Parents have a fundamental right to raise their children and to know how their children are being educated in the classroom. It’s astonishing and downright incomprehensible to think that parents should have to petition their child’s teacher, school, and state to parent their own child. Education used to mean providing children with a learning environment reasonably free from any particular bias or ideology, and primarily teaching children fundamental tools such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, schools have shifted their focus from education to indoctrination, which is producing nothing but confused children and continued political polarization. The idea that Governor Youngkin’s proposed policies to simply have parental involvement in the lives of students is somehow a radical notion reflects how we have completely missed the mark to create a society that understands where responsibilities lie. Parents should parent their children. Schools should educate children. And they should truly educate them – in a way that is suitably understood to be beneficial for their general upbringing and development, not to wield them as tools of the latest ideological fad. Today’s radical gender ideology is untested, unproven, unscientific, and flies in the face of all principles of natural law and innate design. If you want to see distrust in the institutions, this is how you get distrust in the institutions. Children are not conveniently accessible blank slates for their teachers to shape and mold into their own images, contrary to popular belief. Children are, unequivocally and fundamentally, the creation of and responsibility of their own parents above all other community resources and institutions.
I support Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Model Policy provisions, and am proud of the nuanced and balanced approach he has presented for honoring the differences of students and their families, and protecting the parental rights of Virginians.