America First Legal, Schaerr Jaffee, and Joel Ard recently filed a lawsuit against Washington Governor Jay Inslee to block enforcement of S.B. 5599, which allows shelters to provide sex transition services without notice to or consent from the child’s parents. This new law permits shelters in Washington to take in minor children and assist them in transitioning to a different “gender,” which could include chemical sterilization and genital mutilation, all without the consent or knowledge of their parents.
Under Washington’s previous law, a shelter would be required to contact the parents, at the latest, within 72 hours of the child’s appearance at the shelter and the notification would include a description of the child’s physical and emotional condition and circumstances surrounding the minor’s contact with the shelter. The only exception to that rule was if there were “compelling reasons” not to notify the parents, which were limited to circumstances that indicated that notifying the parent “will subject the minor to abuse or neglect.” Where such compelling circumstances exist, the shelter would have to notify the Department of Children, Youth and Families, who would then have an obligation to notify the parents of the report within three days of receiving it.
Now the law expands the definition of “compelling reasons” and excludes parental notification when a minor child is seeking or receiving protected health care services, which include “gender transition” treatments. Further, a recently amended companion law relieves the Department of Children, Youth and Families from notifying the parents when the report from the shelter involves “gender transition” treatment, requiring instead that they offer to the child the options of family reunification services and referrals for medical treatment.
In other words, Washington State has created a legal regime where the state can hide from parents the location of their child if he or she is receiving experimental “gender transition” treatment and help facilitate the process.
That is state-sanctioned kidnapping. It’s also blatantly unconstitutional.
S.B. 5599 denies parents their 14th Amendment due process rights through its blatant governmental interference in their fundamental rights to direct the upbringing of their children and to the custody of their children.
It violates parents’ rights under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause – parents cannot raise their child in accordance with their faith if they cannot communicate with, know the location of, or control the custody and care of their child.
It violates parents First Amendment rights to free speech, by compelling them to follow the government’s preferred speech and verbally affirm that their child can become a “gender” that differs from biological sex, else risk the child seeking the secret protection and medical services of the government. Simultaneously, it chills their ability to speak to their child to deter them from such life altering actions.
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Perhaps most frustrating, it violates parents’ equal protection rights by creating two classes of parents and arbitrarily stripping one class of their fundamental rights. In the first category are the parents who the shelter deems pose a risk of abuse or neglect to their children. In the second category are the parents whose children have been captured by the social contagion of transgender ideology but pose no risk of abuse or neglect. Amazingly, under Washington’s Orwellian legal rubric, the first category of parents that are a legitimate threat to the child will get notification from the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, whereas the second category, who merely oppose a child’s life altering decisions, will be left in the dark to wonder if their young child is in danger or has perished.
Every parent in America should recoil in horror at S.B. 5599. Washington State’s leaders are enticing children to leave their parents for the opportunity to be guinea pigs in medical and social experiments encouraged and supported by the state. It is therefore incumbent for people to stand up, as the plaintiffs in this case are doing, and fight tooth and nail in every courtroom in America to stop the kind of systemic government assault on the nuclear family that would be a dream for Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet Union, but is now a nightmare of a reality for our United States.
