Policy by Stained Glass Window

and then suddenly your children are gone

A little piece here. A little piece here. A little piece over here. Just little pieces. It’s not one big agenda, so don’t worry. Then, at some future point, we assemble the whole window, and then you can see what it is.

So.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is grinding down parent notification policies with a multifaceted legal attack that includes litigation and warnings to school districts. Children are to have intimate discussions about their sexual identity and sexual behavior with school officials, and parents aren’t allowed to know about those discussions.

Also, Assembly Bill 665, signed into law last October, allows minors to leave home and enter residential facilities without parental consent, and requires “a professional person” engaged in mental health services to determine “whether involvement of the minor’s parent or guardian would be inappropriate.”

And also, Assembly Bill 2007, which advanced through the Assembly Housing Committee this morning, will create a three-year pilot network of state-funded “unicorn homes” for LGBTQ+ youth to leave home — “due to family rejection” — and live with identity-affirming host families.

That last bill is a particularly curious piece of shell-gamery, proposing to fund identity-affirming homes for “youth” from the ages of 18 to 24. Why do 24 year-old “youth” need government-funded homes because of family rejection? Beats me, but AB 665 is designed to produce a wave of unhoused minors who need somewhere to live, so fortunately a network of “unicorn homes” will be in place to meet the growing need with just a single eligibility tweek.

Curiously, AB 2007 passed last year, as AB 589, before Governor Patrick Bateman vetoed it for creating a new funding need in the face of a rapidly growing budget deficit. The same Democratic legislator is running the same bill through the same state a second time, in the face of an even-larger deficit, with the same support from her party. “There is no state housing program targeted directly at LBGTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness and Unicorn Homes can help support state efforts to prevent and end homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth,” Assemblymember Tasha Boerner argued last year. We have a population that doesn’t have government homes to live in, and that’s a big problem. Existing “unicorn homes” provide housing for “youth” from the ages of 14-24, by the way.

So parents aren’t allowed to know about sexually-themed discussions happening on school campuses between officials and their own children, and children can leave home without parental consent if a credentialed professional determines that it’s best for the family to not be involved, and the state is preparing to build a new network of homes to shelter “LGBTQ+ youth.” Obscure. Hard to see what the plan might be.

California is selling social atomization and the eradication of the family as liberation. We’re affirming children, and that’s very progressive! All they lose is their parents and their siblings, but we’re going to replace their families with government-funded group homes. It’s like a warm institutional hug!

One of the recurring features of nineteenth-century utopian communities in the United States was the collectivization of childraising: “At the age of three, the children were put in the dormitories.” Parents needed to be focused on productivity and the needs of the community, to produce the utopia, so a narrow focus on their own children prevented the appropriate community-mindedness.

And so here we are in a new utopian era, and the utopianists are selling childhood group homes again. The familiar effect is a turn toward the needs of the collective, and the severing of particular connections that are replaced with a different conception of nurturing: The group homes will now shelter the liberated youth until they’re 24 years old.

The state is your family now, citizen.

How liberating.