First, They Came for the Gender-Confused …

California wants to violate people's right to association.

In a continuing effort to impose the leftward-most agenda in the nation, California lawmakers are considering allowing the state government to take children as young as age 12 out of their homes without their parents’ consent in cases of disagreement over whether the child should be given time to adjust to his or her genetically determined sex.

I’ve worded that very carefully, to ensure accuracy. What it means in short is that the government wants to take forcible custody of children who feel confusion about their sexual identity.

As always, there is an ostensible crisis behind the proposal. In this case it is the premise that troubled adolescents will commit suicide in massive numbers if the government refrains from interfering when parents choose alternatives to “gender-affirming” treatments and surgery—the “live daughter or dead son” argument. The bill proposes forcing parents to give up their children to the all-knowing and supremely empathetic people of the state government,  The Washington Free Beacon reports:

California Democrats on Tuesday advanced legislation to let mental health professionals remove children from their homes and place them in state custody without parental consent.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Assembly Bill 665 on a party-line vote. The bill would allow poor children as young as age 12 to check into state-run youth shelters on the unconditional say-so of a therapist or counselor.

The bill does not mention transgender identity, yet it would certainly cover situations for those services and is obviously directed toward that purpose. State senator Scott Wiener (D), a coauthor of the bill, has also offered a bill “to make parents' non-affirmation of their child's transgender identity grounds for revoking or limiting custody” and wrote legislation enacted last year “empowering California courts to take temporary jurisdiction of kids who come to California from out of state in search of hormone therapy or other transition treatment,” the  Free Beacon reports.

Interestingly, in public statements Wiener and his coauthor of AB 665 insist “that they simply seek to give all children equal access to mental health services, as privately insured minors from age 12 can already receive outpatient therapy without parental consent,” the Free Beacon reports. “The bill would only apply to kids on Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program that provides health coverage to eligible low-income residents.”

Wiener and other proponents of the bill are thus taking great care to hide what the legislation really is: a radical and fundamental violation of people’s freedom of association. One of the most basic forms of association is the family, and the government has no right to interfere in family matters except in cases that are in themselves fundamentally criminal. Here the government is intent on pushing its nose into fraught, agonizing family situations about which it knows nothing.

As I noted in  Life, Liberty, Property #15, people in government are increasingly arguing that children belong to everybody, not their parents. President Joe Biden has said so multiple times. That is a pernicious doctrine. If your children belong to everybody, then the only way for us—the public, your children’s true owners—to exercise proper authority over them is to authorize our representatives—the government—to decide on everything that pertains to them. It gives all power over children to the state.

In practical terms, you can exercise authority over your children only until the government decides that you are wrong.

That means you have no authority at all over your children. The moment the government dislikes how you are supposedly raising them, the police can forcibly remove your children from your home, even if there is no foundation whatsoever for the claim. This happens all the time, and it is outrageous. It is not a matter of erring on the side of caution; it is plain and simple despotism.

The proposed California law extends this trend to a new realm: sexual identity. The bill is wrong because the premise on which it is based is wrong. The bill is fundamentally destructive and a violation of people’s basic rights.

That is why the bill’s proponents are trying to characterize it as an equal-access matter: to hide its real premise behind a benign veneer.

Political analysts often argue that states where one political party controls both the executive and legislative branches, known as one-party states or government trifectas, are particularly disposed to get out of control and enact laws and policies that go far beyond what even most of the majority party’s supporters want. AB 665 is a vivid example of that. The proponents of the bill evidently know that a large proportion of the very people who voted for them would not support it if they knew what it is really about.

Those voters are right, and they should be concerned about the kind of mind that comes up with these ideas. After the government comes for the children embroiled in heart-rending struggles with their parents over how to handle very natural confusions about sexual identity, they will come after yours. It will happen far sooner than you think.