When it comes to creating healthy communities, there is nothing more important than strong families. It doesn’t matter what the family’s makeup is – be it mother-father, same-sex parents, grandparents, step-parents, foster parents, or single parents – the love and support of strong familial bonds are necessary for a free and productive society. Children are able to achieve more when they know that they have people who will stand behind them no matter what.
Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s oldest and largest organization of LGBT Republicans, conservatives, and our straight allies, is in full support of commonsense legislation like New Hampshire’s SB 272, that promotes the strength of the familial unit and the rights of the adults in those families to make the best decisions for their households, and we support its swift adoption.
Nationally, we’ve worked with PTA’s, parental rights groups, and small-government advocates to help craft legislation that gets the government out of the traditional role of parents. Our LGBT parents expect us to stand up for them as well, and we do.
In New Hampshire, the Parent’s Bill of Rights is currently making its way through the House of Representatives. The legislature should pass this important bill immediately. It would put into law the recognition that the parents, not the government, have the final say over their children’s lives. While this seems like common sense to most Granite Staters, there is an organized effort to defeat any bill that would reinforce a parent’s natural, God-given rights to raise their own children.
The opposition to this bill has attempted to take this legislation and somehow turn it into an anti-LGBT bill by suggesting that schools would be required to “out” gay students. That is highly inaccurate, to say the least. We firmly reject the assertion from the radical left that strengthening parental rights comes at the loss of gay rights. SB 272 is a commonsense reaffirmation of both.
What the Parent’s Bill of Rights does do, is ensure that public school administrators cannot lie to parents. This should not be a controversial position, and why so many on the left would choose to fight for the right of schools to lie to parents is beyond us. If a child is being bullied in school, the parents should know if If a child is acting out or getting in trouble. If a child has not been acting like him or herself in recent weeks, the parents should know. This is actually even more important for LGBT families!
LGBT youth often experience the worst that adolescence has to offer, including bullying and feelings of despair and isolation. That is when they need their families the most. It is a time to bring parents closer to their child, not push them further away. Even the best of parents cannot always see it when their child is hiding their struggles, but parents are biologically wired to love their children more than anyone else and need to be part of helping them get through their pain.
Of course, we recognize that not all parents are good parents. SB 272 includes all of the protections that you would expect in a bill of this type, including when there is any reason to believe that the parents are abusive or the child would be harmed. We believe these protections are incredibly important and make this an even stronger piece of legislation as a result.
New Hampshire has the opportunity to be a leader on the parent’s rights issue. Lawmakers should not allow the threats and misinformation of the left sway them from doing what is right for New Hampshire families. The nation is watching, and we are strongly behind you!
Charles Moran is the President of Log Cabin Republicans & the Log Cabin Institute. Richard Tisei is a former Republican state senator from Massachusetts and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Log Cabin Republicans. They wrote this for NHJournal.com.
