Assembly Public Safety Committee chair Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D.), who criticized the legislation on Tuesday for its potential impact on racial minorities, this time voted to advance the bill unchanged along with three other Democrats. The two Republicans voted yes both times. None of the lawmakers spoke about why they were holding a redo vote.

The abrupt and unusual about-face came in an emergency hearing after public outcry over the panel's first vote, which saw all the Democrats abstain and thereby block the bill from moving toward a vote by the full Assembly. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) had also applied pressure, saying Wednesday that he was "surprised" by the decision.

The bipartisan bill, which the state Senate already passed unanimously, appears on track to become law, though changes could still be made. But there is little reason to expect California Democrats, and the Public Safety Committee in particular, will be deterred from longstanding efforts to ease sentencing and empty prisons in the name of racial equity—even as violent crime in California continues to rise.

After Thursday’s vote, Jones-Sawyer tweeted that the bill needs to be "fixed." He claimed without evidence that the measure—which would expand California’s Three-Strikes law to include trafficking of a minor—"could charge trafficking victims and children with a felony."

"We are going to improve this bill and provide justice for victims," he said.

"This is just the latest of a whole series of actions taken by the Public Safety Committee over the years to essentially defend criminals over victims," the Assembly’s Republican leader James Gallagher said in an interview. "I’m glad it’s finally getting the focus and attention that it has deserved for quite some time, where common-sense measures that are just trying to get on top of accountability are killed in that committee."

During debate ahead of the first vote on the bill, Democratic members of the committee bluntly rejected the premise that justice would be served by locking up repeatedly-convicted traffickers of minors for sex and labor.

"All [longer sentences] do is increase our investments in systems of harm and subjugation at the expense of the investments that the communities needed to not have this be a problem to begin with," said Democratic majority leader and committee member Issac Bryan.

Outside the legislature, the Democrats’ logic proved unconvincing. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Emily Hoeven wrote of the vote: "The notion that it isn’t a serious crime to traffic children for sex or labor is so absurd as to be laughable if it weren’t for the gravity of the situation." California Democrats have grown so ideological, argued Hoeven, that they are making Republicans relevant again in the Democratic supermajority state legislature.

Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted his disbelief at Tuesday's vote: "Wtf?"

Some state Democrats were defiant. The California Assembly Democrats’ Twitter account on Wednesday posted a thread defending the committee from its critics.

"Preventing a crime in the first place is our goal," the Assembly Democrats said in the now-deleted tweets, adding "the current 3 Strikes model disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous & People of Color communities, so any bill that builds on this system needs to ensure equity & that unforeseen consequences do not lead to trafficked children being punished under the law."

Sen. Mark Stern (D.), who voted for the bill in the upper chamber, in tweets on Wednesday mocked Republican critics as conspiracy theorists

But Newsom told reporters on Wednesday that he had called the bill's Republican author, Sen. Shannon Grove, to offer his support. He said that trafficking of children is something "I care deeply about." His office declined to provide further comment.

By Thursday, a number of Democratic lawmakers were heard voicing rare support for law and order.

"SB14 and the human trafficking of minors is a serious issue," Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D.) tweeted Thursday. "I have met unaccompanied minors who are survivors who shared with me their horrific stories. I don’t serve on Assembly Public Safety, but if I did, I would have voted yes and plan on voting yes on the Assembly floor."

Assemblywoman Liz Ortega (D.), a Public Safety Committee member, apologized on Thursday after telling human trafficking victims that she could not support the bill because "sending someone to prison for the rest of their lives is not going to fix the harm moving forward."

"On Tuesday, I made a bad decision," Ortega tweeted. "Voting against legislation targeting really bad people who traffic children was wrong. I regret doing that and I am going to help get this important legislation passed into law."

Yet Democrats’ initial opposition to cracking down on child traffickers was no anomaly.

During this legislative session, the Public Safety Committee has quashed bills that would have bolstered punishments for fentanyl dealers as the state faces an overdose crisis and tightened sentencing for gun crimes and domestic violence. California has in recent years restricted sentencing for drug- and gang-related crimes, reduced jail time for convicted felons, and sealed and wiped criminal records.

Newsom, who signed those bills into law, is now touting an initiative to turn the historic San Quentin prison into a "rehabilitation" center that he hopes will become a national model.

The post California Democrats Redo 'WTF' Vote Against Making Child Trafficking a Serious Felony appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"We need to do something," said Democratic state assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D.), calling the moms "a real-life example of what you’re dealing with" as teachers. In a unanimous 6-0 vote, his committee went on to advance the bill that the moms testified against, Senate Bill 596, which would criminalize Californians who "harass" or make a "credible threat" against school employees off-campus.

S.B. 596 is one of several bills that California legislators are considering to restrict parents' rights in the name of empowering LGBT minors. Other Democratic-backed legislation in the works would let children as young as 12 years old enter state custody without parental consent and require judges to disfavor parents in custody disputes who do not affirm their child's gender identity. Last year, California passed a law—which has been emulated in other blue states—allowing minors from across the country to receive sex-change treatments even against their parents' wishes.

The mothers who testified against S.B. 596 on Tuesday, Allie Snyder and Nicole Young, spoke on behalf of dozens of parents who turned up at the hearing to register their opposition. Snyder told the panel that one California school allowed a boy and girl to share a hotel room alone on an overnight field trip against parents’ wishes because both kids identified as "nonbinary."

She also read aloud from This Book Is Gay, a sexually explicit guide to LGBT sex and gender on offer at her son’s middle school that shocked a different panel of California Democrats last week. "Perhaps the most important skill you will master as a gay or bi man is the timeless classic ‘the handjob,’" Snyder recited amid objections from members of the committee.

"Would you remain calm if your kids’ school didn't stop such obvious endangerment rather than criminalize parents who are terrorized by the grooming of their children?" Snyder asked.

Young, the chair of a Sacramento-area Moms for Liberty group, said an LGBT group called the Landing Spot used campus classrooms during school hours to advertise drag shows where minors age 12 and up could dance for cash tips. She said parents only learned about the event through a public records request.

"The number of kids with gender confusion is growing exponentially because of the schools asking for pronouns, sometimes daily, telling kids that they could be born in the wrong body, instructing them to keep secrets from their parents," Young said.

The Washington Free Beacon was not immediately able to confirm Synder or Young's accounts.

State senator Anthony Portantino, the author of S.B. 596, said the bill is a response to the behavior of Californians who—like many Americans—are upset about how schools teach gender and race.

A teachers' union representative who testified in favor of the legislation lamented that parents are attacking teachers over "phantom issues" like "grooming children or providing diversity through critical race theory."

It was those comments that prompted Jones-Sawyer to condemn Snyder and Young and speak of the need to "do something." However, he added that he wanted a solution that was "right down the middle" politically.

The post Horror Stories About LGBT Education Lead California Democrats To Support Crackdown… on Parents Telling the Stories appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The legislation, Senate Bill 14, would classify trafficking of children and teenagers younger than 18 years old as a serious felony on par with murder, arson, and rape, which would bring longer prison terms and potential life sentences without a chance for a plea bargain. The six Democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee abstained from voting on the bill, preventing its advance toward a vote by the full chamber. Both Republicans voted yes.

"All [longer sentences] do is increase our investments in systems of harm and subjugation at the expense of the investments that the communities needed to not have this be a problem to begin with," Democratic majority leader and committee member Isaac Bryan said during the hearing.

