By: Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, Congressional Candidate for AZ-04 (January 10, 2024)
We are facing a crisis of parental rights in this country.
Every day, questions are being asked – and answered.
Who should decide how a child is educated?
Their school – or their parents?
An education union – or their parents?
An elected politician – or their parents?
Who should make a child’s health care decisions?
A bureaucrat – or their parents?
A court – or their parents?
An activist organization – or their parents?
I am increasingly concerned about how those questions are being answered.
If you watch the news at all, you’ve seen the headlines. Schools transitioning students without parents knowing. Radical curriculum slipping into classrooms without parental consent. Laws awarding custody based on a parent’s philosophy of gender. Courts taking children from parents who don’t affirm a gender transition.
Restoring the role of parent and family as sacrosanct in American society is critical for our preservation as a country.
The tactic of separating children from their parents and indoctrinating them is not new. It has been used in some of the worst periods of history to accomplish great harm. Think of the Nazi Youth, or Mao’s indoctrination of China’s young people into the Red Guard. We must heed the warnings of history and stay far from this slippery slope.
The job of raising the next generation is a sacred one. As a father of three children nearing adulthood, I take seriously the legacy I will leave for – and through – my children. That responsibility falls on me and my wife alone. We will not relinquish it to anyone, and certainly not a judge, politician, or government bureaucrat. My parents also took that responsibility seriously, and I owe to them my patriotism, my deep and abiding faith in America and my gratitude for the freedoms found here.
This dangerous slide toward separating children and parents will stop with us. We already saw the power of parents rising up in 2021 and 2022. Parents impacted the outcomes of multiple elections and defined themselves as a voting bloc not to be ignored. But opponents of parental rights are willing to wait us out and play the long game. We must be in it for the long haul too.
After all, they are our future.
Reagan said that “each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation.”
I hope that can be said of the generation that follows us.