DeSantis’ Latest Bill Exposes the Limits of Parents’ Rights

The slate of “parent’s rights” bills that swept through red-state legislatures over the past three years may have seemed innocuous enough to the average observer; in fact, even the most controversial of the bills proved to be broadly popular with the American public. But left-wing writers saw more malign motives lurking under the hood. Jamelle Bouie was one such writer. Her March 2023 New York Times column, ominously titled “What the Republican Push for ‘Parents’ Rights’ is Really All About,” warned readers of the movement’s nefarious intent to undo progress, empower reactionaries, and “undermine public education,” among numerous other evils — an argument that was almost indistinguishable from the hundreds of other columns to the same effect. But in between a recitation of the conventional progressive script, Bouie briefly happened upon a kernel of truth: “‘Parents’ rights,’ like ‘states’ rights,’ is quite particular. It’s not about all parents and all children and all the rights they might have.”

This was, of course, exactly right. But it wasn’t liberal readers who needed to hear it. The fact is that neither the parents’ rights movement nor the conservatives who support it are really devoted to parents’ rights, at least as abstract concepts, even if they may be personally convinced that they are. In truth, they are devoted to certain parental rights in certain contexts and staunchly opposed in many others. This is good and just; only an ideological fanatic would support the unmitigated and absolute exercise of a particular right in every time, place and venue. “Circumstances,” Burke wrote, “give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.” (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: The Censorship Lobby Is Worried About … Censorship?)

Bouie’s argument comes to mind in light of a recent piece from Brad Polumbo, a libertarian writer at the Washington Examiner: “Ron DeSantis just betrayed his promise to champion parental rights.” This betrayal, according to Polumbo, revolves around the Florida governor’s decision to sign a commonsensical — and, in many ways, long overdue — bill restricting children’s social media usage:

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has long positioned himself as a champion of “parents’ rights,” and that pitch is a huge part of his broad appeal to the public. But the Florida Republican just signed a bill into law that betrays those promises.

The new law is supposed to protect children from the alleged harms of social media. It does this in two major ways: by outright prohibiting Floridians under age 14 from having social media accounts and requiring that 14- and 15-year-olds obtain parental permission before they can have a social media account. 

Polumbo’s argument, in and of itself, is largely unremarkable, following the same essential logic as every other libertarian argument: “It is not the government’s job to [X]” — without any further consideration of exactly what [X] is, or what the government’s intervention would really do, or what the material effect of either intervening or not intervening would be on the collective (a word that raises every true-believing libertarian’s hackles) well-being of the nation. But while entirely unconvincing on the merits, the attempt to hoist DeSantis with his own “parents’ rights” petard helps to illustrate an important contradiction written into the so-called parental rights movement.

On the left, similar allegations of conservative hypocrisy are a common affair. Bouie’s column was one such example, pointing out that parents’ rights “never seems to involve parents who want schools to be more open and accommodating toward gender-nonconforming students,” nor “parents who want their students to learn more about race, identity and the darker parts of American history,” nor “parents who want schools to offer a wide library of books and materials to their children.” Analogous arguments have been mounted in regard to GOP bans on youth sex changes: “The rule does seem to be that we are for parental rights when parents make decisions we agree with, and when they make decisions we don’t agree with, we outlaw them,” said Georgia state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, in response to her state’s ban on gender transition surgeries and drugs for children.

In this case, both Polumbo and his left-wing counterparts have a point. No one, least of all conservatives, truly believes in absolute “parental rights”; in fact, in the abstract, many of the initiatives championed by the parents’ movement — i.e., bans on sex-change surgeries — actually restrict parental freedom. What we’re debating, in these contexts, is not really parents’ rights at all, but rather a vision of what society is and should be. The disagreement is over not the scope and reach of parental rights but to what end those rights are used. (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: The Melting Pot Myth Is Destroying America)

Conservatives would be well-served to understand and embrace this rather than to retreat into the warm, comfortable fog of abstraction. We have a vision of what a good society looks like, and we would like our laws to both reflect and encourage that which we think is good — and discourage that which we think is bad. Our vision includes the parental right to object to obscene material in classrooms; it does not include the parental right to mutilate children’s bodies. That’s because we are for good things and against bad things — preserving childhood innocence is good, and mutilating children is bad. Too often, conservatives are loath to speak the language of morality at all, opting instead for amoral frameworks that, in turn, corrupt their political understanding. This is visible in the facially absurd concept of “cancel culture,” as I noted in the American Mind back in 2021:

[T]he problem with cancel culture is not simply that some opinions are seen as socially unacceptable, but that our standards for what those opinions are have shifted radically to the left. Conservatives should be seeking to move those standards rightward, not seeking to abolish them altogether in favor of a libertarian “live and let live” morality. The idea that the right can only ever be intellectually consistent in its critiques of cancel culture if it never enforces its own standard of social morality is a gross perversion of the “liberty” that is often invoked as the basis of such arguments.

It is true, to be sure, that there is an inextricable (though by no means absolute or all-encompassing) link between freedom, properly understood, and virtue — not least in the realm of the family. As the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, a hostility to the traditional family — and an ensuing intervention against it on behalf of the state — is a consistent feature of totalitarian societies: “The shrewd totalitarian mentality knows well the powers of intimate kinship and religious devotion for keeping alive in a population values and incentives which might well, in the future, serve as the basis of resistance.” What was “essential” for totalitarian, Nisbet argued, “was the atomization of the family and of every other type of grouping that intervened between the people as society and the people as a mindless, soulless, traditionless mass. What the totalitarian must have for the realization of his design is a spiritual and cultural vacuum.”

As Nisbet alludes to, the “mediating institutions” that sit in the space between the state and the individual — the family, the church, the community centers, parochial schools, and so on — are the basis of civic virtue. For those institutions to flourish, the political regime must allow them a wide sphere of freedom. In this sense, parental freedom is a cornerstone of a good society. But the “freedom” is the means; the “good” is the end.

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