The Democrats' downvote came even as local leaders and anti-trafficking activists across California have warned that sex trafficking is surging since the state in January decriminalized loitering with the intent to commit prostitution in the name of transgender rights. The Public Safety Committee has killed a number of proposals this session meant to address rising crime—including a previous bill to sharpen penalties for sex trafficking. Progressive members of the panel have for years worked to ease punishments for criminals and reduce prison populations.

During Tuesday's hearing, survivors of human trafficking gave emotional testimony. One of the women, who testified anonymously, said she had been imprisoned after being trafficked and opposed the bill for fear it would criminalize other victims. The other, Odessa Perkins, criticized the panel’s reluctance to keep offenders in jail as enabling a "horrific cycle of abuse and depravity."

"I’ve heard the opposition ... [on] mass incarceration of blacks, harm to communities, and I’ve heard many speak about jail overcrowding," said Perkins, who is black. "But I’m here to say that I was molested and raped repeatedly by black and white men and even some women. So it does not matter the race. What matters is saving our children. Traffickers are getting out of jail, parole, and reoffending, continuing the horrific cycle of abuse and depravity."

Sharmin Bock, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, testified that traffickers in California, a national hotbed of the crime, rarely receive more than a few years of prison time and "are getting so brazen because the law has no teeth."

"Let’s now recognize that organized crime is in it, gangs are in it, because as you heard from our witness, they can do it over and over again," Bock said. "So recognize also that this is a huge moneymaker. These girls are ATM machines."

Public Safety Committee chair Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D.) said that he had planned to vote against the bill but decided instead to abstain and allow the authors to make revisions. He did not specify what changes could make the measure more acceptable to him.

Assemblywoman Liz Ortega (D.) effectively told sex-trafficked minors that the criminal justice system could not help them.

"I'm struggling with how do we support you with mental health access, with housing, with education, with good jobs, because it's part of a holistic approach," she said, addressing the witnesses. "Sending someone to prison for the rest of their lives is not going to fix the harm moving forward. And that's the part I'm struggling with. It's a complex issue."

State senator Shannon Grove (R.), who co-authored the bill along with two Democrats, expressed shock at Tuesday's defeat. She noted that she had already modified the bill to target only repeat traffickers of minors and that her Democratic colleagues in the upper chamber had unanimously voted yes.

"We amended the bill … thinking that once we got to the Assembly… [it] would be so easy to get out of this committee," she said. "And I’m sad to hear that I was wrong."

The post California Democrats Block Bill To Lock Up Repeat Child Sex Traffickers: Prison Is Not the Answer appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The account—which is dedicated to opposing California Assembly Bill 957, a controversial piece of legislation that would punish parents who do not "affirm" their child's gender identity—was deactivated hours after it was created on Wednesday. The parents appealed the decision, and Instagram restored the account, @StopAB957, on Friday. A spokeswoman for Instagram parent company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said the account had been incorrectly flagged as violating the website's community guidelines.

"The account has no violations at current," the spokeswoman told the Washington Free Beacon.

Instagram's targeting of @StopAB957, which boasts just 113 followers and 4 posts, came the same day the company launched a fast-growing Twitter alternative, Instagram Threads, that free speech watchdogs have already accused of censoring conservative users and critics of left-wing gender ideology.

"It's hard to say [the suspension of @StopAB957] was censorship because we had barely said anything," said Nicole Pearson, an attorney who contributed information about the legislation for the Instagram account. "They didn't even let us say anything to censor."

Three of the account’s posts criticized A.B. 957, which would require judges in custody disputes to disfavor parents who fail to affirm their child's gender identity. The fourth featured a video of a parents' rights activist questioning Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) about California's policies encouraging sex changes for minors. The account has made no new posts since it was reinstated.

A volunteer who manages @StopAB957 and who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional retaliation said that Instagram never responded to her questions about why exactly the account was suspended. In an email to the Free Beacon, Meta suggested the suspension was a technical error rather than ideological overreach.

Meta has leveraged its two billion users to make Instagram Threads the fastest-growing website ever, drawing more than 100 million sign-ups in less than a week. In the launch announcement, Meta promised to keep Threads "positive" in implicit contrast with the unrestrained discourse allowed on Twitter under billionaire owner Elon Musk.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, told the New York Times last week that Meta decided to create Threads specifically to respond to "product changes and decisions" that Musk made at Twitter.

"Right now it's just very friendly in there," Mosseri said of Threads on Thursday. "Now, we'll see what it looks like when the gates blow open and anyone and everyone can join. But the vibes are good in there right now."

Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2019 strongly defended free speech, has acknowledged that the company censored true information about COVID-19 at the behest of experts, along with stories about Hunter Biden's laptop after an FBI warning. National Democrats and liberal critics faulted Meta, however, for amplifying "misinformation" in support of Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, and the company has since stepped up content moderation.

"Since 2016 we've invested more than $16 billion in building up the teams and technologies needed to protect our users," Meta said in announcing Instagram Threads, "and we remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and investments to protect our community."

The post Instagram Suspends Tiny Parents' Rights Account Amid Bid for 'Friendly' Social Media Dominance appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Thurmond announced Wednesday that he "will be seriously exploring a run for governor in 2026" to continue "taking on MAGA extremists who want to ban books" and "defending classroom teachers and students against the constant assault on our democracy." A close ally of term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.), Thurmond has served as California superintendent of public instruction since 2019. During his tenure, test scores have fallen nearly 10 percentage points as Thurmond focused on training teachers to help students change genders.

Thurmond could face an uphill battle in his bid for governor. Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis (D.) has already thrown her hat in the ring for 2026, and Attorney General Rob Bonta (D.) is also expected to run. In addition to the crowded field, Thurmond has his fair share of political baggage. He came under fire in 2020 for giving a high-paying "superintendent of equity" job to a friend who lived in Pennsylvania. Nearly two dozen senior officials left the Department of Education after Thurmond took the helm, citing a toxic and abusive workplace.

Thurmond's announcement came on the heels of a damning report on California's public schools. Only 35 percent of low-income students met state literacy standards in 2022, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Just 21 percent were proficient in math.

As California's students faltered, Thurmond focused on pushing gender ideology in the classroom. He helped secure funding to train teachers to support students' gender transition and chose adamant purveyors of transgenderism, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and the Trevor Project, to write the training. The State Legislature is advancing a bill that would make the course mandatory for all middle and high school teachers.

Thurmond also teamed up with the nonprofit Gender Nation to distribute books about transgenderism into public school classrooms for children as young as preschoolers. He is supporting a bill this year to prohibit school boards from removing LGBT books they deem inappropriate and has joined the LGBT rights group Equality California to rate California districts on their transgender policies.

Thurmond did not respond to a request for comment.

The post California's Scandal-Plagued Progressive School Chief Eyes Governor's Mansion appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

During the public comment portion of a legislative hearing, California parent Allie Snyder read aloud portions from This Book Is Gay, the only book officially restricted by a California school last year. The book, which is available in Snyder’s son’s middle school, includes explicit descriptions of sexual acts and step-by-step instructions to use dating apps to find where "the nearest homosexuals are."

When Snyder read from the book, Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D.) demurred on whether it was appropriate for children.

