Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was elected in 2021 in large part thanks to his pledge to honor the rights of parents after his Democrat opponent Terry McAuliffe said the quiet part out loud during a debate about how he believed parents should have no say in what their children were taught in the public school system.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis easily won reelection by historic margins in his state in 2022 even after being relentlessly vilified by the press and Democrats over, among other things, his signing of the Parental Rights in Education bill into law in March 2022.
So you’d think with all of that in mind that Congressional Democrats would have learned their lesson when a bill modeled in part on the Florida law was introduced in the U.S. House earlier this month.
But House Democrats being House Democrats steamrolled ahead with again falsely claiming that another parental rights bill was code for “Don’t Say Gay.” And on Thursday with the bill set to pass mostly on party lines, they went crazy, engaging in scare tactics and claiming all sorts of things that weren’t true about the legislation since scaring people is one thing Democrats do very well.
Before we get started on the Democrat meltdowns, let’s note that five Republicans voted with Democrats against the bill:
H.R. 5 passed in a 213-208 vote Friday morning, with five Republicans — Reps. Andy Biggs, Ken Buck, Matt Gaetz, Mike Lawler and Matt Rosendale — joining all Democrats to vote against the measure.
Their reasons, which mostly revolved around believing the federal government shouldn’t be involved in state/local education matters, are noted here.
As for Democrats, their reasons had everything to do with being “woke” and little to nothing to do with caring about children and the rights of their parents to have a voice in their child’s education.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, laughably claimed that the bill “put politics over parents,” said it had nothing to do with parental rights, and suggested that Republicans were “jamming the extreme Republican MAGA ideology down the throats of the children and the parents of the United States of America” He later lied and said that “extreme MAGA Republicans” were opposed to children learning about the Holocaust:
“This Republican bill is asking the government to force the outing of LGBT people before they are ready,” Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez proclaimed while gesturing wildly:
Reading between the lines, disgraced former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz alleged in so many words without evidence that it was only a minority of parents who were concerned about what children were being taught in schools:
Freshman Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who has been busy auditioning to be the next member of AOC’s Squad, claimed that “Bills like this make schools more hostile. And make no mistake, it results in hate, bigotry, and, yes, sometimes death of our students in schools.”
Watch:
Frost also stated that the bill was “about the fear of a problem that doesn’t exist,” which lets you know that the problem absolutely does exist.
Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) said the bill was “disgraceful” and that it would “terrorize” teachers:
Democrat Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-KY) told Republicans to “stop being mean to kids”:
Meanwhile, PBS turned to Washington Post associate editor and MSNBC weekend host Jonathan Capehart for what amounted to the definitive ‘media’ hot take on the House GOP’s parental rights legislation after being teed up by host Amna Nawaz with a map helpfully provided by the radical left-wing group Human Rights Campaign:
[PBS Host Amna Nawaz]: This is a map, just out this week, from the Human Rights Campaign. They now estimate, of all the transgender kids across the country, age 13-to-17, just that age group, more than half of them now live in a state where they have either already lost access to or could lose access to gender-affirming care. It’s over 50% now.And Jonathan, I want to turn to you on this because that’s a striking number first of all when you think of the sheer volume of children who are impacted by that, but I’m wondering why you think this particular issue resonates so deeply right now.CAPEHART: Because it makes people feel uncomfortable. Let’s just be perfectly frank about it. It makes people uncomfortable.But just because you’re uncomfortable doesn’t mean that you then target what makes you uncomfortable. And by target, you’re targeting kids. You’re targeting the families of those kids, making it impossible for them to get health care in their own home state, making it almost impossible for them to go out of state, criminalizing, in some cases, going out of state to get care.All these kids and their families want are for these trans kids to be able to go to school like everyone else, learn like everyone else, and be left alone like everyone else, if possible, and to be able to learn in a classroom environment where there’s neither a target on their back or they’re not being denied the full history, the full curriculum that they’re supposed to be taught.
Watch:
Capehart, I should note, was married in January 2017 to his boyfriend Nick Schmit, a State Dept. official, in a ceremony tearfully officiated by then-President Obama’s former Attorney General Eric Holder.
Republicans have to be loving the fact that Democrats and the mainstream media are falling in line all over again with the same talking points that failed them in 2021 and 2022 on bills that have to do with parental rights. Rest assured that many of these video clips will be used against Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats in battleground parts of the country in 2024.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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