Does the Government Know Better Than Parents?

Mr Holdsworth takes on the Twisted Nanny State.

His introduction:

I live in Alberta, Canada, which is currently governed by a socialist party called the NDP who just passed a bill into law that would make it illegal for someone working at a school to inform a parent that their child has joined a group called a GSA which, for now, stands for Gay Straight Alliance. If you’re like me, you probably think that this seems like a drastic measure. Surely simply informing parents about what their kids are up to at school isn’t criminal behaviour and shouldn’t be punishable by law. The government, however; insists that this is to protect vulnerable students from being “outed” by their teachers or schools. What I’ve found bewildering throughout the very brief time that this bill was being debated is that the media took this exact same line of reasoning for granted. Any time I heard the CBC, which is like Canada’s version of China Central Television- when they covered this story, they always described it as a measure to protect kids from being outed, which in my mind is an obviously deliberate attempt to portray the biased political language of the government as objective and accurate, which is a kind of political fawning that should be uncommon in unbiased journalism. The reason I find this premise of outing kids so fallacious is because you don’t have to be gay or LGBTQ to belong to a GSA. They’re called “Gay Straight Alliances.” They’re designed to provide supportive environments for LGBTQ kids and their straight allies. So you don’t have to be considered LGBTQ to belong to the group. In fact, if you read the discussion page on the Wikipedia article, someone even points out that the GSA’s at their schools were mostly filled with straight kids. So equating the process of keeping parents informed about what groups their kids belong to with “outing” gay kids, is a massive stretch. But yes, it might draw the suspicions of parents which could lead to uncomfortable conversations with their kids, but honestly, it’s a massive leap from saying that we want to help kids avoid uncomfortable conversations with their parents to passing a bill that creates an atmosphere of clandestine activity where students and teachers act as agents of espionage against the authority of parents by penalty of law should anyone break the seal and let parents in on what their kids are up to. Here’s the thing, minors don’t have the right to publicly join political activist organizations, which is how GSA’s describe themselves on their own websites, without the knowledge of their parents and the fact that a political party is using the full force of law to create an environment in which an ideology that aligns with their own can be promoted to teens, in secret, strikes me as Machiavellian at best.
But what about students who might experience abuse if their parents find out they’ve joined a group like this? Well, if a child lives in a home in which they would suffer abuse for being gay or otherwise, then that child lives in an abusive home. It’s not like they live in a home with perfectly loving parents who transform into despotic tormentors the moment they find out their kid is affiliated with a GSA. If that’s what legislators are trying to avoid, then they need to extract their heads from their asymmetrical ideologies.
If certain kids are at risk of abuse over something like joining a GSA then the very sad fact is - those kids live in abusive homes and this legislation won’t do anything to protect them from that environment. They’re probably just as likely to be abused for bringing home bad grades on a report card and outlawing the reporting of student’s grades to parents wouldn’t make any more sense than this current law does. This new law doesn’t do anything to protect kids in abusive homes. What it does do is place a wedge between parents and their kids that is filled by politicians who flatter themselves in thinking that they are more interested in the wellbeing of kids than the people who sacrifice their time, money, and sometimes sanity, providing direct care, provision, and affection to those kids. It’s incredibly arrogant that these politicians can assume kids are safe with them and their policies but not safe with their own parents.