"I can’t comment on something I haven’t read myself," Jackson told Republican Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, who asked him if he considered the book appropriate for junior high schoolers. Jackson instead cited his experience as a social worker to underscore the importance of determining whether "books are appropriate depending on the development of the child." A spokesperson for Jackson told the Washington Free Beacon that Jackson stands by his answers.

The exchange came during a hearing on Jackson’s proposal to pull funding from schools that provide an insufficient number of books on LGBT issues. The assemblyman says his proposal is necessary to counter what he described as "some sinister movements sweeping this nation," which harness "the legitimate concerns of parents" for a political agenda. The bill cleared the committee on a party line vote and with the support of California Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond.

"The anus does not have the capacity to stretch in the same way a vagina does," the book reads. "This means it’s a tight hole."

This Book Is Gay is tied for ninth place on PEN America’s list of the "most banned books" over the 2022-23 school year. Even in California’s deeply progressive legislature, excerpts from This Book Is Gay appeared to shock some Democrats—including the chair of the Senate education committee.

"Per her description, if it’s even remotely accurate, [the book] is probably offensive to many of us," committee chair Josh Newman said, before voting in favor of Jackson’s bill.

Thurmond, who as the primary backer of Jackson's bill testified in its favor, said it would bring "consequences" to districts that act in a "discriminatory" way. Throughout the hearing, Thurmond, who did not respond to a request for comment, avoided any discussion about the content of controversial books and framed the bill as a measure to stop "threats" to LGBT and minority students.

"There has been violence at school board meetings, simply over a discussion over whether or not to hang a Pride flag," Thurmond told the Senate panel, ostensibly referring to last month’s protest in the Glendale school district where Armenian parents squared off with Antifa protesters. "People were arrested, people were injured, and there were threats being made."

Thurmond also criticized a Southern California school board, which last month rejected an elementary school curriculum that celebrates Harvey Milk, the gay activist who had a relationship with a minor.

As the California legislature debates books, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) has made "book bans" central to his national fundraising campaign. Over the weekend, Newsom posted a video of himself in an Idaho bookstore that opposes "book bans."

"Couldn’t leave Boise without dropping by this incredible bookstore," Newsom tweeted on Sunday. "The owners of Rediscovered Books are doing everything they can to push back against these insane bans happening across the country."

The post California Dem Won't Say If Book That Teaches Minors to Use Gay Hookup Apps Is 'Appropriate' appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Notably, the report doesn’t set an exact amount for direct cash payments to black Californians. But it has plenty of other radical policies. Here are eight of the wildest.

Decriminalize Public Urination. The task force suggests police refrain from arresting those caught publicly urinating, trespassing, camping on the street, or evading fares on public transportation.

Arresting such people "criminalizes poverty," the report says. Public urinators and their ilk are better left to a  "public health and safety institution" without power to arrest or prosecute anyone, according to the task force.

This recommendation will likely irk Bay Area residents, who overwhelmingly say they don’t feel safe in public transit precisely because there aren’t enough police around to prevent disorderly conduct as crime spikes in the state.

Let the Urinators Sue. Should police dare to stop public indecency, the task force suggests letting criminals sue police for damages or paying them outright for their troubles.

In a similar vein, the task force suggests compensating anyone convicted for loitering to solicit sex, which the state legislature decriminalized last year.

Debt Forgiveness For Deadbeat Dads. The task force wants California to ax its 10 percent interest charge for delinquent child support payments and wipe all child support debt, on the grounds that a disproportionate number of fathers who owe child support are black. Such debt "hinders their ability to attend school or job training, maintain housing, and find employment," the report states. 

Defund School Police. Police and probation officers should be banned from school campuses, and replaced with social workers, psychologists, and wellness centers. Schools that can’t afford to replace officers should just fire them anyway and curtail what remaining officers can do, the task force says.

No More Traffic Violations. The task force suggests prohibiting cops from pulling over cars with expired registration, tinted windows, or broken tail lights. In lieu of tickets, the report suggests mailing warnings to offenders.

Guaranteed Income for Descendants of Slaves. The report says California should expand on its $25 million pilot program that guarantees monthly cash payments for poor pregnant women and youth who have just aged out of foster care. In this case, the guaranteed income would only go to descendants of slaves.

Close the "Racial Wealth Gap." The report calls for the state to study the racial wealth gap, accounting for differences in black Americans’ home equity, financial assets, and income. The purpose is to help the federal government calculate reparations for all black Americans.

Teach Kids About the Reparations Task Force. California schools should be required to teach high school students about reparations, the task force says—with a particular focus on how black students are disadvantaged.

"In order to educate Californians about the findings and recommendations of the Task Force, and because of the stubborn opportunity gap between African American students and their peers, the Task Force recommends that the Legislature fund the development and implementation of a standard curriculum encompassing the contents of this final report," the panel wrote.

Perhaps teachers could squeeze that in alongside their lessons on why California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) is a historic figure.

The post The Craziest Recommendations from California's Reparations Task Force appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The DSA, the nation's largest socialist organization, made the pitch in a 2018 pamphlet titled "Why Socialists Should Become Teachers." It argues that "socialists should take jobs as teachers (and other school-based workers) for the political, economic, and social potential the industry holds." The decision to get in the education industry, the pamphlet says, is a "strategic" route to toppling the capitalist economy.

"While teachers don't make a product that is sold on the market, we are necessary in the reproduction of a capitalist economy and the perpetuation of classes," according to the pamphlet, which was written by West Virginia socialists after teachers in the state went on strike. "It is teachers who train, both socially and technically, the workers of the future."

"There is a growing national network of educators in DSA working to transform our schools, our unions, and our society," the pamphlet boasts.

The pamphlet came as the socialist group's ranks swelled amid anti-Donald Trump fervor. The group's sprawling platform demands an end to capitalism, prisons, the five-day work week, and "state recognition of the gender binary," along with enshrining "social ownership" of all major industry and infrastructure, energy production, and wealth redistribution.

Since the 2018 directive, the DSA through its local and regional chapters has worked with teachers' unions across the country to push left-wing initiatives that are unrelated to education, including "reparations" for black students and affordable housing developments on school property. DSA members have been elected to lead two major unions in Los Angeles and Boston, and the group's national youth branch, the Young Democratic Socialists of America, held its national conference this year at the Chicago Teachers Union headquarters. Socialists who count themselves as members of the organization are winning school board seats around the country as well.

While the organization's efforts have gone largely unnoticed by the public, those who follow public education closely say the playbook is obvious.

"The DSA is leveraging the education process to advance its unpopular agenda," said Rhyen Staley, a researcher for Parents Defending Education who has tracked the trend and noted that the socialist push comes as students across the country "are struggling to read and write."

The DSA brands itself as a decentralized "political and activist organization" and boasts more than 92,000 members—a more-than-tenfold increase since Trump's election in 2016, when the group included just about 8,000 Democratic Socialists. In Trump's first year in office, the group's ranks more than tripled to 25,000, CNN reported at the time.

The DSA's financial coffers grew as well. Total revenue in 2015 was just over $490,000, according to its tax filings. By 2021, the latest tax year for which DSA filings are available, funds reached nearly $6.9 million.

It is during this period of explosive growth that the DSA embraced the strategic alliance with teachers' unions, which now embrace several socialist policies. The Colorado Education Association, which represents teachers across the state, approved a resolution this April condemning capitalism. It came at the behest of a DSA member, Bryan Lindstrom, who urged the union to commit to dismantling capitalism in favor of "a new, equitable economic system."

