‘Father and Mother Are Dear, but Dearer Still Is Chairman Mao’

‘Father and Mother Are Dear, but Dearer Still Is Chairman Mao’
Communist Chinese soldiers sing a hymn to Mao Tse Tung as they arrive in Sham Chum, three kilometers north of the Hong Kong border on Oct. 25, 1949. STAFF/AFP Getty Images
Erin Friday
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Commentary

The above Communist Chinese saying from the not-so-distant past is soon to be revived as California lawmakers move forward with the passage of four devastating bills.

With these measures, the state’s Democratic Party supermajority seeks to emancipate children at age 12 for any reason; to force parents to affirm the trans-identity of a child or lose custody; to mandate that school boards present even kindergarten students with overtly sexual material and scientifically inaccurate lessons; and to shut parents up who disagree with their school boards.

The state intends to assume the role of parents and erase actual parents from the picture. Using a familiar playbook, state leaders are encouraging teachers to supplant parents, by both passing laws to exclude parents from local governance and branding all who dissent as domestic terrorists, bigots, and insurrectionists. Children are being instructed to keep secrets from their parents. The government is shoving parents aside from controlling their own children’s medical treatments and directing children with their own belief systems.

This isn’t a new concept to the communists, and it should horrify those who fled China and other countries for our supposed “Land of the Free.” Luckily, the ability to fight back without taking up arms or fleeing in the dead of night is still possible. Powerful tools still exist that can be used to return parents to their rightful place as the sole decision-makers in their children’s care and upbringing.

San Francisco’s Chinese community has repeatedly welcomed state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) as an honored guest at many events, but he doesn’t have parents’ best interests in mind, nor children’s. Behind his outwardly mild demeanor, Mr. Wiener prioritizes the LGBTQ Caucus, which pushes the notion that a child could be born in the wrong body and that parents who don’t accept this new belief system are not worthy of being parents.

The current administration in Sacramento has been eviscerating families and parents’ rights for years with little resistance, from Democrats and Republicans alike, with the cries of equity, kindness, and nondiscrimination. But what they are doing to families isn’t kind.

12-Year-Olds Allowed to Leave Home

With Assembly Bill (AB) 665, Mr. Wiener and Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles) teamed up for a bill that will divorce children from their parents when they reach the age of 12. California law currently allows children 12 and older to self-consent to outpatient mental health care and inpatient residential shelter without parental consent, but only if they face danger at home—such as abuse or incest—or pose a serious danger to themselves or others. The counseling and residential shelter provided under the current law (Family Code section 6924) is paid for by Medi-Cal.

With AB 665, Mr. Wiener and Ms. Carrillo plan to eliminate those “danger guardrails,” and allow any 12-year-old to leave home and check into government custody at any time, for any reason, without notice to parents. Notably, neither of these lawmakers has children.

The California state Capitol in Sacramento on March 11, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The California state Capitol in Sacramento on March 11, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

To garner support for the bill, the duo has been tugging on heartstrings, claiming that AB 665 is meant only to correct a historic injustice and merely enables parity. Mr. Wiener and Ms. Carrillo decry existing law, which was created by Democrats, claiming that it’s discriminatory that low-income kids on Medi-Cal cannot hide mental health counseling from their parents like rich kids with private-pay insurance can.

In legislative hearings, the testimony in support of the bill implies that immigrant parents are ignorant and cruel and won’t consent to mental health counseling for their children. The insult to immigrant parents is overshadowed by the dishonesty about the purpose of AB 665, because it is really about emancipating children at the age of 12.

If AB 665 passes, a seventh grader need only confide in a school counselor that she had a fight with her parents and doesn’t want to go home after school. It could be over something as trivial as a bad grade. The school counselor can give the child the address of a residential shelter, and off she goes. Once at the shelter, the child can come and go as she pleases, because shelters are not locked.

This makes them favorite stalking spots for sex-traffickers and drug dealers. The shelter need only use vague and undefined “best efforts” to contact the parents with the child’s whereabouts.

Meanwhile, the parents—who did nothing wrong—will be frantically searching for their missing child. And with hostile anti-parent sentiments flooding our school system and the intentional twisting and contorting of laws to exclude parents from receiving important information about their kids, schools will be unwilling to help.

Parents will need to figure out how to find their child and get their child back, when they have done nothing to lose them in the first place. Should AB 665 pass, it will pave a pathway for gender-confused children to leave home for a housing center that will permit children to become their “authentic” selves by injecting opposite-sex hormones that have irreversible effects or slicing off healthy body parts.

Detransition advocates protest outside of the annual Pediatric Endocrine Society conference held in San Diego on May 6, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Detransition advocates protest outside of the annual Pediatric Endocrine Society conference held in San Diego on May 6, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

‘Affirm’ Gender or Lose Custody

This attack on parental rights continues with a second bill that Mr. Wiener co-authored with Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City). This bill, AB 957, seeks to remove children of any age from the custody of parents who do not support their child’s purported gender identity, regardless of how absurd it may be: eunuch gender, autism gender, agender, non-binary, “furry”—yes, these genders must be affirmed if a parent hopes to win a custody battle.

