Front Burner - The origins of “parental rights”

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Over the last couple of months, the provincial governments in both New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have made controversial changes to their LGBTQ+ policies at schools. Parental consent is now needed when a student under 16 wants to use a different name or pronoun in the classroom. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has also been saying that schools should leave conversations about LGBTQ issues to parents. This is all happening at a time when the concept of “parental rights” is a top issue for U.S Republicans. A parental rights bill was passed in the Republican-held House earlier this year and more than two dozen statehouses have passed similar legislation. Today on Front Burner, the Washington Post’s Emma Brown on the origins of the parental rights movement in the U.S. and how it became a massive political force and how that might help us understand the implications in Canada. Looking for a transcript of the show? They’re available here daily: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. I'm Tamara Kandaker. So right now, if you're a student under the age of 16 in both New Brunswick and in Saskatchewan, and you want to use a different name from your given name or a different pronoun in the classroom,

you have to get your parents' permission, as per policies introduced in the last couple of months by their provincial governments. There's been a lot of concern around these policies, about the kind of harm they could cause to trans and non-binary youth. We're making the government aware that this is not acceptable, that they are putting children's lives at risk. By outing them to people that they're not ready to come out to is not the right thing to do for our kids and youth. School should be a safe place where you can trust the people around you and be yourself and sometimes home isn't that. I know one of my friends would most likely get kicked out of their house and another one could be at risk of physical abuse. Like, that's the reality of the situation. But in defending these policies, the premiers of both provinces have been emphasizing the needs of another group.

This is Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe. This policy by its very design is designed to include parents in their child's education, to include parents in their child's school. What can be more supportive than bringing parents closer to what is happening in their schools?

Asked about who was consulted on the policy changes, Moe said on social media that he believed, quote, the leading experts in children's upbringing are their parents. New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs has also talked a lot about the needs and rights of parents. What we're hearing certainly are parents learning more about the policy and wanting to know more and wanting to play a role in their children's education. And wondering how there could be a policy

that would actually hide information from them. Conservative leader Pierre Palliev has echoed this rhetoric. Look, this is a provincial policy. The prime minister has no business in decisions that should rest with provinces and parents. So my message to Justin Trudeau is butt out and let provinces run schools and let parents raise kids. These arguments aren't new, especially when it comes to policies and curriculum around gender identity and sexual orientation in school.

But the people making them have become louder, at a time when the concept of parental rights is a top issue in the U.S. for Republicans. Back in March, a parental rights bill was passed in the Republican-held House, and more than two dozen state houses have passed similar legislation. Today, I'm talking to The Washington Post's Emma Brown about the origins of the parental rights movement in the U.S., how it became a massive political force there, and how that might help us understand the implications of similar rhetoric here in Canada. Hi, Emma, it's great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.

I wanted to start with the term parental rights. On the surface, it sounds unobjectionable because parents would have their children's best interests at heart. But tell me about how this term has been used recently. Yeah, the parental rights movement is definitely a distinctive movement that has a political valence to it. It is a conservative movement here in the United States that has come to represent parents who are concerned about what's being taught in schools and are seeking, in many instances, to limit what can be taught about sexuality and gender and race and history. Yeah. And can you give me some notable examples of where parental rights has been used to push legislation and shape policy in the U.S.? I am a former education reporter, and issues around children and education are always sort of, I feel, when I covered education, sort of on the sidelines. And more recently, the parental rights movement has moved to the center of politics, particularly in Republican politics.

This has parental rights movement has moved to the center of politics, particularly in Republican politics. And we see that especially in in Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, really won the governor's seat back from Democrats on a platform of parental rights. Because it's time to get back to normal. It's time to empower parents. And I am so excited that Virginia is leading in a bipartisan way to give parents the power to choose whether their child wears a mask or not in school. And in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has turned it into the center, not only of his governorship, but of his argument that he should be president. I think the idea that somehow your own kids, when they go to the school system, that parents have no role and what's going on

there is absurd. Of course, parents have a fundamental role in the education of their kids and the upbringing of their kids. And that's just the way it's got to be. Right. So this has also come up in Canada and New Brunswick and in Saskatchewan with a couple of policies that I mentioned in the intro. Now we've heard Ontario Premier Doug Ford also weigh in, saying that parents should be informed if their child wants to use a different pronoun. It's not up to the teachers. It's not up to the school boards to indoctrinate our kids.