Teachers have gone on strike across the country to demand DSA agenda items such as paying reparations to black students, defunding police, building subsidized housing on school land, teaching "climate literacy" through a "racial justice lens," buying electric buses, and instructing students about "structural racism."

In California cities, teachers have gone on strike to demand that district leaders fulfill DSA agenda items. The United Teachers of Los Angeles shut down classrooms for days in March over a platform crafted from the DSA's "Green New Deal" for public schools. Their asks included more campus solar panels and a climate literacy course taught through a "racial justice lens." The union president, Cecily Myart-Cruz, is a DSA member who in 2019 spoke at the organization's national convention.

And shortly after the Los Angeles strike, the Oakland-area DSA chapter helped organize a teachers' union strike for "common good" proposals such as reparations for black students. The DSA coordinated a "solidarity working group" to plan the strike, canvassed for the authorizing votes, and ran a phone bank to finance the walk-out, according to the local chapter calendar.

In exchange for pushing the DSA's policy agenda, the teachers' unions have won a passionate advocate in their political fights. In Chicago, the city's DSA locked arms with the Chicago Teachers Union when the union made lofty demands for school reopenings that even the city's Democratic leadership couldn't get behind. The DSA argued that leaders wanted kids in classrooms only "to keep the gears of the economy moving and the already exorbitant profits for the ruling class flowing" and to "push the march towards privatization of public education."

The DSA's growing ranks in schools have helped the organization enter public school governance as well, with socialists winning seats on local school boards in blue cities where teachers' unions typically sway elections for their chosen candidates. Two members of the Los Angeles DSA were elected to the board of the nation's largest district, Los Angeles Unified—the first in 2019 and the second in 2022. One of them, Jackie Goldberg, is now president of the board. Since 2018, Democratic Socialists have won school board seats in Nevada, Minnesota, Texas, New York, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

These school board seats give Democratic Socialists sway over both sides of teacher contract negotiations, Staley said, and further promote DSA policies within school districts. This dynamic played out in Los Angeles this year, when the teachers' union strike for a public school "Green New Deal" coincided with a similar policy push by the district's two DSA-affiliated board members in the name of creating "sustainable, healthy, resilient, and equitable learning environments."

None of these efforts have come as a surprise to union critics like Rebecca Friedrichs, a longtime Southern California teacher who lost her 2016 U.S. Supreme Court case against forced unionization by the California Teachers' Association.

"If you want to bring down a republic, you have to capture the schools first," Friedrichs said. "Groups like the DSA have been the leaders of that."

Neither the DSA nor any of the various unions mentioned responded to requests for comment.

The post The Emerging Alliance Between America's Leading Socialist Organization and Teachers' Unions appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Templeton Unified School District superintendent Aaron Asplund proposed a variety of potential solutions to the conundrum during a special school board meeting this week. His ideas drew from an hours-long debate that saw local parents shout one another down, exchange insults, and, in some cases, break into tears.

One woman told the school board that her son, a slight eighth grader, had mysteriously grown anxious and withdrawn and his grades had fallen. When she finally convinced him to open up, she said, he revealed that he was the only boy assigned a locker in an aisle with male-identifying girls. Another mom talked about a boy in a neighboring district, her friend's son, who she said had stopped using the restrooms at his high school to avoid embarrassing encounters with a female classmate who identifies as male.

The turmoil in Templeton, a politically reddish town in a purple district in a deep-blue state, offers a glimpse of what can happen when sweeping Democratic mandates of transgender "inclusion" run up against other students' comfort levels and deeply held local mores. Under the circumstances, school bathroom access laws—which 16 states and the District of Columbia have followed California in enacting—may foster more fragmentation than inclusion.

California requires schools to allow transgender students to use the restrooms and locker rooms that correspond with the gender identity, as opposed to their biological sex. Since the first-in-the-nation law was enacted in 2014, the number of U.S. teenagers who identify as transgender has nearly doubled, according to a report last year. The Templeton school district convened a meeting on Tuesday to address growing concerns about transgender students using opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms in local schools.

Packed into a middle school band room on Tuesday, parents and other community members appealed to science and their Christian beliefs to explain why it was dangerous and wrong to allow boys into girls' changing areas, showers, and bathrooms, and vice versa. A crowd of LGBT activists and community members from outside the town joined other local parents who support the status quo. Many suggested even having the conversation was hateful, or at least ignorant. Some audibly laughed or sighed in response to the religious appeals.

A lipstick-wearing older man, who dressed as a woman and introduced himself as a transgender lesbian, dismissed concerns about mixed-sex restrooms and locker rooms as "silly."

"I identify as a female. I am a woman. What you see before you is a woman," he said. "Are we debating the right of a child or adult to use the restroom?"

One Templeton resident said that she could not wait for her children to graduate from high school so they could leave the "small minded" district.

The board member who convened the meeting, Jennifer Grinager, repeatedly faced vitriol from speakers for her one-time role as the leader of a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, an influential new conservative network that advocates against left-wing race and gender ideology in schools. Several speakers dismissed her by repeating claims that the group is a hate group, and one former elementary school teacher from the district likened it to the Nazis.

Robin Terra, a mother and former teacher in the district, was among those who sought to lower the temperature in the room and focus on policy.

"We have to fix the bathroom situation," she said. "It’s a hot topic for both the majority and the minority. We need to figure this out. If the kids are not happy, they’re not going to learn. We need to stop fighting each other, come together, and come up with solutions instead of bashing each other."

A woman who said her daughter had briefly identified as a boy recommended the approach of the girl's former middle school in another district where administrators let her daughter use a separate changing room.

The superintendent, Asplund, laid out his proposals after the public comment period, stressing that the school had to consider the "privacy, comfort, and safety" of all students rather than viewing the situation as a winner-take-all partisan fight. But he made clear the status quo would have to change "as we fully embrace the opportunity for students to use the facility of their gender identity."

For locker rooms, which pose the most privacy concerns, Asplund suggested putting up partitioned stalls in the general changing area so students could undress out of sight—an idea the board seemed to favor the most. He noted that physical education teachers have to supervise their students changing for P.E., and now that they have transgender students they are now seeing adolescents of the opposite sex undress.

Other ideas included an individual, fully private changing room any student could use, or even the complete elimination of locker rooms. Students could also be allowed to wear their regular clothes during P.E. and avoid changing altogether if they are not comfortable in the locker room.

To address privacy concerns in mixed-sex restrooms, Asplund suggested, single-person facilities could be opened, urinals could be removed from the boys' restrooms and replaced with stalls to maintain privacy, or monitors could be employed to prevent inappropriate behavior between boys and girls.

One possible advantage of switching to gender-neutral restrooms that board members noted: The district could get ahead of a bill California Democrats have been advancing to mandate such facilities at every school.

While California is at the national forefront of advancing gender ideology in schools, students and parents in other blue states are also pushing back on transgender access to school bathrooms. In Wisconsin, four 14-year-old girls filed a federal Title IX complaint against their school after an 18-year-old boy who is transitioning to female exposed his genitalia to them in the locker room. A group of Ohio parents sued their district for allowing transgender students into opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms as the state considers a bill to restrict such access.

In Virginia, the state and the federal government are investigating Loudoun County Public Schools for its handling of a boy's 2021 sexual assaults of two girls at district schools, one of which occurred in a girl's restroom. Last year, Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin reversed rules that school restroom and locker room usage must be based on gender identity.

