Tag: parental rights

Colorado Could Be The Parental Rights Canary In The Coal Mine

Some may look at the pending Colorado legislation destroying parental rights and wrongly see the last gasps of a dying woke regime.   

The dystopian state house bill, HB 25-1312 or better known as the “Kelly Loving Act,” allows the Colorado government to remove a child from her parents if parents refuse to go along with her gender dysphoria and self-styled new identity. It represents the most totalitarian legal destruction of parental rights in American history. 

The bill passed the Colorado House and Senate. To understand why this destructive legislation might become Colorado law, we need to look closer at the cultural understructure. 

The most politically powerful defenders of children are married, biological parents. In 1970, married households with kids under age 18 made up 40 percent of all American households. Today, that number stands at just 17.8 percent of all households. 

Colorado sits on the front edge of the demographic cliff with K-12 schools already starting to shutter. According to the US Census, married households with kids in the state are just 81 percent of the national average at 14.4 percent of all households.   

So, this evil legislation makes some political sense. The less married parents with kids in any electorate district, the more vulnerable parents and kids are to the onslaught of state power. 

And given current trends in marriage and fertility rates – our future politics may look a lot more like Colorado’s politics than anyone realizes. This legal threat to parental rights will spread. 

Here’s what we know both from the data and common sense.  

A man not married to the mother of his child is less present in the day-to-day life of his child. Nearly all unmarried dads are nonresident dads who see their child less than once a week within two years of becoming a nonresident dad. A large portion of these men see their child only monthly or even less. These children don’t just lack the vital day-to-day influence that only a loving, present father can provide, they lose a powerful advocate and protector – particularly in politics.   

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Virginia passes law to limit time teens spend on social media to one hour a day

Virginia teens under 16 will soon face limits on their social media usage after Governor Glenn Youngkin signed new legislation into law.

The law requires social media companies to set default time limits of one hour per day for users under 16 years old, with parents having the ability to adjust that time up or down.

“It’s a good first start, and it’s a good way for parents to be able to have better control over how much social media their kids are on,” said Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D – Henrico), who co-sponsored the legislation.

VanValkenburg, who teaches in Henrico County schools, has witnessed the impact of excessive social media use firsthand.

“You see how much it hinders their ability to do well in school, and you see how much it hinders their socialization with their friends,” VanValkenburg said.

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Affirm Your Kid’s Chosen Gender Or Lose Custody? Colorado’s Chilling New Bill

The Colorado state legislature is considering a bill that would radically chill parents’ speech. Dubbed the “Kelly Loving Act,” the bill, if signed into law, would empower judges to consider “deadnaming” and “misgendering” your child to be types of “coercive control” when they’re making custody decisions. In simple terms: if your child gender transitions and you don’t affirm their new gender identity, then a judge could consider your non-affirmation to be a form of abuse and use it as justification to deny you custody of your child.

This is a deeply chilling bill. The bill’s sponsors frame it as a way to show support for transgender people, but this bill goes way too far in stripping away parents’ rights.

Being a good and loving parent means telling your child “no.” Every parent has had these conversations.

“No, you can’t have M&Ms for dinner; eat your broccoli.”

“No, you can’t stay up until midnight. Your bedtime is ten.”

“No, you can’t hang out with Chad who’s always high; find some friends who will have a better influence on you.”

But when it comes to gender transitioning, saying “no” could be dangerous. If your son decides to socially transition and begins calling himself a girl, and you don’t unconditionally affirm that decision, then you could risk losing him if you’re ever in a child custody battle.

Some advocates of gender transitioning say that socially transitioning is harmless. After all, what does it matter if your son starts to use female pronouns and wear dresses? The problem is that socially transitioning puts many children on a conveyor belt to medically transitioning. According to a 2022 study on the topic, a stunning 97.5 percent of young people who socially transitioned continued to identify as either trans or nonbinary several years later. Nearly 60 percent went on to medically transition via either puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

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Mothers Are Losing Custody Over Sketchy Drug Tests

A Georgia mother claims that she lost custody of her newborn daughter due to faulty drug tests from a lab with a documented history of inaccurate results. When a drug court and her OB-GYN ran tests on Kristen Clark-Hassell, her results were clean. But the tests from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) came back positive, and so the government took her youngest child.

