Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe attacked the right of parents to have a say in the public-school curriculum, revealing the left’s “power to the state” obsession, cancelling the old New Left’s slogan: “power to the people.”
The left has a fanatical belief in government. They just don’t get how out-of-step with regular people this makes them. Very much including people of color.
McAuliffe declared, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. ...” He doubled down on Meet the Press.
After McAuliffe’s humiliating defeat, the left went off to fight “book banning,” libeling parents’ objections to age-inappropriate material in the schools. Sly!
Conservative commentators tended to focus on the political cost of rejecting the legitimacy of parental concern about giving schoolteachers, who in turn are channeling avant-garde elites, unchecked power to prescribe morality. It’s bigger than that.
The “culture war” really is the left’s cultural revolution. The right’s cultural counter-revolution is a “love that dare not speak its name.” It’s mostly about sex.
Out of a comely modesty, this fight typically gets euphemized as about “privacy” or “consent” or “choice.” That said… it’s largely about sex: access to erotic artworks (extending to the pornographic), birth control, free love, modesty, gender preferences, marriage, and abortion. Secondarily, America's legitimacy.
The parental rights fight is largely over whose morality will be the standard for the next generation. However, in undermining parental rights, the left undermines the very constitutional grounds by which they have so capably advanced their agenda.
Per “Exploring Constitutional Conflicts,”
The Supreme Court, in two decisions in the 1920s, read the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty clause to prohibit states from interfering with the private decisions of educators and parents to shape the education of children. In Meyer v Nebraska (1923), the Supreme Court struck down a state law that prohibited the teaching of German and other foreign languages to children until the ninth grade. … Two years later, in Pierce v Society of Sisters, the Court applied the principles of Meyer to strike down and Oregon law that compelled all children to attend public schools….
The doctrines generated by two parental rights cases formed the precedents on which the Supreme Court relied in striking down a state’s law prohibiting contraceptives to married couples, a right to possess and view pornography, and the basis for a woman’s supposed right to “choose.” And so on.
Much “progressive” judicial advocacy — and their Supreme Court victories — is founded in two Supreme Court cases affirming parental rights as fundamental constitutional rights. If the left succeeds in demolishing parental rights, they would undermine the foundation on which much of their cultural revolution has been built.
Big oopsie! That said, the leaders of the right don’t grasp how precarious the left’s predicament is. The right almost always fails to exploit the left’s internal contradictions.
I know first-hand. I was president of a conservative advocacy group, “Of the People,” in the 1990s. We proposed a state parental rights constitutional amendment.
In opposing us, the left relied on a false claim that such an amendment would shield child abuse. It wasn’t a good faith argument, but it worked.
Outspent, misrepresented, weakened by factional infighting, we failed at the Colorado ballot box. And yet.
Our underpowered effort terrified the left.
The Guttmacher Institute’s after action report concluded “the [defeat in Colorado] … appears to reflect a failure on the part of the amendment's supporters to mount a serious campaign. … They thought Of The People's deep pockets and the public's perception that parents have rights were all it would take,” observes Patrick Steadman, deputy campaign manager for Protect Our Children, the coalition that opposed the amendment. Steadman and others believe that the race might have been much closer if the proponents had mounted an effective campaign.”
Surely true. Yet our (in reality, shallow-pocketed) initiative led to knock on or copycat initiatives in 28 states.
The hard left People for the American Way used our Parental Rights Amendment as Exhibit A in its direct mail fundraising for years after. When I saw one, I called its then-president, Ralph Neas to complain that they were not attacking me by name. The notoriety would have been invaluable!
Of The People’s Parental Rights Amendment was ahead of its time. The time is now.
The Atlantic shrewdly frames the left’s reality distortion field in an article by Olga Khazan (mentioning Of the People in passing), Red Parent, Blue Parent: “parents are divided over what matters most: parents’ rights or the common good.” False choice.
That said, the leaders of Conservatism, Inc. only dimly, if at all, grasp the magnitude of the parents’ rights threat to the left. And may fumble it. Again.
Memo to the right: Parental rights would be a very powerful tool to thwart the progressive’s ongoing cultural revolution.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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