Using "Parental Rights" to Assert Censorship, Autocracy and Unregulated Child Labor

Children working a Pennsylvania coal mine in 1900.

Red states are marching in virtual lockstep to inflame parents, literally enticing them to buy into the GOP culture wars, ranging from access to books, accurate school lessons or even in getting rid of school vaccination requirements that have been with us for almost three-quarters of a century. Though a majority of Americans oppose this anti-woke red state movement, led by Florida Governor and failing GOP candidate, Ron DeSantis. Take for example the recently passed Florida statutes, all sponsored by that governor.

DeSantis’ official website summarizes his Parental Rights in Education Act, signed into law this past March, as follows:

HB 1557 takes three key steps to protect students and put power back in the hands of parents:

• This bill prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in K-3 classrooms, and after 3rd grade, these conversations need to be age-appropriate.
• The bill ensures that at the beginning of every school year, parents will be notified about healthcare services offered at the school, with the right to decline any service offered
• The bill ensures that whenever a questionnaire or health screening is given to K-3 students, parents receive it first and provide permission for the school to administer the questionnaire or health screening to their child.

The Florida Board of Education, interpreting the “age-appropriate” provision of the statute, immediately expanded the reach of the law all the way through the 12th grade.

This new statute was designed to expand last April’s “law, which has become known as the ‘Stop WOKE Act,’ [which] prohibits workplace training or school instruction that teaches that individuals are ‘inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously’; that people are privileged or oppressed based on race, gender, or national origin; or that a person ‘bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress’ over actions committed in the past by members of the same race, gender, or national origin. The law says such trainings or lessons amount to discrimination.” Time, April 22, 2022.

Tracked in many red states, this pattern of statutes has devolved into culling thousands of books from school and public libraries and created a “lowest common denominator” standard for in-class instruction, some of which is even reaching into state colleges and universities. All too often, a single student or a single parent can shut down a course or class by simply stating that they feel anguish over the subject matter, even if it is accurate and has been part of course curricula for many decades. Courts are weighing in.

Diversity and inclusion policies have died under pressure. A school in Missouri emptied the entirety of its library “just in case” and because of the serious penalties that could be imposed against the school administrators, teachers, or the librarian as a result. These children will eventually move into the real world, where diversity is just a fact of life and employers often make decisions accordingly. Are they prepared? Clearly not!

But if these practices underserve children, there is another parental rights vector being pushed by some red states that is even worse. We already know that protecting children is no longer a priority in much of the United States, as school shootings with semi-automatic AR-15 style rifles are on the upswing as red states continue to liberalize gun ownership. Unwanted children born to mothers unable to obtain an abortion are finding very little in the way of financial and other support from the red states that have forced them to give birth. Even the GOP federal bill conditioning approving the debt ceiling is rife with massive cutbacks in spending for children whose parent(s) are well below any definition of the poverty line.

But if these elements were not bad enough, rightwing states are beginning to take aim at laws and regulations that limit or encumber a parent’s right to push their younger children into the labor market. Writing for the April 28th Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik drills into this toxic process: “In 1933, in signing a textile industry code that outlawed the employment of children under 16 in sweatshops, FDR crowed that “after years of fruitless effort and discussion, this ancient atrocity went out in a day.”… Conservatives and Republicans, who have tried for decades to undo such cornerstones of the New Deal as Social Security, have lately turned their efforts to resurrecting this “ancient atrocity.”…

“In the last two years, 10 states, mostly Republican-controlled, have enacted or introduced laws rolling back child labor restrictions. Bills to do so have been introduced in six Midwestern states — Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota… The charge has been led by Arkansas, where in March Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law repealing a rule that required children under the age of 16 to verify their age and obtain the written consent of a parent or guardian before obtaining a work certificate. Employers had to provide state officials with a job description and schedule.

“A Sanders spokeswoman defended the law by stating that ‘this permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.’ The spokeswoman said that all other laws ‘that actually protect children still apply.’... Children’s advocates observe, however, that the new law eliminates an important enforcement tool, leaving the door open for ‘the exploitation of children and youth under the age of 16 to perform dangerous jobs, often in hazardous work conditions,’ in the words of Dennis Lee, a spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock.

“Make no mistake: The rollback of child labor protections isn’t a matter of streamlining unnecessary regulations. It’s a moral test for America… Children are the most easily exploited group in the U.S. economy, especially when they’re members of low-income or migrant households. They can be paid less than adults doing the same work, oppressed and manipulated by unscrupulous employers, and are less inclined to fight back against employers over workplace safety issues.”

And do you really believe that Arkansas will vigorously enforce those “other laws” to protect child labor? Look at how poor Black kids are treated there. And this is all under the guise of protecting parental rights?! Yup. A century of social progress, protecting the vulnerable, expanding voting rights and culling bigotry are vaporizing in a new autocratic trend to ensure that White Christian nationalists and billionaires are completely in charge of the rest of us. This most certainly isn’t the America I was raised to believe in.

I’m Peter Dekom, a student of history and a lawyer who has been practicing for decades, and I have never witnessed such a significant political effort to disenfranchise the clear majority of Americans into autocratic White Christian governance.