“They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming after the court hearing,” Clark-Hassell told the Savannah-based outlet The Current. “For her to just be ripped like that just cut a hole in our hearts.”

In a 2021 whistleblower complaint, a former lab director for Avertest—the company that processed Clark-Hassell’s drug tests—claimed that as many as 30 percent of the lab’s test results were inaccurate. She further alleged that “meeting deadlines for test results is more important to Avertest than accuracy” and that the company manipulated data and set arbitrary detection cutoffs, increasing false positives. Avertest settled the Justice Department lawsuit relating to these claims in 2024, paying a $1.3 million settlement.

Clark-Hassell’s legal battle began with a DFCS-ordered Avertest drug screening in 2020. According to documents obtained by The Current, that test was taken on August 5, and it came back positive. Then a test from her OB-GYN taken on August 11 was negative. In September, a court-ordered drug test came back negative, but the DFCS ordered another round of testing in October. That time, her urine sample came back clean, but her hair follicle test was positive—raising serious concerns about the reliability of the results. While it’s still possible that the sporadic positives Clark-Hassell experienced were the result of drug use, this exact circumstance is why accurate testing matters when deciding whether or not to take the drastic step of removing children from their parents’ care.

Clark-Hassell’s case is not unique. Last year, The Marshall Project published two investigations revealing that CPS removed children based on unreliable drug tests. Some mothers tested positive after consuming over-the-counter drugs or poppy seeds. In other cases, hospitals reported women for testing positive for drugs that were given to them during labor.

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Colorado Democrats Push Trans Bill That Was Too Radical For California

Colorado’s “Kelly Loving Act” (HB 1312) is truly one of the most radical, extreme, and anti-family bills ever proposed in our nation’s 249-year history. And that might be an understatement.

HB 1312 purports to provide “legal protections for transgender individuals.” In reality, it facilitates the state ripping children away from their parents if they refuse to go along with their child’s desire to “socially” or “medically transition.”

Indeed, HB 1312’s Section 2 prohibits parents from “misgendering” or “deadnaming” their child from the moment they choose to adopt a new identity. The bill likens such horrible practices — such as parents calling their child by the name they lovingly chose for them — to “abuse” equivalent to “threatening, humiliating, or [other] intimidating actions, including assaults or other abuse.”

If parents refuse, Colorado’s courts could step in and remove the child from their parent’s custody.

The legislation’s Sections 8 and 9 also adds “deadnaming” and “misgendering” to the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act, the same law that was used by the radical Colorado Civil Rights Commission to go after Christian cake artist Jack Phillips. Such a provision would censor the speech of businesses and employees across the state, forcing them to utter falsehoods they know to be untrue — or else.

In addition, the proposed bill’s Section 4, 5, and 6 would force schools to bend the knee to gender ideology, mandating school employees use student’s “preferred pronouns” and prohibiting any sex-based dress codes.

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RFK Jr. Says New Parents Should ‘Do Your Own Research’ Into Vaccines

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has advised new parents to research vaccines recommended for their children, as he also disclosed that health officials are looking into how some children start experiencing symptoms of autism shortly after vaccination.

During an April 28 town hall with Phil McGraw, also known as Dr. Phil, a mother asked Kennedy what his advice would be to new mothers with regard to vaccines.

“I would say that we live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” Kennedy said. “You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they’re getting, and you need to research the medicines that they’re taking as well.”

Kennedy, who heads the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said before becoming health secretary that no vaccines are safe. During his confirmation hearings, he described himself as “pro-safety” and not “anti-vaccine.” “I believe vaccines have saved millions of lives and play a critical role in healthcare,” he said at one point.

