Democrats Can't Forget Parents Are Politically Powerful and Popular
The political danger of "Don't Say Gay"
I was listening to SiriusXM’s centrist talk show host, Michael Smerconish, as he led a discussion about Florida’s now infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which allows parents to sue school districts whose teachers mention sexual orientation or gender issues in class. And I noticed Smerconish’s discussion was completely different than the discussions that are occurring in the online spaces I inhabit.
And I don’t just mean he wasn’t unequivocally opposing the law; I follow some prominent conservatives on Twitter so I have gotten a fair picture of what many of them are saying about it. Indeed, what conservatives have been saying plays right into liberal hands, with right wingers resurrecting the old Anita Bryant smear that LGBT teachers and advocates were in the “grooming” business. And of course, on the left, the bill has been christened “Don’t Say Gay” and has been portrayed as a huge intrusion on the professional judgments of educators as to age appropriate education.
Smerconish’s discussion was different than any of this. He talked almost entirely about parents. And he pointed out that he was surprised by the discourse on the left about this bill, because a majority of American parents are either members of racial minority groups or college educated, i.e., parenting is concentrated in groups that generally vote for Democrats. Why, he asked, were Democrats not centering parents in their discussions of this?
Why indeed? The answer is obviously that the Democrats have coalitional needs that prevent this. Teachers’ unions are vital to the Democratic coalition (this is the same reason Democrats don’t support inner city school voucher programs even though many Black parents who vote for Democrats love them), and the party cares a lot about LGBT groups and what they think. And while neither of these groups could fairly be characterized as anti-parent, both of them have structurally adverse relationships to parents.
With respect to teachers’ unions, the basic problem that parents pose is not much different than any busybody customer poses to a skilled professional. It’s not that they hate parents, but teachers went to college and got an education credential and studied teaching and pedagogy, and are experts about the subject generally and what goes on in their own classrooms specifically. Parents know none of that, so when parents push for restrictions on curricular or pedagogical choices that teachers believe to be important, teachers unions tend to reflect the resentment of their members about such intrusions by people who know less than they do.
With LGBT groups, the relationship with parents is complex. Again, it’s not accurate to say they are anti-parent; indeed, part of the LGBT rights product has been to establish the right of gays and lesbians to parent; advocacy groups have fought to allow same-sex couples to adopt, to grant gay parents equal rights in custody disputes, to put same-sex parents’ names on birth certificates, and for the legalization and regulation of reproductive technologies such as IVF and surrogacy which allow LGBT people to become parents.
But a segment of the LGBT community had unsupportive, or worse, parents. In some parts of the country, coming out as gay or trans often still requires a rebellion against one’s parents; some parents try to push their kids into damaging conversion therapy programs, or just cut them off entirely. Accordingly, there’s a fear of parental authority that is built into that movement.
Some of the activists and academics associated with LGBT causes are even more extreme than the mainstream groups on the parent question. There are queer theorists and prominent activists who advocate quite extreme positions such as there should be no parental authority at all and that schools should go to great lengths to keep even transitions and medical treatment secret from parents.
Moreover, other parts of the left-Democrat coalition are sympathetic to at least some of these theories and activist positions. Most notably, feminists are rightly very concerned about parents with conservative attitudes about sex preventing their daughters from accessing good information about sex, effective contraception, and abortions if they get pregnant.
So while it’s never quite text, there’s a subtext of distrust of parents that permeates the left. You can even argue that some positions taken in the 1960’s, where there was an open left rebellion against parental authority, still have some purchase in some parts of the coalition as well.
But here’s the problem: that position is very unpopular among parents themselves. For instance, parental notification and consent laws on abortion rights have always polled very well, and received a lot of support even from pro-choice parents. These parents may support their daughters’ right to get abortions, but they feel they have the right to know what is going on. Similarly, trans-skeptical activists like Abigail Shrier have gotten a lot of traction with ordinary people by reporting stories about schools who kept kids' transitions secret from parents.
