Defeat Doesn’t End Parental-Rights Efforts

For weeks before Tuesday’s election, backers of a controversial parental-rights measure in Colorado predicted that their efforts would ignite a national rebellion against meddlesome public officials and agencies.

With support soaring among Coloradans before the election, organizers raised their sights to California, Texas and beyond. Sponsors in 26 states other than Colorado are pressing measures designed to establish the precedence of parents’ rights in raising their children.

But when the ballots were counted Tuesday, Coloradans had rejected the initiative, 57% to 43%. The defeat surprised its backers and “took the wind out of their sails,” said Mike Hudson of the People for the American Way, a leading member of the “Protect Our Children Coalition,” which opposed the initiative.

Hudson said that Coloradans turned against the idea “when they saw this was a vague and possibly dangerous proposal and nobody knew how far it would go.” They also grew suspicious when opponents spread the word that they were being outspent in the campaign by organizers who drew virtually all of their financial support from a Virginia-based conservative group, Of The People.

“This was the epitome of outside carpetbagging, and Colorado was being used as a testing ground,” Hudson said.

Colorado was considered a promising starting point for the campaign because placing a measure on the statewide ballot is comparatively easy, backers of parental-rights initiatives said.

Coloradans, who have a deep-seated wariness of the government, initially embraced the measure, persuaded by accounts of state authorities wrongly taking children from homes, haughty school officials pressing controversial social agendas on children over their parents’ objections and bureaucratic intrusions into family decisions, such as whether a child should be spanked or “grounded” for bad behavior.

By amending state constitutions to guarantee parents the right “to direct and control the upbringing, education, values and discipline of their children,” voters would send government agencies a clear message to back off, supporters said.

“Government bureaucracies will have to take a long, hard look at themselves and how they are currently dealing with parents’ rights, and I would expect they would change their approach to the people of Colorado,” argued Kristine Wooley, executive director of the Colorado initiative movement. “Schools are going to have to look at parents more as consumers of education than they do now. This may open the door to school choice, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

But groups opposing the measure, including the National PTA, the National Education Assn., the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, warned that such an amendment would stall teaching in public schools. They said that religious conservatives would use the measure as a legal blunderbuss, suing school boards over such things as the teaching of evolution, the use of books deemed offensive and the counseling of teens about pregnancy and drugs.

Opponents also argued that the measure would have a chilling effect on state child-protection agencies, making them reluctant to investigate reports of physical abuse. That concern was also voiced by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Their Colorado defeat notwithstanding, backers of parental-rights initiatives said that they are on the march elsewhere and are making inroads with the American public. Legislators in 26 states and the U.S. Congress have introduced measures, and committees in four state legislatures--Washington, North Dakota, Kansas and Virginia--already have passed the measures in committee.

In the California Assembly and Senate, six parental-rights measures have been introduced in the last year. Five died from inaction but a sixth--a proposed state constitutional measure tendered by Republican George House of Hughson--was granted reconsideration in the coming session by the Assembly Committee on Education. Prospects for the bill dimmed considerably, however, with the outcome of Tuesday’s election, which put the Democrats back in control of the Assembly.

However, backers of the idea are expected to mount a signature campaign to take it directly to California voters in the form of a ballot measure. If they succeed, predicted Jean Hessburg, California director for People For the American Way, they will get tough scrutiny. “We are extremely used to the initiative process, and voters are more savvy about looking deeper into this legislation,” she said. “When they do, they’ll discover that parents already do have every right to oversee the upbringing of their children.”

* DEATH OF COMMON SENSE? Schoolyard kiss? Bad. Midol? Very bad. Doesn’t anyone use judgment anymore? E1