About a third of respondents to a Gallup survey in 2021 said that they do their own research when their doctor gives them important medical advice.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of HHS, currently recommends children receive 12 vaccine doses in their first four months of life, and dozens more before they become adults. Many of the vaccines are required to attend school.

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Supreme Court likely to rule for parental opt-out on LGBTQ books in schools

The Supreme Court on Tuesday was sympathetic to a group of Maryland parents who want to be able to opt their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. The parents argued that the local school board’s refusal to give them that choice violates their religious beliefs and therefore their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion. During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral argument, a majority of the justices seemed to agree with them, with several justices questioning whether there would even be any harm to simply allowing the parents to excuse their children from the instruction. 

The parents in the case have children in the public schools in Montgomery County, which is in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and is one of the most religiously diverse counties in the United States. The parents include Tamer Mahmoud and Enas Barakat, who are Muslim, Melissa and Chris Persak, who are Roman Catholic, and Svitlana and Jeff Roman, who are Ukrainian Orthodox and Roman Catholic. 

In 2022, the county’s school board approved books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book describes the story of a girl attending her uncle’s same-sex wedding, for example, while another book, Pride Puppy, tells the story of a puppy that gets lost during a Pride parade. 

The following year, the board announced that it would no longer allow parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. That prompted the parents in this case to go to federal court, where they argued that the board’s refusal to allow them to opt their children out violated their rights under the First Amendment to freely exercise their religion because it stripped them of their ability to instruct their children on issues of gender and sexuality according to their respective faiths and to control how and when their children are exposed to these issues. 

The lower courts refused to temporarily require the school board to notify the parents when the storybooks would be used and give them a chance to opt their children out of instruction. A federal appeals court reasoned that on the “threadbare” facts before it, the parents had not demonstrated that exposing their children to the storybooks compelled the parents to violate their religion. 

Several justices had questions about what it means for children to be “exposed” to the storybooks. Justice Clarence Thomas asked Eric Baxter – who argued on behalf of the parents – whether the LGBTQ-themed storybooks were merely present in the classroom, or instead actively used as part of the curriculum. 

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Colorado parents terrified of ‘totalitarian’ transgenderism bill that could take kids away if they misgender them

Protecting kids proved bipartisan in Colorado as moms reached across the aisle to take a stand against gender ideology legislation threatening custody rights.

Democratic Party lawmakers in Washington, D.C. were hardly alone when it came to advancing the Marxist whims of their alphabet activist supporters. Now, more than two weeks after the Colorado State House took a Sunday to advance gender ideology, a Colorado mother and a California parental rights activist have joined together in an effort to stop so-called “misgendering” and “deadnaming” from breaking families apart.

Monday on Fox News’ “The Faulkner Focus,” Protect Kids Colorado Director Erin Lee and attorney Erin Friday, a lifelong Democrat, joined host Harris Faulkner to decry the “totalitarian” HB 25-1312 which, if signed into law, would give courts cause to take custody from parents who refused to buy into the “preferred” gender identities of their own children.

“This is giving the authority to our state to take our children away if we don’t agree with these gender transitions. And so it’s got huge ramifications for all parents, especially those in custody situations who are fighting with their ex-spouses to stop their children from being medicalized,” said Lee.

“But it opens the door for all parents to potentially have their children forcibly removed by the state if they’re not willing to affirm their child’s mental health distress,” she went on as her social media account promoted Colorado state Rep. Ken deGraaf’s (R) HCR25-1003 which sought to amend the state constitution to protect parents’ rights “to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.”

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Massachusetts Proposes Laws to Remove Religious Exemptions, Parental Consent for Vaccines

Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill to remove religious exemptions to school vaccine mandates and two bills that would allow minors to consent to “preventative care,” including vaccines, according to grassroots groups Health Rights MA and Health Action Massachusetts.

Versions of the bill seeking to remove religious exemptions were introduced in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Senate.

