Parental rights should not be a cover for child abuse.
The principle of subsidiarity is not absolute.
The GOP has historically been the party of “subsidiarity”: those closest to the problem, often the family, should be the ones to solve it. This has lately led to the rise of the parental rights movement, which mushroomed under COVID as parents saw the divisive poppycock being taught their kids online.
Parental rights, however, are subservient to a higher principle of protecting life and doing no harm. At last night’s 4th GOP primary debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Chris Christie and Nikki Haley failed to grasp that higher principle, as they both claimed they would defer to parents when it comes to questions of gender reassignment.
In May of this year, fellow Presidential candidate, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill prohibiting “sex-reassignment prescriptions and procedures for patients younger than 18 years of age.” The ban encompassed cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries. While Haley personally supports pushing the age at one can surgically transform one’s body to 18—the same age at which one can get a tattoo in her words—she ignores the fundamental question of child protection.
In response to the DeSantis bill, in a June 5 interview with CBS News, Tony Dokoupil asked Haley, “What care should be on the table when a 12-year-old child in this country assigned female at birth says, ‘actually I feel more comfortable living as a boy.’ What should the law allow the response to be?”
Haley responded, “I think the law should stay out of it and I think parents should handle it… And then when that child becomes 18, if they want to make more of a permanent change, they can do that.” But Haley wants to have it both ways. Schools in many states block parents from even knowing if their child is questioning their identity, let alone seeking “gender-affirming medical care.” So, in making it a parental rights issue for preteens, she effectively punts on the question of right and wrong.
Just as it is not OK for a civilized society to embrace infanticide, it is not OK for it to tolerate preteen genital mutilation under the guise of affirming a child's identity. Strong scientific evidence suggests that the human brain does not fully develop until well into its early to late twenties. One of the last parts to mature, the prefrontal cortex, helps regulate a wide array of executive functions, including foreseeing the consequences of one's decisions as well as impulse and emotion control. Enabling child-directed life-altering body changes before a child’s brain can fully process the long-term implications of those changes is not “compassionate care.” It’s abuse.
And couching preteen sex change surgery as a form of “liberation” as many well-meaning but misguided parents do, is an imposition of an adult political agenda upon a child, whose decisions about purpose and identity change myriad times before they turn 18, let alone 28, while making a mockery of genuine social justice movements built on affirming who one ineluctably is from birth.
It is unconscionable that a civilized society, let alone Republicans who ostensibly prioritize life, would allow children to engage in self-harm. Pre-teen genital mutilation is not a parental decision, let alone a child's decision. It falls within the ambit of the state to prevent and prosecute this unique, insidious, and rising form of abuse.
Former New Jersey Governor, and professional Trump antagonist, Chris Christie, argued last night that letting the state into these intimate questions would invite a slippery slope of further intrusions. Christie: “I get to make the decisions about my children, not anybody else, and every parent that’s out there who’s watching tonight, you start to turn over just a little bit of this authority? The authority they take from you next, you’re not going to like.”
But preventing child abuse no more invites the state into all parental decisions than seat belts and stop signs invite the state to drive one's car. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron Desantis clearly understood that distinction last night. Chris Christie and Nikki Haley did not. And that should seriously inform the decisions of GOP voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and beyond.