Oklahoma, meanwhile, faces a lawsuit from three students over a state law that blocks them from using opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms. Eight other states have such bans.

Even as polling shows that a large majority of Americans believe gender is and should be defined by biology, the Biden administration's pending Title IX rule would compel schools to let transgender students use bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

The post Bathroom Monitors and No Urinals: California School District Stretches To Protect Kids Without Violating Trans Law appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D.), the wife of California attorney general Rob Bonta, replaced the previous language of Assembly Bill 1352 on Tuesday to "expressly prohibit" school boards from "taking an action that contradicts any existing law requiring a school district to have inclusive policies, practices, and curriculum," according to the revised text. The legislation had already cleared the Assembly floor and a Senate committee as an unrelated bill about childcare subsidies.

If the bill becomes law, school board members who propose ideas that run counter to California’s diversity mandates could be removed by their colleagues with a two-thirds vote—a prospect that "creates a specter of retribution" against dissenters, according to Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs for the California Policy Center.

"We’re at tin-pot tyranny level now where any time a local official does anything that’s completely within their authority—legal and constitutional—the agitators on the left feel like they have to strip their lower offices of their duly elected officials," Christensen said.

Bonta’s measure is the latest move by California Democrats to crack down on resistance to the state's pro-LGBT educational regime. Like other states, California has in recent years seen an upswell of opposition to progressive policies for schools and educators, including a wave of conservatives challenging liberal school board members. But the movement has so far been largely squelched by California's teachers' unions and Democratic leaders.

Just this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) joined a host of Democratic lawmakers in condemning as hateful a protest by Los Angeles parents against school board-sanctioned LGBT Pride activities after a fight broke out between some of the protesters and Antifa counterprotesters. Newsom and Rob Bonta threatened investigations of school districts that remove any potentially inappropriate books that are LGBT-themed or "gender-diverse." And the Education Department launched a probe into a Southern California school district for its rejection of LGBT curriculum for early elementary school students, including books that celebrate San Francisco’s first openly gay lawmaker Harvey Milk.

To advance her new proposal, Bonta used a legislative tool known colloquially in Sacramento as "gut-and-amend," which swaps out already-vetted and approved legislative language for an entirely new policy. This maneuver can allow lawmakers to sidestep the customary hearing process and move controversial measures through the legislature with relatively little scrutiny. A.B. 1352 needs to make it out of the Senate to be sent to Newsom for signature into law.

Bonta's office did not respond to questions about why the assemblywoman flouted standard legislative procedure, who is backing her bill, and why she seeks to suppress dissent by democratically elected local officials.

The post ‘Tin-Pot Tyranny’: California Dem Moves To Purge School Boards of Members Who Dissent From 'Inclusive' Regime appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Assembly Bill 665 on a party-line vote. The bill would allow poor children as young as age 12 to check into state-run youth shelters on the unconditional say-so of a therapist or counselor.

Ahead of the vote, dozens of Californians passionately testified against the bill, variously condemning it as "emancipation of 12 year olds," "heinous," and "dangerous." But the bill's authors dismissed the concerns as "misinformation" and "lies."

The bill's advance is the latest victory in a campaign by California Democrats to roll back parental rights, often in the name of allowing minors to choose their own gender. Other legislation making its way through the legislature would punish parents and foster parents who do not "affirm" children's transgender identity.

Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D.) and state senator Scott Wiener (D.), the co-authors of the bill, reiterated on Tuesday that they simply seek to give all children equal access to mental health services, as privately insured minors from age 12 can already receive outpatient therapy without parental consent. The bill would only apply to kids on Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program that provides health coverage to eligible low-income residents.

"This bill protects children. It makes children safer. It makes children healthier," said Wiener. "It’s unfortunate that this bill, like so many, has been caught up in this right-wing outrage machine."

"We would never move a piece of policy that takes away parental discretion, to allow children to not have access to their parents," Carrillo assured the assembled parents, drawing audible scoffs from the room. "There’s been a lot of misinformation and lies about this bill to the point that it has national and international attention as to how we treat mental health services for young people in the United States and California."

But the bill would leap beyond the autonomy granted to children under existing law. There would be no obligation, as there is for minors on private insurance, for therapists or counselors to show that a 12-year-old patient is mature enough or in a dangerous situation before transferal to a "residential shelter." Whether or not to inform the parents of the move would also be left to the discretion of the mental health professional, who could be an intern or trainee.

"Have each of you used your elected platforms and networks to inform and speak with the people of California?" Los Angeles mother Wendy Minas asked the Senate panel during her testimony against the bill. "It doesn’t seem so, because when I talk to my community, no one knows about it. And when they hear about it, they are shocked and angry that you would consider passing an extreme bill that would break apart families during a child’s most difficult and challenging years."

Critics have warned that if the bill becomes law, troubled children will exploit its provisions to run away from home. Transgender kids, in particular, could try to negate their parents' veto over sex-change treatments, including by accusing them of abuse.

"The authors want to change the law to let a 12 year old opt out of their home on a whim, invoking parental separation and emancipation of minors without any claim of danger or parental consent," Nicole Pearson, an attorney, said in her testimony against the bill. "This is child emancipation."

Pearson noted that if lawmakers only wanted to remove the parental consent requirement for minors on Medi-Cal to receive mental health services, they could simply tweak the state's welfare code. That would leave the rules for entering residential shelters unchanged.

When Republican state senator Scott Wilk asked about Pearson's alternative during the hearing, Taylor Chambers, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, a cosponsor of the bill, responded that changing the welfare code would create billing confusion for doctors and counselors—and therefore wouldn't be equitable.

Other supporters of the bill, who testified before the panel in much smaller numbers than opponents, include children's mental health clinics, insurers, psychiatrists, and psychiatric associations. Conservative advocacy groups, parents’ rights groups, and California Nurses United, a progressive nurses union, have opposed the measure.

While the bill does not mention gender identity, the track record of one of its authors has fueled suspicions. Wiener, who recently honored anti-Catholic drag nuns at the California legislature, is also pushing a bill that would require California foster parents to "affirm" the transgender identities of foster children. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced another bill that Wiener co-authored to make parents' non-affirmation of their child's transgender identity grounds for revoking or limiting custody. Last year, a law that Wiener authored went into effect, empowering California courts to take temporary jurisdiction of kids who come to California from out of state in search of hormone therapy or other transition treatment.

The post California Moves Toward Giving Therapists Unconditional Power To 'Emancipate' 12 Year Olds From Their Parents appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Nearly two dozen California mothers, coaches, and activists in interviews were dismayed by the increasingly visible presence of transgender-identifying boys in girls' sports. Yet all but a few declined to speak on the record, citing concerns about loss of reputation, livelihood, or athletic dreams.

"Most are in agreement that trans kids should have their own category, but no one can say that out loud," said Keri Olson, a former UCLA tennis player who belongs to a secret chat group of Southern California women who do not want their high-school aged daughters to be forced to play sports with bigger and stronger males.

The climate of fear is striking given that Americans overwhelmingly oppose letting transgender athletes play against girls even as that is rapidly becoming the rule. According to a Gallup poll published this week, nearly 70 percent of Americans think sports participation should be determined according to biological sex. Meanwhile, a pending update of Title IX by the Biden administration would require schools to default to allowing students to play on teams according to their gender identity.

