Schools Overriding Parent Authority Caused by Breakdown of Family: Sponsor of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill

Majority of Americans support parental rights: Florida Rep. Joe Harding

Florida state representative Joe Harding in Gainesville, Fla., on Sept. 27, 2022. The Epoch Times

Florida State Rep. Joe Harding spearheaded Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which received the misnomer “Don’t Say Gay Bill” from the progressive left. He believes schools have become emboldened to override parental authority because there has been a fundamental breakdown of the family and the family’s role in American society.

“It’s a breakdown in understanding of what the role of the family is, and you cannot replace parents with government,” Harding said during a Sept. 27 interview with EpochTV’s American Thought Leader program.

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• From Gender Theory Guides to ‘Transition’ Questionnaires–Florida State Rep. Joe Harding on the Fight for Parental Rights in Education

Harding is a father of four and runs a business, both of which keep him very busy. But they are also what make the work he does as a state legislator all the more meaningful, he said.

Harding authored Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill because he saw that schools were trying to usurp parents’ authority in making decisions about their children’s education, especially concerning the teaching of sex and the indoctrination of gender ideology.

After being elected in 2020, he heard various anecdotes from parents and was deeply disturbed by one particular incident in which a 12-year-old girl had multiple meetings behind closed doors with people from the school district in Leon County, helping her change her name and change your pronoun.

“We can’t have an idea that a school district could have a closed-door meeting with my child, not include me as the parent,” Harding said. And to compound the situation, the concerned parents were told that the school wouldn’t disclose what was said at those closed meetings with their child.

“What it showed me was that it was so important that we do something now before it’s too late,” Harding said.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis displays the signed Parental Rights in Education bill flanked by elementary school students during a news conference at Classical Preparatory school in Shady Hills, Fla., on March 28, 2022. Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times via AP

Essentially, the new Florida law tries to empower parents by designating the parents as the final decision makers on any issue that impacts their child physically or emotionally, as well as prohibiting the teaching of gender ideology in K to 3rd grade, and enabling parents to sue school districts if staff violate the law.

The original bill was going to focus on countering unapproved curriculum guides that teach gender ideology. But when Harding saw that some schools were putting out a questionnaire asking students, “do you want your parents to be involved in helping you transition, in our school as he, to a she, or however you want to do it,” he knew the bill had to address this secrecy.

Young children were being allowed to make decisions without the knowledge or consent of their parents, Harding said, which was very troubling.

In 2022, 26 states pre-filed or introduced bills that aimed to empower parents as the final authority in their child’s life. To date, six of these laws have been enacted; two in Florida, two in Arizona, and one each in Georgia and Louisiana. One in Kansas has cleared the legislature and is on the governor’s desk.

Some of these bills update the existing “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” while others are brand new efforts fueled by parents’ protesting what is happening in schools across the country. Many of the bills mandate transparency in the school curriculum, while some bills outline the rights parents have always had at school board meetings.

State legislatures believe these laws are necessary because many schools around the country train their staff to secretly affirm whatever gender a student chooses for themselves, by using preferred pronouns and names without telling the parents.

Houston-area teacher and staff training slide presented this school year. Courtesy of Julie Pickren

Parents have begun protesting extreme, non-academic related curriculum and activities, including drag queens story hours where an adult man dresses as a woman and does a strip tease show in front of young children, and sexually explicit graphic novels in school libraries.

"We the people: for parental rights and against liberal groomers": a local protests outside Luther Jackson Middle School in Falls Church, Va., before a Fairfax County Public Schools board meeting on Sept. 15, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

There is a widespread issue of activist groups bypassing the normal curriculum review process and getting curriculum about gender identity and sex into the schools, Harding said.

“We had more and more people reaching out and saying our county has one [gender identity-related curriculum guide] just like this. And that was probably the scariest part because these guides were not being voted on in public meetings ... They figured out a way to bypass it with an activist agenda.”

Activists, Media, Corporations Promote Ideology

Activist groups then spun Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill as an “anti-gay” effort to take away the rights of trans and gay students, which was false, Harding said.

These left-wing groups started blanketing the Florida capitol with pamphlets.

Members and supporters of the LGBTQ community attend the "Say Gay Anyway" rally in Miami Beach, Fla., on March 13, 2022. Florida's state senate on March 8 passed a controversial bill banning lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity for kids in kindergarten through third grade when they are eight or nine years old, a step that critics complain will hurt the LGBTQ community. CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images

“All my freshmen colleagues are getting these pamphlets dropped off at their desks that basically says: Help us stop the ‘Don’t say the Gay’ bill, this bill is targeting trans children ... just rhetoric,” Harding said. “It was my first kind of glimpse into how dirty and how low these groups will go to spin up a narrative.”

The mainstream media parroted this narrative and prime-time TV news hosts were calling it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill too, Harding said.

“In many ways, we were losing the messaging war on this bill, not because our message was not good, but because we didn’t have the power of the media.”

Harding said even some of his Democrat colleagues privately supported Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill but publicly had to go along with their party’s narrative. And one Democrat who did support the bill lost his primary election to a progressive candidate.

About 150 people attend a rally to oppose The Walt Disney Company's stance against a recently passed Florida law that prohibits schools from teaching their youngest students about sexual orientation and gender identity, outside of Disney's headquarters in Burbank, Calif., on April 6, 2022. Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times

After the bill passed both chambers in the Florida legislature, the Disney Corporation got vocal in opposing the legislation, trying to pressure Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to veto it.

“I think Disney misjudged the amount of energy that was behind this bill already.

“Disney came out with a statement that [said] that we’re going to work to make sure that House Bill 5057, my bill gets repealed,” Harding said. “Unfortunately, Disney is no longer the company that Walt Disney founded. It’s now a California-based company with California values and it doesn’t align with Florida.”

Republicans’ National Parental Rights Bill

Republican Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the U.S. House introduced a bill called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act of 2022,” which “prohibits the use of federal funds to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10.”

“The bill prohibits federal funds from being used to host or promote events, where adults dance salaciously or strip for children,” it added.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) speaks to reporters in Washington on May 14, 2021. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Drag queens Athena Kills (C) and Scalene Onixxx arrive to awaiting adults and children for Drag Queen Story Hour at Cellar Door Books in Riverside, Calif., on June 22, 2019. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

An LGBTQ rights group, GLAAD’s president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, responded to the Republicans’ bill.

Ellis said the content of Johnson’s bill was “misinformation.”

“The American people see this for what it is: a desperate and losing effort targeting the most vulnerable students, with the goal of spreading lies,” Ellis said in a press statement.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Campaign Government Affairs Director David Stacy in an Oct. 19 statement called Republicans who support the bill and their constituents “extremists.”

However, Harding believes that most Americans would agree with the content of legislation like Florida’s parental rights law if they read it for themselves.

“I believe the majority of Americans realize what is happening in our schools: targeting our children, trying to indoctrinate our children. Enough is enough,” he said.