It’s said that the law of non-contradiction is the foundation of rational thought. The principle is so simple my 4-year-old can understand it: Something cannot be both true and false at the same time.
Recently, Gov. Josh Stein contradicted himself on the topic of parental rights. On July 3, the governor signed into law SB 442, a bill that prevents parents from being charged with abuse simply for seeking to raise their children consistent with their biological sex. On the same day, he vetoed another bill aimed at defending parents’ rights, HB 805, calling it “mean-spirited.”
Last week at the Council of State meeting, a reporter asked the governor why he signed SB 442. His reply: “I think parents have the right to raise their children as they deem best.”
So, does the governor support parental rights, or not?
To understand the governor’s contradiction, we must look more closely at HB 805. The bill safeguards parental rights by ensuring that parents of children in public schools can opt-out of instructional materials that conflict with their religious beliefs — including sexually explicit concepts and materials. It also mandates that school library catalogs be online, accessible, and searchable by parents and offers them the right to identify library books that may not be borrowed by their student.
Additionally, HB 805 reaffirms the biological reality of sex by defining male and female by biology, not gender identity, in the law. It prohibits K-12 public schools from forcing girls to share sleeping spaces with boys. It ensures that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund irreversible sex-transition procedures for inmates and makes it easier for victims of harmful gender-transition procedures to sue their doctors for permanent injuries. And it improves birth certificate integrity by requiring the original birth certificate to be preserved when a birth certificate is amended.
The governor said HB 805 was “mean” and an attempt to “target vulnerable people” in his veto, and by that he meant that lawmakers were being mean to and targeting transgender people. Articles published in WRAL and N&O paint the bill (and others like it) as an attempt to target “trans rights.”
But does a boy or a man really have the right to enter a private space or a sleeping space reserved for girls and women? Does a man have the right to declare himself a woman? Do inmates have the right to have their gender transition funded by the tax dollars of people morally opposed to it? Do children have the right to access books on gender and sexuality in school, even if their parents oppose it?
For several decades, left-wing politicians and gender ideology activists have argued that these are, in fact, rights. But Americans are realizing that “trans rights” come at a cost. One cost: privacy, safety, and opportunities for women and girls. Another cost: the right of parents to raise their children according to their values.
And Americans are increasingly indicating that they are not willing to pay that cost. Polls show that a growing number of Republicans and Democrats believe that our society has gone too far with transgender accommodations. A growing number of states have passed laws defending parental rights and seeking to protect women and girls from the myriad effects of gender ideology and the rights its supporters demand.
This summer, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed parental rights, pushing back on the tide of gender ideology. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court sided with parents fighting to opt their children out of instruction that conflicted with their beliefs — mirroring HB 805’s parental opt-out protections. And the North Carolina Supreme Court also recently reaffirmed that parents have a fundamental constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children in the Happel v. Guilford County Board of Education decision.
This cultural and political context explains the governor’s parental rights contradiction. He wants to support trans rights and parents’ rights at the same time. He wants to do that because it’s unpopular with most North Carolinians to infringe upon their God-given right to have authority over and responsibility for their children, and because it’s unpopular with his radical left base to abandon the LGBTQ cause. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
But Stein’s contradictory statements and actions on parental rights only reveal that he is out of step with the values of most North Carolinians, the NC General Assembly, the NC Supreme Court, the US Supreme Court, and even… himself.
North Carolinians — and the legislators returning to Raleigh at the end of the month for the HB 805 veto override vote — need to notice this glaring glitch in the governor’s rationale, work out the truth for themselves, and vote accordingly.