In California—the spearhead of progressive governance and gender "equity" in the United States—discontent with the status quo is boiling just out of public view. A decade after the state decreed that kids can choose their sports team and locker room based on gender identity, nearly 2 percent of California high schoolers identify as transgender, according to CDC data, and trans-identifying boys are popping up at the top of girls’ sports. Two boys beat out girls to qualify for last month’s state track championships, shortly after a trans-identifying high school boy took the girls’ ski racing title.

Olson and her fellow chat group members, most of whom are also former college athletes, see the transgender movement as a threat to the hard-won federal protections women's sports have enjoyed since Title IX banned sex-based discrimination in schools half a century ago. Olson agreed to have her name published because, she said, "if nobody speaks up, then the other side is going to prevail. We need to not be scared."

Many Californians are scared, though. One San Francisco Bay Area woman whose daughter competed against a trans-identifying boy in high school said she stopped talking about her opposition to the situation, even socially, for fear of losing a corporate salary her family relies on. Another mother, a small business owner who is involved in Bay Area activism in defense of female-only sports, worried: "If I were to publicly declare that women’s sports should be for females, all my employees would quit within a day."

Several other women who spoke anonymously to the Washington Free Beacon said their daughters do not want to play sports against boys. But, the women said, the girls are hesitant to object because they don’t want to hurt the boys’ feelings. Two other mothers said their daughters believe protest is pointless as the transgender takeover of female sports is a fait accompli—even though, as one of the mothers put it, "everyone knows it's not fair."

"McCarthyism Run Amok"

California girls know that if they complain about trans-identifying boys in their sports, "You’ll get kicked off the team, lose your scholarship," said a newly retired Southern California high school track coach who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"A lot of these girls are going to run at liberal universities," said Marshi Smith, a former NCAA swimmer who was in the pool with last year’s transgender women’s champion, Lia Thomas. "The NCAA itself has doubled down repeatedly before and since Lia Thomas’s huge international coverage. They continue to stand by their discriminatory policies and have no self-reflection in terms of changing their path as of yet."

Smith last year co-founded the Independent Council for Women’s Sports, a nonprofit group that provides a voice and a forum for female athletes and their parents who are worried about transgender competitors but afraid to be identified.

"People, even kids, recognize justice and what is fair and right. This is just not right," Smith said. "We need to get to the point where people can speak openly and freely and recognize that ‘Everyone agrees with me, everyone on the team agrees with me.’ That’s the place we have to get to in order to solve this."

One longtime girls’ track coach in Southern California said he is weighing going public with his concerns after recently seeing his athletes fall apart when they faced a trans-identifying boy. But he predicted that if he does so, he will be suspended from his job or worse.

"I’m concerned about the trans kids also, but what about my girls? Did we forget about them somewhere?" he said. "If it’s a biological boy, why are you putting them on the girls’ team when all of us know there’s this thing called testosterone, and that’s where it ends. It stops being fair. If it’s chess, it’s fair. But athletic ability–it’s not fair."

Bill Fraser was the girls' lacrosse coach at Acalanes High School in the Bay Area for 13 years until he was fired late last month. Fraser would not discuss the reason for his termination, and the school district did not respond to a request for comment. But Fraser confirmed that in an April Facebook post he expressed support for House Republicans’ proposed ban on transgender athletes and recounted his team's experience playing against a boy.

"None of our girls could stay with him …. he was easily the fastest human on the field," Fraser wrote in the post, which was made private. "Those of you who think this is proper ought to witness it with your own eyes, then return here and explain how we are not endangering all the progress made in sports, on behalf of girls/women, over the past 50 years."

Fraser likened the conversation around transgender athletes to the Red Scare of the 1950s, when an anti-communist campaign led by then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R., Wis.) created a national climate of fear that quashed dissent, enabled ideological excesses, and ruined lives.

"It’s McCarthyism run amok," he said. "Instead of one Joe McCarthy in this country, we have hundreds of thousands of them. Anyone in America who doesn’t understand that isn’t paying attention."

"We Are Not Insane"

Julie Lane's feminist group Women Are Real made headlines after members showed up to a high school track meet in Northern California last month to protest that a trans-identifying boy was being allowed to run against girls. Members of Women Are Real held up signs that read "Protect Female Sports" and "Speak Up 4 Girls." Security officers removed them from the event, and the boy qualified for the state championships, sparking backlash.

Lane spoke to the Free Beacon on the record, ending years of anonymity as an activist, which she said was meant to protect friendships. She said she felt compelled to come forward as a lesbian and a Democrat in response to liberal politicians and journalists' vilification of people who share her support for female-only sports.

"There is power in numbers," Lane said. "We’re not insane. People are trying to make us out to be insane, and we’re not. I don’t want to hide anymore. Hiding allows people to make assumptions."

In the end, neither trans-identifying runners who qualified for the championships showed up to the meet. California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body for high school sports in the state, condemned critics like Lane for the outcome: "The CIF strongly denounces discriminatory or harassing behaviors that impact our student-athletes’ opportunities to participate in interscholastic competitions."

The federation made no mention of two female runners who were also no-shows at the championships. One of the girls had drawn the ire of transgender advocates for making a thumbs-down motion on the podium after finishing behind a trans-identifying boy in a qualifier. The girl's school said her gesture was misinterpreted, quickly adding that it "supports and commends all of the athletes for their performances."

The post Californians Are Terrified To Say What 'Everyone Knows' About Trans Athletes in Girls' Sports appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the legislation in a party-line vote after nearly two hours of debate and testimony, almost all from opposed Californians. A diverse group, including teachers, pastors, San Francisco Democrats, immigrants, gays, and a "gender-nonconforming" mom, spoke against the bill. Many drove several hours from Southern California to make their views known to lawmakers.

"There would be no ability for a parent to even bring in a medical provider to counter the statement that affirming is in the best interest of the health, safety, and welfare of a child," said Erin Friday, a San Francisco attorney and co-lead of the parent group Our Duty who testified against the bill. "You can't overcome that conclusion when it is law."

Under the bill, which passed the State Assembly in March, judges in custody dispute cases involving transgender-identifying children would be required to favor a parent who "affirms" his or her child's gender identity. The bill's authors updated the language last week to specifically make "non-affirmation" a violation of health, safety, and welfare in California's family code. Critics warned the change could lead to abuse claims against parents who do not go along with their child's transgender identity.

Acknowledging the groundswell of public opposition on Tuesday, some Democrats on the panel expressed discomfort with the bill's silence on what counts as parental "affirmation." A few questioned the bill's real-world implications and said they would like to see changes even as they voted to move the measure along for a full Senate vote.

The primary author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D.), did not define "affirmation" but said the term does not encompass OK'ing medical sex changes. What is important, she argued, is that the state guide judges to "see" transgender-identifying children, many of whom are "not safe in their own homes because of a non-affirming or abusive caretaker."

"I love judicial [discretion]," Wilson said. "But … we want to make sure that … every judge in the state of California recognizes that for a [transgender, gender-diverse, or intersex] child, affirmation is in their absolute best interest. Period."

Her coauthor, Sen. Scott Wiener (D.), dismissed the public outcry as a result of "a pretty massive misinformation campaign about this bill by the right-wing media." He claimed the opponents were part of an effort "to erase trans kids" and an "attack on gay and lesbian kids." Wiener, who is gay, also complained that some critics treated him as the primary author, which he described as "straight-up homophobia."