Under AB 957, gender “affirmation” will be inextricably tied to three powerful words: the “health, safety, and welfare” of a child. The result is that a judge will be mandated to find it in the best interest of the child to transition him, whether socially—such as by changing his name, pronouns, clothing, or hair—or medically—by arresting his natural puberty with estrogen that could sterilize him in as little as four months or performing radical surgery to flay his penis and invert it, barbarically fashioning a non-functioning neovagina that must be manually dilated daily to challenge the body’s natural inclination to heal the surgically created open wound by closing it.

What happens when neither divorcing parent agrees to affirm a child’s gender delusion? Under AB 957, both parents will be viewed under the law as detrimental to the child’s health, safety, and welfare. Who gets custody of the child then? Why, the state, of course. A guardian must be appointed to take control of the child away from his monstrous parents who don’t wish to sterilize him with drugs and surgery.

Because AB 957 has equated “affirmation” of a child’s transgender identity with the health, safety, and welfare of a child, even parents who are not in family court will be placed at risk of losing their gender-confused child. The laws addressing abuse and neglect refer to those magic three words as determinants to judge whether the parents are deserving of keeping their child.

If AB 957 passes, California will be the first state in the nation to codify the concept that parents who decline to harm their children with experimental drugs and irreversible surgeries on healthy body parts are abusive or neglectful. Make no mistake: Transgender interventions are barbaric and are based on abysmally low-quality evidence—so low that the UK, Sweden, and Finland have all but stopped treating gender-confused kids with drugs and knives. Norway and Denmark are also on their way to ending these unproven so-called treatments.
Transgender affirming children's books in Irvine, Calif. on Aug. 30, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Transgender affirming children's books in Irvine, Calif. on Aug. 30, 2022. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

‘Diverse’ Curriculum Required

California is not only moving to excise parents from their children’s lives and force medical interventions on children, but it’s also stealing political power from local government and nullifying voters. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Superintendent Tony Thurmond, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D-Perris) want California students to be exposed to books on transgenderism, books that teach children how to locate strangers on the internet to meet up for casual sexual encounters and how to perform a multitude of sex acts found in “This Book is Gay.”

These men cry “book banning” or “racism” when parents merely ask school boards to keep X-rated books away from children.

Mr. Jackson is the author of AB 1078, which will force school boards to accept highly offensive materials in their school libraries, even in the elementary grades. AB 1078 will allow these bullies to replace a curriculum specifically curated by local school boards elected by local voters. AB 1078 promises that if a school district does not accept the gender ideology curriculum that is creating the acute crisis of gender dysphoria among our kids, the state will intervene to buy it for the schools and fine the schools for its cost.

It isn’t hyperbole to say that public schools will become California’s version of communist reeducation camps. AB 1078 also indirectly seizes control of local school boards by proposing to defund, fine, investigate, and “dox” board members who do not fall in line with the state agenda of “sexualize children or else.”

This is exactly what recently happened in California’s Temecula Valley Unified School District, even without any law permitting it. After the district had twice reviewed and rejected the state’s recommended curriculum, Mr. Newsom and his henchmen announced they would secure state-selected textbooks for the district, fine it $1.5 million for “failure to provide adequate instructional materials,” and investigate it for “civil rights violations.”

The school board ultimately voted to accept the state curriculum, with one offensive lesson module redacted, but Mr. Newsom insisted that the civil rights investigation would still continue. The Temecula Valley debacle showed us the tyranny of AB 1078 in real time.

The Glendale Unified School Board’s final meeting of the school year draws dozens of parents, community members, and activists protesting over the district’s policies on LGBT content in schools in Glendale, Calif., on June 20, 2023. (Courtesy of Hasmik Bezirdzhyan)
The Glendale Unified School Board’s final meeting of the school year draws dozens of parents, community members, and activists protesting over the district’s policies on LGBT content in schools in Glendale, Calif., on June 20, 2023. Courtesy of Hasmik Bezirdzhyan

Charging Parents With ‘Harassment’

Finally, if Sen. Tony Portantino’s Senate Bill (SB) 596 is approved, parents and community members won’t be able to continue to support sane, lawful, and representative school boards or to ask for review or removal of materials considered inappropriate for its children. SB 596 was drafted in direct response to protests by Glendale Unified School District parents over obscene and pornographic materials found in the schools.

In order to quell future unrest, SB 596 seeks to jail, fine up to $1,000, or do both to any adult for “harassing or making a credible threat” against a school employee or an employee’s family member while the employee is away from the school site or after school hours “for reasons related to the school employee’s course of duties, including, but not limited to, instruction” even on social media. SB 596 seeks to stifle fundamental, constitutionally guaranteed, and protected rights to free speech, assembly, and petition of the state to redress grievances.

Each one of these appalling measures can be stopped, yet it will take determined citizens who are willing to visit their representatives’ offices in person, make a few phone calls, or send a few emails. Democracy is still enshrined in California’s government. Locate your representative at http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov.
Anyone can call and ask his or her representative to vote “No” on AB 665, AB 957, AB 1078, and SB 596 or any other bills that they don’t believe represent their values. Mr. Newsom can be contacted through www.gov.ca.gov. He can veto the bills should they actually make it to his desk. Silence is acquiescence; apathy is complicity. Democracy demands citizen participation.
Nicole Pearson contributed to this report.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Erin Friday
Erin Friday
Author
Erin Friday, Esq., is a licensed California attorney and co-lead of the U.S. branch of Our Duty, a parent group dedicated to protecting children from gender ideology. Friday is a lifelong Democrat who voted for same-sex marriage.
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