own children in a dispute. Gender ideology teaches that a person’s internal sense of gender overrides his or her biological sex.
“Deadnaming” involves referring to an individual who claims to be transgender by the name that person has rejected. “Misgendering” involves referring to a person who claims to be transgender with the pronouns associated with their biological sex, rather than their preferred pronouns. “Gender-affirming health care” is a euphemism for experimental medical interventions designed to make a man appear female or vice versa.
This bill (modeled on a 2023 law passed in California) is currently limited to custody disputes, granting an advantage in divorce proceedings to parents who affirm transgenderist theories. They will win out over parents who have science- or faith-based objections to the brand-new idea that the human species has up to 47 genders, which people can cycle through all their lives and the state must force other citizens to affirm. In this sense, the law is like policies in many blue states that forbid Christians who won’t sign on to LGBTQ talking points to adopt or foster children.
The next logical step? To say that intact families that don’t cooperate with groomers ought to lose custody to the state, and their kids go into the social service system — which will find them “affirming” homes. If you think this sounds implausible, remember that Joe Biden’s FBI was labeling PTA moms who complained at school board meeting about transgender and gay porn materials being taught to their kids in class as “domestic extremists.”
A New, Intolerant Cult Has Seized Control of the Government
If you’d rather not be gaslit into accepting your status as a second-class citizen who doesn’t deserve to raise your own kids in your own worldview, you need to see such new laws for what they are: a move by a new dominant religion that has gained power over the state,to persecute rival religions by seizing their children.
Transgenderism isn’t science. It doesn’t rest on newly discovered evidence or studies. It’s a grab bag of anecdotal claims, discredited studies, and loud political hysteria cobbled together to justify and demand public acceptance of sexual fetishes, some of them driven by mental illness linked to sexual abuse or porn addiction. The fervor and violence of so many trans activists — from school shooters to would-be terrorists — speaks less of a secular worldview than of a fanatical, intolerant cult. (See this analysis in Revolver News of why trans activists are so disproportionately violent.)
Science didn’t discover 45 extra genders 10 years ago. What happened was that a reality TV star, Bruce Jenner, decided to go public with a fetish and appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in elaborate drag. But now everybody pretends that this amounted to discovering penicillin. I think “Kaitlyn” ought to be granted the Nobel Prize for medicine, just to keep up the charade.
We Get Your Kids
Religious movements good and bad have seized children in the past. The Ottoman Empire imposed a regular “tax” of male children seized from their homes, then raised as fanatical Muslims to serve as elite Janissary soldiers. In Louis XIV’s France, the Crown seized Protestant children from the Huguenots and gave them to Catholic families to raise. In nineteenth-century New York City, Protestants pressed for the state to hand custody of Catholic orphans to “real Christian” homes. Mother Frances Cabrini, now a saint, fought hard against this practice meant to “civilize” unruly Irish and Italian immigrants.
Secular replacement religions we call “ideologies” have also engaged in this practice of high-minded kidnapping: The Nazis scrutinized children of Polish couples for signs of “Aryan” heritage, and seized thousands of them to be raised as good Nazis in Germany.
The American Left, with its dead-end secular worldview and consequent tiny birthrate, depends on two strategies to avoid simply disappearing: 1) Import lots of docile immigrants and make them dependent on the Left for government benefits, and 2) Evangelize the children of fertile, religious subcultures using government schools and media propaganda (see Disney, Inc.) to get them to convert. That’s bad enough, but it’s positively ominous to see our elites and our lawmakers take the next coercive step: treating religious parents as inherently less fit to care for their own kids.
Who knows if the Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims who seized other people’s kids really believed they were doing those children a favor by moving them to homes where they’d learn the “true” religion instead of a false one? Presumably the groomers think they’re “saving” sexually confused kids from misery and oppression by their bigoted, backward parents. The kidnappers’ rationalizations don’t matter. Taking children this way violates the most fundamental of human rights.
A mother lends out her body and risks her life, a father worries and toils, and for two decades at least they sacrifice and scramble to keep a young life going – not to just keep up a heartbeat, but to form him in health and happiness, and hopefully in holiness. Deprived by the Fall of immortality in this world, our closest approximation on Earth is to see our physical and spiritual heritage carry on after us, in the form of this image of God, whom we hope to meet someday in eternity.
There is no act more tyrannical, more prone to cause revolutions, mass emigrations, or violence and terrorism, than targeting a group as “unfit parents” and stealing their children for the little ones’ “own good.” Or the good of the State, or the Race.
When one group of citizens starts treating other groups this way, it’s a recipe for bloodshed.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.