A few other Democrats questioned the bill's real-world implications and said they would like to see changes even as they voted to move the measure along for a full Senate vote. But most agreed the state should intervene in how parents handle their children's gender identities.

Sen. María Elena Durazo (D.) declared that she has two transgender family members and that she was looking at the proposal "through the eyes of unconditional love." Sen. Anna Caballero (D.) said affirmation is about parents "accepting and helping their children through whatever transition that they're going through."

The two Republicans on the panel, meanwhile, warned that the bill could be destructive to California families.

Sen. Roger Niello (R.) asked why California law should require "gender affirmation" of children at a time when Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom are starting to have doubts about the practice.

"The elevation of the issue accepts gender affirmation care as an accomplished science and accepts gender affirmation as the appropriate approach by a parent," Niello said. "My concern is, given the conclusions of the U.K. and those three Scandinavian countries—not exactly restrictive-type societies—I have concerns about making the conclusion that this bill does, bringing it into a custody dispute."

Sen. Scott Wilk (R.) was more definitive in his criticism, saying the bill will make it so that children of a parent who "does not support the ideology of the government" will be "taken away from the home."

"I can assure you it's not gonna end with divorce proceedings," he said. "If you love your children, you need to flee California. You need to flee."

Wilk added: "Born and raised in this state, I love this state. I'm not gonna stay in this state because it's just too oppressive. And I believe in freedom and so I'm going to move to America when I leave the Legislature."

The post California Democrats Advance Bill To Punish 'Gender Non-Affirming' Parents Over Vocal Opposition appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The legislation, which passed in the Senate late last month and is about to be taken up by the Assembly, would require employer-sponsored insurance plans to cover all nonexperimental fertility treatments, including artificial insemination of pregnancy surrogates. Supporters of the legislation have touted it as an overdue step toward "fertility equality" for LGBT people.

Freshman state senator Caroline Menjivar (D.), who coauthored the bill with Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D.), said: "It will ensure that queer couples no longer have to pay more out of pocket to start families than non-queer families. ... This bill is critical to achieving full-lived equality for LGBTQ+ people, as well as advancing well-rounded and comprehensive health care for all Californians."

In liberal California, opposition to the bill, S.B. 729, has been mild and focused on concerns about ballooning insurance premiums. But the measure is part of a nascent campaign by LGBT rights advocates that could open a new front in the national culture war over gender.

California already requires health care insurance providers to cover fertility treatments other than in vitro fertilization for policyholders who are medically infertile. The law defines infertility based on a physician's diagnosis or according to the widely accepted definition of not being able to have a child after a year or more of trying.

The fertility insurance bill would expand the coverage mandate for employers to include IVF and expand the legal definition of infertility to include, "A person’s inability to reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention." Infertility would no longer be defined only as a disease or medical condition but also as a "status," such as being in a gay or lesbian relationship or being single.

California business and insurance groups have objected to the bill's projected price tag for employers, even as they have been careful not to criticize its intent. According to an analysis by the California Health Benefits Review Program, the coverage mandates would raise annual premiums for employer-sponsored plans by more than $330 million a year. The California Association of Health Plans said the coverage mandates are the most expensive of 16 that the legislature is considering, which together would add about $1 billion to the premiums.

Conservative policy advocates, meanwhile, have sounded the alarm about what they see as the bill's broader social costs.

Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, pointed to concerns about nontraditional families and forms of reproduction, including surrogacy and IVF.

"Under this bill, most insurance plans would be required to provide in vitro fertilization services based on someone’s relationship status or sexual orientation," Waters said. "For single men or male same-sex couples, this means they would need to access a surrogate to carry their child. So the bill is outlining what adults have the right to, but nowhere does it address the needs of the child or safety concerns regarding the child either in IVF or in gestational surrogacy."

California Family Council Capitol director Greg Burt said: "This bill seeks to further erode the father, mother, and child nuclear family and make everyone in society pay for it to further a make-believe cause named 'fertility equality.' The reason healthy singles and same-sex couples can't reproduce has nothing to do with infertility; it has to do with biology."

The authors of the bill did not respond to requests for comment.

LGBT and fertility nonprofits backing the legislation have been clear about their agenda. They seek to decouple pregnancy from biological sex and traditional conceptions of gender and family. And the groups’ ambitions extend far beyond California, which is known as a testing ground for progressive policies of the future.

One of the bill's nonprofit sponsors, Men Having Babies, describes its broader goal as "to remove financial barriers to surrogacy parenting for gay men worldwide, a cause which we refer to as Fertility Equality."

"Central to our fight for more equitable access to parenting options is what we know from our combined experiences: The anguish and yearning that same sex couples and singles feel due to their inability to reproduce without medical intervention is equal to the anguish of heterosexual couples who suffer from 'medical infertility,'" the group says on its website.

Men Having Babies—along with another S.B. 729 sponsor, LGBT powerhouse Equality California—successfully lobbied to insert key language into the bill. The groups also claim to have added LGBT-friendly wording into infertility insurance mandates in Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. California would be the second state, following Illinois in 2021, to adopt a version of their redefinition of infertility.

"We … are part of coalitions [seeking] to pass similar bills in several additional states," including New York, New Jersey, and Maine, Men Having Babies's founder and executive director Ron Poole-Dayan said.

Men Having Babies, Equality California, and other S.B. 729 sponsors are also behind a federal bill by Reps. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and Judy Chu (D., Calif.) that would allow LGBT people and others to take tax deductions for medical expenses related to IVF and surrogacy. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has considered redefining infertility in the Affordable Care Act to require insurers to cover IVF and other fertility treatments for LGBT people.

"This is just one of those spaces where the way that we think about what is necessary medical care is running to catch up with our understanding of intimate relationships," Nicole Huberfeld, a professor at the Boston University School of Law and School of Public Health, told Bloomberg Law last year.

The post California Bill Would Redefine 'Infertility' To Give Men Access to Pregnancy Treatments appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The legislation, which already passed the state Assembly, would require any judge hearing a custody dispute over a trans-identifying child to favor a parent who "affirms" the kid’s preferred gender. On Tuesday, the authors of the bill released an updated version that defines "the health, safety, and welfare" of a child to include "a parent's affirmation of the child's gender identity."

Critics say the bill, as now written, could lead judges to treat as abusers parents who are anything less than fully supportive of their child’s claims to be transgender.

"When you say that gender affirmation is in the child's best interest for health, safety, and welfare, it takes nothing to say [non-affirmation] is now abuse because you're not taking care of the health, safety, and welfare if you’re not affirming them," said Erin Friday, a San Francisco attorney and co-lead of the parent coalition Our Duty.

"It's not a giant leap–it's a tiny step to get there. We know exactly where they are going with it. I didn't think the bill could get worse, but it got worse."

The bill, known as A.B. 957, is California Democrats’ latest move to enshrine left-wing gender ideology in law. State senator Scott Wiener (D.), who coauthored the measure along with Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D.), is simultaneously advancing a separate bill that would require foster parents to promise to "affirm" the gender identity of trans-identifying children. In 2022, Weiner introduced a first-in-the-nation law making California a "haven" for out-of-state minors to obtain sex-changes treatments without parental consent.

Meanwhile, Texas GoGreg Abbott (R.) declared last year that helping kids get such treatments amounts to child abuse.