You know, it's the parents' responsibility to hear what the kids are doing and not the school board. I feel like it's worth noting parental rights never seem to involve parents who want more inclusive policies and who do want their kids to learn about race and identity. Like you said, it's used more in socially conservative circles. It's used more in socially conservative circles. And there are people who think that it's a dog whistle about LGBTQ plus people, for example. And I'm wondering what kind of pushback have we seen around this from the LGBTQ plus community? Well, first, I'll say that the legislation that has been passing here in our state, in our state governments and some of our state governments

sounds similar to the push that's happening in Canada. So in Florida, DeSantis and the Republican dominated legislature there have passed laws, you know, to limit what has what can be taught about sexuality and gender. This morning, the Florida law critics dubbed the Don't Say Gay Bill is expanding. Gender ideology has no place in our K-12 school system. Florida's Board of Education agreed to ban classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades except for health class. And there are a number of legal efforts underway to push back against policies in schools that allow children to transition genders at school, sometimes without their parents' knowledge or consent. So the same issues, it sounds like, are at play here as in

Canada. And it's become such a central political issue. And so we see it happening on a political front that there's pushback against these efforts. But I think there's also sort of a quieter effort among parents of LGBT students and parents who are concerned about LGBT students to figure out how to handle this new landscape. What kind of harm do these parents and advocates for LGBTQ plus students say that these kinds of policies have on kids? What I hear from parents of LGBT students and advocates for those students is that these

policies being passed in the name of parental rights, that they are in opposition to children's rights and to the health and mental health of children. I've seen situations where kids aren't able to tell their parents and it increases chances of self-harm and suicide. Kids that are trans are 10 times more likely to commit suicide. So there's a lot of outrage, I think, among those folks as to the way that this is being framed as a parental rights issue, because they say, you know, which parents? It's only some parents that this movement represents. Which parents? It's only some parents that this movement represents. Yeah. And some of the issues where the idea of parental rights is being invoked are issues where kids would want protection from their parents, right? Like in cases, for example, where kids don't feel safe coming out as gay or trans to their families. Absolutely.

I mean, that is the argument that I hear from parents who are concerned about these measures that children and some families need to have the space at school and the trusted adults at school to come out to talk about everything that's going on inside them that they don't feel safe talking with their parents about. And so there's sort of this tension between, I think, children's rights in the eyes of many and parents' rights. And, you know, this movement, the parental rights movement has sort of burst into the mainstream recently, but it has been simmering for a long time at the fringes of the Republican Party here. And this tension between, you know, parental rights and children's rights is longstanding and goes back decades.

Yeah, and I want to talk about the history of this movement in a bit. But first, like you mentioned, it's really exploded politically recently in the U.S. And that hasn't really happened at the same scale or been as organized an effort in Canada. We've mostly seen parents kind of sporadically organize on issues of gender identity and sexuality. Like, for example, there were these protests here in Ontario in 2015 over revamping the sex ed curriculum. Is to teach this radical program. And I don't believe any person has the right to enforce their own idea of sexuality on the entire school board. Two million children. It's wrong. Your parental rights don't come from Kathleen Wynne.

They come, your parental rights come from God. Similar types of protests have happened elsewhere in the country, but it hasn't been a full-fledged movement. So why do you think the parental rights movement has gained so much traction in the U.S. in the last few years? Well, when I talk to people who are on all sides of this issue, they pretty much all agree that the pandemic played a really key role in kind of galvanizing and then accelerating, uh, the growth of this movement. There was much to be upset about during the pandemic for sure, including, you know, school parents were upset about school closures, about the way online school was being conducted.

Then there was when kids were back to school, lots of debate, of course, about mask mandates and so on. And I think there was an energy among parents that was galvanized and a political engagement that happened there that people, as I said, on all sides of this issue sort of agree, got this ball rolling in a big way in the United States. Yeah. And then we saw politicians like Ron DeSantis and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin kind of seize on the discontent of parents who had been watching over kids while schools were closed, right? Absolutely. I mean, at first, there was sort of a wave of executive orders and legislation in states like Virginia under Youngkin and Florida under DeSantis around

banning mask mandates. And then that sort of moved into the realm of so-called critical race theory and opposing critical race theory, which is sort of a way of talking about how we teach about race and history and Black history and slavery in the United States. And then more recently, we've seen it with, it's sort of morphed more into legislation and policies around gender and how schools handle transgender students, gender transition, and how schools handle sex ed. gender transition and how schools handle sex ed. Okay, so that's what we've seen in recent years. But like you said, this movement actually has a long and pretty fascinating history in the U.S. that you wrote about. So can you tell me about its origins? Yes. So the the parental rights movement has become this incredibly powerful force in recent years.

But it has been, as I said before, sort of simmering for many years on the fringes. And it goes back really to the 1980s, to the movement among Christian homeschoolers to legalize homeschooling around the country. And the leader of that movement is a conservative lawyer named Mike Ferris or Michael Ferris. I'm here to speak to you about the, I think the ultimate form of privatization of education that is homeschooling, but I'm also here in support of the basic concepts of privatization because I believe... He is best known for his efforts to, and they were successful efforts to legalize homeschooling around the country with the argument that, you know, parents should have the right

to educate their children as they see fit. Now, homeschool freedom means basically this. All freedom is actually pretty simple. Freedom means the ability to, you make the decision rather than government make the decision. Where should your kids go to school? Who makes the decision? A free parent, a free parent decides, I'll make the decision where my child goes to school. So that's what he's best known for. But really, he's also had a longstanding interest in how public schools operate. And he started fighting for the rights of homeschoolers around the same time that there was a lot of panic in the U.S. around communism and like the moral direction of the country. public education system that were about giving local school systems more power and giving

