Miranda Devine: Parents should have right to guide their children

Mark Latham’s proposed parental rights bill has touched a raw nerve, but it makes sense for mums and dads to be responsible for the moral values of their kids.

You know that Mark Latham’s proposed parental rights bill has touched a raw nerve in our culture from the extreme institutional opposition lined up against it.

The NSW Department of Education, the lavishly taxpayer-funded bureaucracies of the Children’s Guardian Office and the Advocate for Children and Young People and even the Catholic Diocese of Parramatta, to name a few, have deployed all their might to shoot down the bill.

They are treating it as an existential threat.

Latham’s commonsense proposition is that the state must respect the rights of parents to raise and educate their children as they see best.

Parents, not the state, should decide how to raise their children.

Parents — not teachers — are responsible for their children’s values and moral development, and his bill would enshrine in law their right to withdraw students from the classroom if they object to the political or ideological material being taught, with one obvious example being “gender fluidity”.

Another example would be anti-police ideology imported from America being taught to Year 5-6 students, such as the students at the Lindfield Learning Village public school who made posters in class vilifying police and white-skinned people: “Stop Killer Cops”, “Pigs out of the country” and “White lives matter too much”.

First to the good news.

Parramatta Catholic Bishop Vincent Long has withdrawn his submission opposing Latham’s bill and has replaced it with a submission which recognises parental primacy in the education of their children: “The Diocese of Parramatta strongly affirms the Catholic teaching that parents are the primary educators of their children in matters of faith and education”.

“I’m glad Bishop Long has responded to the parents’ protests and (has recognised) two fundamental truths: that parents are the primary educators of their children, and the active promotion of gender fluidity has no place in our schools,” says Latham, the NSW leader of One Nation. Hallelujah.

Mark Latham’s proposed parental rights bill has touched a raw nerve.

But it should not have taken open revolt from faithful Catholics, the picketing of Sunday mass and an appeal to the Vatican for the Bishop to see the light.

But Bishop Long is a lightweight in the proxy war being waged against parental authority as Latham’s bill wends its way through the consultation process. Already the process has flushed out the stealth campaign to reinstate the malignant gender-bender program “Safe Schools” into the curriculum after it was banned by the NSW government.

An illuminating exchange on April 21 at a parliamentary committee hearing into the bill shows how activist agencies still are trying to embed the unscientific fringe idea of gender as a “social construct” into all government interactions with children.

This is the idea that you can choose whether to be a boy or a girl, that “male” and “female” are arbitrary labels “assigned” by a doctor at birth.

In other words, you must not say that a baby born with a penis is a boy, even though his maleness is genetically coded into the Y chromosome embedded in every cell of his body. “They” could be a girl and should be encouraged to choose whatever gender “feels” right. This is the insane dogma that children, as early as pre-school, are being taught under the guise of “diversity” and “inclusion”. It’s what has brought us to the point where the Orwellian term “birthing people” is used in the US Congress in place of “mother”.

Zeroing in like a laser on this dogma, Latham, as committee chairman, grilled Zoe Robinson, the “NSW Advocate for Children and Young People”, whose submission opposing his bill urged that the “prevention of instruction about gender fluidity not (be) adopted and that students [be] taught about different worldview, social constructs, health and wellbeing in accordance with their age and developing maturity.”

Latham asks: “What are the ‘social constructs’ that you would like to see taught in schools?”

Robinson: “… it is something that we would work with children and young people to understand what their understanding is of that, but it talks about broadly the ‘worldviews, social constructs, health and wellbeing’. So that would include things around gender and other experiences of children and young people.”

Latham: “So you are advocating for gender as a social construct to be actively taught in NSW schools?”

Robinson: “Not advocating for that. I am saying that children and young people would like to have things that are worldviews, social constructs, health and wellbeing incorporated into their learning.”

Latham: “Do you think there is an age-inappropriate level where you would be teaching gender as a social construct?”

Robinson: “I think we need to reflect… what children and young people themselves are asking for. We need to provide a safe space for children and young people to explore and understand themselves.”

Latham: “But you have got no view on an age-inappropriate level to tell a, say, four-year-old girl that she is only feeling like a girl — if she is — because she was dressed in pink and played with the Barbie doll. You are ok with that?”

At this stage Greens MLC David Shoebridge butted in to save Robinson. Latham’s questions have been “taken on notice”, so he will receive a written response within 28 days.

Robinson told the committee her recommendation against Latham’s bill was based on “consultations” with children and young people across NSW, which found they were overwhelmingly in favour of teaching gender fluidity in NSW classrooms. She read quotes from children into Hansard to prove her point, including: “Put simply, if teachers stop teaching gender fluidity, gender fluid people will not stop existing. It is imperative for us to understand those around us so we do not fall into the trap of othering, therefore teachers need to teach the reality of the human experience, inclusive of sexuality.”

But Latham then exposed the farcical nature of the “consultations”.

Robinson admitted they amounted to a grand total of 35 students, out of 2.7 million young people in NSW (0.001 per cent), plus the views of nine members of the Youth Advisory Council, which includes adults aged up to 24.

The students in this tiny focus group were self-selected, and half were from a high school near Robinson’s inner-city office in Strawberry Hills. The other half were from a regional high school, of which half were members of a “support group for LGBTQIA+ students”.

“No one in the opinion polling industry would regard this process as credible,” says Latham. “It breached every conceivable industry standard, in guaranteeing a heavily biased sample group and unreliable findings.”

He regards the bogus poll as an attempt to mislead parliament and says Robinson and Janet Schorer, her counterpart at the Office of the NSW Children’s Guardian, “should be condemned as political activists hellbent on advancing their own views rather than the representative opinion of young people in NSW”.

Stay tuned for more of this David v Goliath battle.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph