Victory Over a Domestic Dictatorship

Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”

Maduro captured, Cuba’s Stalinist dictatorship poised to fall, and Iran’s Islamic tyranny on the ropes. In all this excitement, as inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) might say, the people may have missed a strategic victory on the home front.

Three days before Christmas, U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez ruled that California’s practice of hiding children’s “gender incongruity” from their own parents is a violation of their constitutional rights. As the 52-page opinion explains:

These parental exclusion policies are designed to create a zone of secrecy around a school student who expresses gender incongruity. The policies restrain public school teachers and staff from informing parents about a child’s unusual gender expression, unless the child consents. The policies apply to children as young as two and as old as seventeen. The policies do not permit teachers to use their own judgment in responding to an inquiring parent. . .

The parental exclusion policies, which create “a trifecta of harm,” derive from California Assembly Bill 1955, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2024. So no surprise that California attorney general Rob Bonta denounced the Benitez ruling.

“We are committed to securing school environments that allow transgender students to safely participate as their authentic selves while recognizing the important role that parents play in students’ lives,” said Bonta in a statement. The ACLU of Southern California took it to another level.

“LGBTQ+ students deserve to decide on their own terms if, when, and how to come out, and to be able to be themselves at school,” said Christine Parker, of the ACLU’s Gender, Sexuality and Reproductive Justice Project. “This case is part of a nationwide, coordinated attack on trans people and all those who stand up for trans youth,” and so on, but it isn’t.

This case is part of state and ACLU coordination with the policies of the USSR, a pioneer in parental exclusion. The Communist bosses held that the family was an oppressive bourgeois relic, so children were to be isolated from their parents and indoctrinated into goose-stepping Stalinjugend. ACLU founder Roger Baldwin was a first-wave Soviet apologist.

The St. Louis social worker was briefly engaged to Anna Louise Strong, who in I Change Worlds contended that Stalin was too important to be called “a god.” As Helen Andrews explains, “there was a time when the ACLU was practically a Communist front group. Its board of directors was stacked with card-carrying party members and fellow travelers. Baldwin himself visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and came back full of praise.” He wrote it down in Liberty Under the Soviets, about as worshipful as it gets. That changed after the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1939.

The ACLU purged Communists and sympathizers from positions of leadership with and for a time during the 1940s, Andrews notes, “did stand for sincere liberalism,” though some didn’t think so. William Donahue, author of The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union, called it the “legal arm of the liberal-left,” and William F. Buckley dubbed it the “Anti-Christian Litigation Union.” In recent times, the ACLU went the politically correct route with “diverse staff” weighing cases based on “marginalized communities.”

Deputy director of the ACLU’s “Transgender Justice Department” is Chase Strangio, born a woman but now posing as a man. As Andrew explains, “Strangio is more committed to the cause of transgenderism than to old-fashioned rights such as free speech.” Transgenderism maintains that the male-female reality, bundled into every human cell,  is a social construct.

As Bruce Bawer explains, transgenderism and homosexuality are “utterly different phenomena,” and “queer” can mean anything, so the alphabet formulation is the true construct. There is no “trans community,” a leftist fiction to divide the people and create another oppressed minority in need of government help.

Those who claim trans status are of a piece with those who claim to be Napoleon, Elvis, or Mae West. They demand that others accept their claim, but nothing that puts demands on others can be a “right.” Any lawyer should know that but as Andrews notes, but in current conditions many in the ACLU are “unfit to be a lawyer.” What should be now called the American Construct Litigation Union does not defend liberty or constitutional rights in any meaningful sense.

The organization that praised the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat now defends the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood (DSM), which drives the trans ideology now imposed in the schools, with irreversible mutilations passed off as “gender confirmation surgery.”

Reality dysphoria has no place in government or education. Judge Benitez has restored parental rights and his ruling shows the way ahead for families nationwide:  

Some parents who do not want such barriers may have the wherewithal to place their children in private schools or homeschool, or to move to a different public school district. Families in middle or lower socio-economic circumstances have no such options.

Gov. Newsom, who lives in a $9 million mansion in upscale Marin County, sends his children to private schools with annual tuition of $60,000. As working families should note, state and federal Democrats, the teacher cartels, and the ACLU all oppose parental choice in education. The Trump administration should work to establishment parental choice nationwide, as a matter of basic civil rights. The people will be watching.