Sarah Jones is a writer at New York magazine who today she has a piece titled “Household Tyrants” which attempts to sort of wrap up everything wrong with 2022 politics into one grand unified theory of badness. She starts with what critics have called the “Don’t Say Gay” bills in Florida.

To empower parents, Florida Republicans would put children in danger. If passed, their Parental Rights in Education legislation, known more commonly as the “don’t say gay” bills, would prevent public-school districts from “encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,” CBS News reports.

That link goes to this CBS News story about the bills:

The bills would extend to student support services, including counseling, and would require school district personnel to give parents all information related to a student’s “mental, emotional or physical health or well-being,” unless it’s believed that such disclosure would result in abuse. Parents would be able to sue districts that do not follow these requirements.

Their purpose, according to the text, is to “reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children.”

The bill’s restriction on talking about gender is apparently limited to early elementary school and thereafter what is “age appropriate.”

The bill’s language prohibits “classroom instruction” on sexual orientation or gender identity for kindergarten through third grade, and in older grades in a way that is not appropriate for students. It ties the definition of “age-appropriate” and “developmentally appropriate” to state standards.

“I want folks that oppose the bill to be really clear on what they’re actually opposing,” Harding said. “I want them to go on record to say it’s OK for a six-year-old to have one identity in school and one at home because the school encourages that kind of behavior.”

I can imagine some circumstances, i.e. kids whose parents or parent are gay, where gender issues might come naturally in elementary school and the school shouldn’t be trying to prevent that. But the bill specifies “classroom instruction” and is pretty clearly aimed at preventing teachers from lecturing young children on the now fashionable but still minority view that gender is a spectrum and any child could grow up to be a boy or a girl or neither. Pew has done some research on this and not surprisingly there’s a vast difference of opinion between the two parties and also based on age cohort.

This chart is from last year and as you can see, 56% of adults still believe gender is determined by birth. Even among Democrats, a third of people still say that’s the case. Hence there are a lot of people out there who are not ready to have their preschooler taught that he could choose to be a girl or a boy.

And even beyond elementary school, I think there is some reasonable concern that school counselors shouldn’t be pushing children toward life and body altering decisions behind the backs of parents. Read this story for an example of the kind of thing parents are worried about.

In any case, Sarah Jones is clearly one of the 63% of Democrats who find this outrageous. And she sees the pushback to the left’s gender ideology as, what else, the right seizing power.

There is no appetite to prohibit parents from raising their children in even the most hate-filled churches. Yet the right behaves as if parental rights were under sustained and serious attack, as if the parent has been dislodged from a high place and, as [Texas Gov.] Abbott said, should be restored…

In the party’s view, parental rights both supersede and exist in conflict with the rights of the child. The right insists that what’s good for parents is good for kids. This is not necessarily the truth, as any queer person can say in return. The idea that children are already people, with thoughts and needs independent of their parents, never factors into the party’s position at all.

This of course sounds pretty tone deaf coming from the party that sees abortion as sacrosanct. It’s also lazy and ignorant. It made me wonder if Sarah Jones had her own children or even knows anyone who has kids. As I quickly discovered by looking at her Twitter feed, she does not have children.

I truly don't get why 'childless cat lady' is the insult of choice. It's a statement of fact! I happen to be a woman without children who has two cats, you got me

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) February 23, 2022

I’m not someone who believes you can’t have a position on something just because you’re not part of the correct demographic. People without children can have opinions on parenting and men can have opinions on abortion. But in this case I think the problem is that Jones’ sounds a bit smug and out of touch. Does she really think parents, including the conservative parents she clearly despises, don’t see their own children as people?

In reality, most parents are very aware, at least from age two onward, that their children are individuals with their own point of view. This fact is not a secret parents have overlooked. And yes, I think if Sarah Jones had children she’d likely know that. She’d know that as hard as parenting can be at times and as difficult as children can sometimes make it, being a parent means feeling a mix of love and worry, hope and fear and overall an abiding desire to see your child grow into happiness, self-sufficiency and success.

And given that parents are usually their children’s best and fiercest advocates, putting them in charge of decisions about what is best for their children seems like a good idea in most cases, rather than handing control over to someone else who probably isn’t as motivated to make sure their child is succeeding. All that to say, the idea that children are real people does make its way into policy which says the people closest to the child and most committed to the child should always have a say.

As parents know, children may not like doing homework, playing with other kids, bathing, telling the truth, learning new things, being responsible with money or dozens of other things that parents know they need to learn. And sometimes that means parents have to cajole, coddle, bribe or outright force them do the things they might not do if they were left on their own. That may be undemocratic but it’s also sometimes unavoidable. But Sarah Jones doesn’t know any of this because she’s not a parent. And so we get this spectacular closing paragraph:

To the GOP, the parent exists to enforce the party’s will, as though the parent is simply the local arm of a national entity. Parents who fail to obey may find their powers restricted by the state. Authoritarianism is inconsistent in this way; rights granted to followers are not extended to dissenters. For the latter there exists only punishment, a fate that extends to their children. The GOP is the party of parental rights because it is increasingly anti-democratic. It has become the party of ruthless, cynical power, and children aren’t exempt from its schemes. In fact, they’re key.

This is completely wrong on many fronts. Conservative parents don’t see themselves as the local arm of any party. On the contrary, they generally want less input from national anything, including NY Times writers, teacher’s unions, popular anti-racism activists and gender identity scholars. The goal isn’t to restrict the rights of other parents but merely to say that the opinion of the majority of parents can’t be shoved to the side simply because progressives at New York magazine don’t like what they have to say.

The GOP is not the party of parental rights because it’s anti-democratic. On the contrary, it is the party of parental rights because it sees the government as a servant of the people and not the other way around. When teachers’ unions demand that schools remain closed even as parents see their children suffering and struggling at home, good parents naturally don’t like that. They want what’s best for their kids regardless of how progressive educators feel about it. If that means taking control back from unions, experts and lax administrators or simply speaking up loudly at a school board meeting, that’s what parents will do. And to be fair, if Sarah Jones had children instead of cats who only need to be fed and scratched once in a while she might do the same.