Beth Ingham, a leader of Children’s Health Defense’s New England Chapter since 2022, called the proposed legislation “horrendous.”

If passed, children whose families object to school-mandated vaccinations based on sincerely held religious beliefs would be barred from attending public and private K-12 schools, according to Health Action Massachusetts.

Massachusetts’ lawmakers are also considering An Act Promoting Community Immunity, a bill that would undermine religious exemptions for school-based vaccine mandates and remove parental consent for vaccines in some cases.

According to Health Rights MA, the community immunity bill would:

  • Allow minors to consent to preventative care, including vaccination, without parental consent or knowledge.
  • Allow private daycares, schools and colleges to refuse religious exemptions and impose additional vaccines like the COVID-19 shots, which are not required by the Department of Public Health (DPH).
  • Subject the religious and medical exemptions to state approval.
  • Grant DPH expansive authority to change immunization and exemption requirements.
  • Require doctors to sign religious exemptions.
  • Allow DPH to publicly label programs with immunization rates below a state-defined threshold as “Elevated Risk” and exclude healthy, unvaccinated children, even in the absence of an outbreak or emergency.

Candice Edwards, executive director of Health Action Massachusetts, told The Defender that the state’s Joint Committee on Public Health will soon announce a hearing date for the two bills.

“Once the hearing is scheduled, we’re asking people to show up in person” to testify about why they oppose the bills. “Given the climate specifically for the removal of the religious exemption, we need an army inside that State House testifying.”

Additionally, Massachusetts’ lawmakers are considering a third bill that ostensibly aims at “enhancing access” to abortion but would also allow minors to consent to “preventative care,” including vaccines, without parental knowledge or consent, the groups said on their websites. Versions of the bill have been introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

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Pennsylvania Lawmakers Push To Protect Medical Marijuana Patients In Child Custody Cases After Father Loses Rights Over THC Test

Pennsylvania lawmakers are taking action to clarify that a person’s status as a medical marijuana patient cannot be used against them in parental custody rulings in family court.

While state statue clearly stipulates that lawful use of medical cannabis “shall not by itself be considered by a court in a custody proceeding,” a father’s recent experience losing custody rights after testing positive for THC metabolites has exposed an apparent implementation issue.

After David Levi—a registered medical cannabis patient with severe arthritis—sought financial support from his daughter’s mother in family court, his use of marijuana became a determining factor, contrary to what’s prescribed under state law.

“By the time they were done with me, I became a drug user—not a prescribed user—and that’s my tagline” in the eyes of the court, Levi told Marijuana Moment. “And two days before my father died, I got an email, and it was that the judge had ordered to take away all of my rights as a father.”

“I went from 50-50 custody to not being able to drive my daughter, and I’m only allowed to have overnight visits with her every other week,” he said.

Sen. John Kane (D) learned about his constituent’s story and, last week, circulated a cosponsorship memo to build support for forthcoming legislation to both clarify the existing statute and also make it so a person’s medical cannabis patient status cannot be used to determine child custody or to justify a drug test in a custody case.

“To treat his pain without using addictive opioids, my constituent obtained a medical marijuana card and began using this medication to treat his arthritis,” Kane wrote. “Medical marijuana has allowed him to manage his pain, maintain his work, and remain an attentive father to his three-year-old daughter.”

“Despite following the guidelines set forth by Pennsylvania’s Medical Marijuana Act, the constituent found himself in a custody battle that has threatened his rights as a father and penalized him based on his status as a medical marijuana patient,” he said, adding that current statute “prohibits the lawful use of medical marijuana as a determinant of child custody.”

“However, in my constituent’s case, his use of medical marijuana was used against him to determine child custody,” the senator said. And to address the issue, he will be filing legislation to “amend Title 23 Section 5328 to prohibit the use of medical marijuana from being used to determine child custody or the sole reason to order a drug test in child custody cases.”

The text of the bill hasn’t been filed yet. But on the House side, a Republican lawmaker has since committed  to work on the issue as well, Levi said.

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