parents more of a choice about where to send their kids to school. But better education doesn't mean a bigger department of education. In fact, that department should be abolished. Instead, we must do a better job teaching the basics, insisting on discipline and results, encouraging competition, and above all, remembering that education does not begin with Washington officials or even state and local officials. It begins in the home. Well, Ferris really comes out of that. I mean, he cut his teeth in that time period. He was a lawyer

for the Moral Majority, which is a socially conservative and religiously affiliated group. He represents a wing of American politics, which is sort of grounded in an evangelical Christianity, is pushing back against, for example, gay marriage. I mean, Ferris argued against the authority of the federal government to decriminalize gay sex. You know, he has like a long history of really socially conservative positions. What we've been about in the conservative movement, in the pro family, pro-life, pro-Bible movement for the last 20 years or so, is we've been about putting our fingers in the dike. In particular, there's so many problems in education because while we try our best to get leaders who have the right values, we keep training up the next

generation in the wrong values on a systematic basis. Mike Ferris is not a household name in the United States. He's not really widely known outside of conservative circles. But he has had this enormous impact. And you can hear it in the rhetoric that's being used today by Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin and even former President Donald Trump as he campaigns again. When they talk about parental rights and when they talk about what they see as the problems in public schools, they are using talking points that Mike Ferris has been using for decades. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples,

I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So religion has historically been part of this movement in the U.S. and it still is to this day. In Canada, we've seen a bit of that. We've seen in recent months, for example, in Alberta and Ontario, some Muslim parents take their kids out of school to protest elements of the school curriculum around gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as pride celebrations. In the past, we've seen some fundamentalist Christian groups protest gender-inclusive policies. and they say that it's about religious freedom and that these events and these policies are not aligned with their faith. What role does religion play in the parental rights movement today in the U.S.?

It plays a really important role. I mean, Ferris and people like him have been arguing for a long time that schools are trying to foist a secularism upon students and shouldn't be allowed to do that. By three-fourths of the teenagers believe in situational ethics. Only 9% believe that morality is absolute and the rest are mixed up. It is an alarming fact that can only be credited to the fact of where our kids getting in their education and their values from the media. We must be alarmed at these factors. And that argument has never really caught hold in our courts. But I think that with the conservative Supreme Court that we have now and a judiciary

that's really influenced by the number of conservative judges who were appointed by former President Trump, there are sort of a renewed set of challenges to argue that schools are too secular and are sort of enforcing a secular worldview in a way that violates parents' rights to determine their family's faith. And that argument is made a lot around how schools talk about gender and how schools talk about race. Right. But there are a lot of people who say that this movement, it's not about religion, it's about something else entirely, And that's undermining the public education system. So can you talk about the kind of impact that the parental rights movement is

having on that front in the U.S.? Yeah, I think that one remarkable thing that I learned in my reporting is how what began as an effort to, you know, ensure the rights of parents to opt out of the public school system is really now showing itself to be a movement that is about influencing the public school system itself. And in a couple of ways, one way is through, you know, limiting or shaping what can be taught about gender and sexuality and race in schools, and what books can be in libraries and all of that. And another is what you just said, it's how our public dollars are used. There have long been efforts to expand vouchers in the US to allow people to essentially take the public money that would go to their public schools if

their child went to the public schools and use it for private schools. And that effort has just been supercharged in the last few years, coinciding with the rise of the parental rights movement. So we see now in a number of conservative states, these new programs that are not just sort of voucher programs to allow students and often impoverished students to escape poor public schools, which is what vouchers have traditionally been in the United States, but to allow all students everywhere to opt out of public schools and take their money with them, not only to private schools, but for homeschooling. So it's a sort of unleashing of public money into families' pocketbooks and into private schools. And this is happening in a way that

advocates for public school fear is really undermining public schools by draining them of the resources they need. So Emma, in the US, these conversations around parental rights, they've been going on for a while and in Canada, they're growing. I'm wondering, what do you think Canadians should keep an eye out for as that conversation evolves here? Well, I think there's two things. One is there's a lot, I learned a lot about our current parental rights movement by looking at the history and coming to understand where it came from. So I found that really instructive to understanding the United States movement better. And then the second thing is

thinking about which parents are included, as we talked about earlier, in the parental rights movement and which are not. So I spoke, for example, to the mother of a transgender student who in Virginia, following a policy that Governor Youngkin put forth that would change how schools handle transgender students in a way that this mother found pretty offensive. And she said to me, look, which parents are really served by this? And which students are really served by this? She said, not me and not my, not my child. And this is a parent who has actually really politically connected. She's a school board member in one of Virginia's largest school districts. She is running for the state legislature. and unified voice to kind of provide, you know, an alternate point of view to the parents who

are organized under the, you know, quote unquote, parental rights movement. Okay, Emma, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Kendacker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.