There’s a legal backstop that might explain the issue with parents fairly well: we generally presume parents are doing a good job and only intervene where there’s proof that they are not. Think about this: ordinary parents make ordinary decisions on behalf of their children, including decisions that could impose serious psychological hardships down the line. For instance, parents can decide to move and remove their kids from the local schools, uprooting them from all their friends. Nobody outside of perhaps some obscure academics argues that these sorts of ordinary parenting decisions are up for “best interest of the child” review by courts or social workers. We all accept parental authority. Indeed, society even accepts parental authority on some truly difficult and vexing issues such as physically punishing a child.
Officially, we only intervene into parenting decisions where there is very strong proof of abuse. In legal terms, parents get a presumption in their favor. And culturally, they get that same presumption; even when you see a parent, say, drag a recalcitrant kid out of the cereal aisle at the supermarket, you don’t intervene, and I don’t either. We trust the parent’s decisionmaking.
So the skepticism that teachers’ unions and LGBT groups have about parents reflect a flipping of this strong cultural presumption. And in practice, such attempts are met with resistance. Parents want schools to teach their children; they do not want schools to supplant the parent’s role, make fundamental decisions as to which values to inculcate into their children, or to keep secrets from them.
“Don’t Say Gay” is a bad law. Whatever you think young children should be taught about issues of gender and sexuality, encouraging parents to sue school districts will just result in a chill of any discussion at all. Teachers will be on pins and needles when a third grader mentions that he has two female parents, or when a second grader says that she thinks she might be a boy. And Democrats need to make that argument loudly and clearly.
But “Don’t Say Gay” is also a reaction to something real. As LGBT causes have become more popular, especially on the left, educators have reached into lower and lower grades with instructional materials designed to promote the notion that children should consider whether they, in fact, have LGBT identities. This doesn’t bother me- but I’m a libertine, and, crucially, not a parent. I grew up in a bedroom community, where parents were allowed to opt their kids out of biology class during the sex education, and where my biology teachers were ordered not to discuss birth control or abortion. I thought those restrictions were stupid (and, in the case of birth control and abortion, not merely stupid but malevolent).
But here’s the thing. Politically, the reality was that in Burbank, California, at that time, if the School District had insisted that in fact the biology curriculum must be mandatory and that parents would have no choice in the matter as even the most controversial subjects were taught, well, the School Board members would have quickly found themselves out of a job. And in a world of second-best options, the option where most kids in Burbank got at least halfway decent sex education was better than the one where they got nothing at all.
You aren’t going to convince parents that they should have no say in their kids’ education, and that everything should just be left to the experts. And you are especially not going to convince parents of this with respect to some of the most sensitive subjects in the curriculum. And I hate to say this, but even the Democrats’ current messaging on “Don’t Say Gay” isn’t helping things.
I think a lot of parents hear “Don’t Say Gay” and say to themselves “why should anyone be saying ‘gay’ to my first grader?”. What you want to say about the “Don’t Say Gay” bill is something like “we understand and respect that parents have a primary role in bringing up their children. But we can’t live in a world where even a stray comment about some child having two mommies ends up in a lawsuit against the school district. This law isn’t about giving parents more say in the curriculum; it’s about giving lawyers the power to sue school districts”.
And the reason that Democrats can’t say that is the reason I wrote this post. Teachers unions and LGBT groups would get very upset if Democrats said anything, even anodyne, about the rights of parents to have some control over or even a right to know everything a school is doing with or knows about their children. Which makes this a very dangerous issue for Democrats. The position that you should be giving young children lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation may be held by a lot of educators and almost every LGBT activist; it is not, however, popular with parents.
And the electoral poison here is manifest. There’s a reason this is happening in Florida, a swing state with a lot of parents. This is an issue that could draw Hispanic and even some Black parents to the GOP, in a state with a lot of both. It’s a classic wedge issue. And the Democrats are blowing it.