Authoritarianism for Thee, But Not for Me
Leftists only care about some parents’ rights.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes think child abuse is not the government’s “[expletive] business.”
Rational people beg to differ, which is why most Americans oppose children being given hormones and surgery to try to change their gender. And it’s why Florida Republicans banned such “treatments” and gave courts permission to revoke custody for parents who try to circumvent the law.
Hayes’ opinion doesn’t much matter, but it is representative of two important norms in liberal groupthink. The first is that gender-confused children who can’t drive and need parents’ permission to go on field trips have independent authority to decide that their biological sex is wrong. The second is that gender issues only violate parental rights when it’s convenient for liberals’ narrative.
Violating parental rights is a critical part of normalizing gender-confusion and body mutilation for children. That’s probably why supporters are so keen to pull kids into the system as quickly and completely as possible, misleading and manipulating parents along the way. In Texas, a children’s hospital was recently exposed for its practice of railroading kids into submission to sterilizing hormone treatments and amputations. According to the whistleblower who claims to have witnessed the doctors’ actions firsthand, parents were browbeaten into accepting the treatments and shamed with false claims that their children would harm themselves if not allowed to transition. The situation is even worse in numerous “blue” states, which in recent years have legislated away parents’ right to a say in how their gender-confused children are treated.
Incidentally, Chris Hayes and much of his millions-strong audience seem to be fine with this. Hayes recently described Republican-led efforts to put the brakes on transitioning children as a plot to “cut off” young people from “healthcare.” This kind of language reveals a lot about how liberals think: to them, accepting the word of a distraught child as the green light to permanently deprive them of life functions and body parts is healthy. But parents–who know their children best–voicing concerns about the consequences amounts to inflicting harm and must be shut down.
Gender extremism is just the latest in the Left’s philosophy that the rules only go one way, that those who disagree with them do not have a right to speak out and participate in civil society. It’s authoritarian to make slaughtering unborn children illegal, but not authoritarian to require taxpayers and
private citizens to pay for abortion. It’s not authoritarian to tear down the Founders’ statues and require Critical Race Theory in schools—but it is authoritarian to require protesters to not burn down neighborhoods.
When it comes to abortion, even not wanting taxpayer dollars to enable it is “discriminatory” according to the Guttmacher Institute, one the most powerful pro-abortion groups in the country. When parents start expressing concerns about race and sex indoctrination in the public schools their taxes fund, they find themselves targeted by the Department of Justice. The message is clear: “rights” are something reserved for liberals in positions of power. And while this has renewed attention under the Biden administration, it was the Obama administration which tried to force schools to put male students female bathrooms and locker rooms or lose federal funding.
In Chris Hayes’ world, authoritarianism is when elected officials don’t want kids mutilated for gender identity reasons or in the womb…but forcing people to pay for abortions, and removing kids from parents who don’t buy into the gender identity narrative, is just fine.
Government absolutely has a role in protecting kids from bad parents. Liberals just don’t understand who the bad parents are.
Paul Revere is the pseudonym of a conservative writer.