The California bill does not define "affirmation," leaving it unclear if a parent would be required to support a child’s desire to socially transition or receive medical sex-change treatments. Nor does the bill make distinctions based on a child’s age or mental health record.

Wilson's spokesman disputed that the revised bill is significantly different than the previous version and noted that A.B. 957 only relates to family law. It would not make parental "non-affirmation" a crime.

"It's not saying [affirmation] is the most important factor or determining factor," the spokesman, Taylor Woolfork, said. "It's one of many factors that the judge should consider while working out a custody agreement."

Wiener's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The bill easily cleared the Assembly in late March with the support of 51 Democrats, although 16 lawmakers refrained from voting, most of them Democrats. The updated version is slated for a Senate committee hearing next week.

The post California Bill Would Punish Parents Who Don't 'Affirm' Their Child's Gender Identity appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D., Wash.) was at least six months late on a property tax bill of $6,592.18 on a Portland, Ore., auto-repair shop she owned with her husband, The Oregonian reported Wednesday. Her failure to pay the tax came as she made tax paying central to her political messaging. Last April, while her tax bill was delinquent, she tried to fundraise on Twitter off the claim that in 2022 she "paid more in taxes than Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in the country."

"[Y]ou read that right," she wrote. "This system doesn’t work for everyday folks. Stand with me to demand a fair tax code that forces the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share."

Perez says she was busy with other things but that the bill had since "been paid in full." She gave up ownership of the auto shop after flipping Washington's Third Congressional District in the 2022 midterm elections. She did not respond to the Washington Free Beacon's request for comment.

Perez may have been comparing her tax rate, rather than her total tax bill, to that of Bezos. Last year, Bezos paid $973 million in taxes on a reported $4.22 billion in income, a rate of about 1 percentage point, The Washington Post reported based on his IRS filings.

In a March interview on the progressive Pod Save America political podcast, Perez pointed to her role as a taxpaying citizen as a primary reason she beat her Republican opponent Joe Kent by less than 1 percent of the vote.

"I really believe what people want is normalcy, like we want people that pay their own taxes, and like, you know, that are on the waitlists for daycare and are trying to navigate the world, like running a small business," she said to host Jon Favreau.

While Perez last week cited her campaign as a reason for not paying her taxes, she made a different claim during a campaign debate against Kent.

"As a small business owner, I don't have the luxury of being in fights all day because I've got to worry about making payroll and paying my taxes," she said last September, two months before the tax deadline she blew past.

One of Gluesenkamp Perez's first votes as a freshman congresswoman was to preserve new funding for 87,000 additional IRS agents.

Washington's third district, which spans rural southwest Washington, was considered a safe Republican seat until the primary shakeup by Kent. Republicans have made winning back the district a top priority in 2024.

The post This Washington Democrat Claimed To Pay More Taxes Than Jeff Bezos. Turns Out She Was Delinquent.  appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Newsom claims his policies differentiate California from states like Florida and Texas, where "education is under assault in ways that I’ve never experienced in my lifetime." He urges residents of the conservative states to "join us in California, where we still believe in freedom."

Under Newsom, however, California requires schools to teach progressive takes on gender, sexuality, and race—sometimes in graphic ways. The governor this week warned school district officials not to remove materials they deem inappropriate no matter what parents say. Violators, he warned, face investigation by the state justice department.

Explained Lance Izumi, the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute: "When you mandate something, you also ban other points of view, especially when schools adopt very radical types of curriculum."

Here are some of the K-12 school materials Newsom's California requires in the name of freedom.

History

In 2011, California became the first state to legally require schools to feature gay, bisexual, and transgender role models in history-social science courses. The state guidelines call for second-grade lessons on family to include LGBT parents and 11th-grade World War II studies to emphasize discrimination against gay soldiers. High schoolers should also learn about Gay Liberation Front activists, drag icon Jose Sarria and sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who conducted friendly research with pedophiles and dismissed the harms of rape, according to the state of California.

Since 2017, California must approve all kindergarten-through-eighth grade history-social sciences textbooks and materials to ensure they include mandated material.

One first-grade textbook that the state deems compliant features Newsom as an LGBT icon because he illegally issued same-sex marriage licenses as mayor of San Francisco. The Sacramento Bee reported in 2018 that local school children were studying Newsom, who was then running for governor, alongside the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Sex-ed

A 2016 California law requires the state's public middle and high schools to provide "comprehensive" sexual education, including instruction on gender identity and homosexuality.

"Students will explore and discover their identities, gender expression, and sexuality throughout their education and into and beyond their high school years," the state guidelines say.

In terms of gender and sexuality, using gender-neutral language and not promoting gender stereotypes can help in creating an inclusive classroom. Gender-neutral pronouns include the singular form of "they/them/theirs." When referring to relationships, use the term "partner" or "significant other." Using gender-neutral language helps avoid incorrect assumptions based on personal biases, student appearance, or possible lack of awareness.

Kindergarten teachers are instructed to "Discuss gender with kindergartners by exploring gender stereotypes and asking open-ended questions, such as what are preferred colors, toys, and activities for boys/girls, and then challenging stereotypes if presented."

The guidelines also advise kindergartens to bring in guest speakers who are transgender or otherwise defy "traditional stereotypes" to "serve as role models and myth busters" for the children. By third grade, "teachers can introduce the concept that gender does not always match the sexual and reproductive organs described," the state says.

Ethnic studies

Under a 2021 California law signed by Newsom, all public high school students must take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate. The six "values and principles" of the curriculum include: "Critique empire building in history and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression," and "build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic-racism society."

Sample ethnic studies lessons provide instruction on Black Lives Matter activists, police brutality, and Latino studies focused on oppression. Early versions of the model curriculum were even more progressive, but under pressure from Jewish groups, characterizations of Zionism as repression were toned down before the model was adopted in 2021.

Books

California's list of recommended books—which informs what ends up in libraries and classrooms—includes texts that tell children there are many genders they can choose from.

Julian Is a Mermaid, by Jessica Love, is recommended for preschoolers and follows a boy named Julian who dreams of dressing up like a beautiful woman but worries about what his grandmother will think. It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity, by Theresa Thorn, recommended starting in kindergarten, tells kids they may be gender "nonbinary" if they feel like neither a boy or a girl, or that they may be both boy and girl or transgender.

When it comes to the fraught issue of race in America, California recommends Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi for children kindergarten-aged and older. The picture books teach kids not to ignore race but instead to "use your words to talk about race" and to "confess to racist ideas."

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Kendi and Jason Reynolds, recommended for students as young as age 14, states, "From the beginning racist ideas have been stamped into the United States—into the Constitution, laws, policies, practices and beliefs of segregationists and assimilationists." "And you dear reader?" the authors ask. "Do you want to be a segregationist (a hater), an assimilationist (a coward), or an antiracist (someone who truly loves)?"

The book also cautions against using words like "blackmail" and "blacklist" because they "support the idea that black is negative."

Backlash to the requirements

While California is one of the nation's most liberal states, not everyone feels included by its far-left education policies.

As California rolled out its LGBT sex-ed program in 2019, hundreds of parents protested outside local education offices in 46 out of the state's 58 counties. The protesters held signs that read, "Educate, Not Indoctrinate," and, "It's 2019, do you know what your kids are learning?"

A group of students and teachers in 2020 settled a lawsuit against California for the state's failure to teach children how to read proficiently. Now, about half of third graders and about two-thirds of black and Latino third graders still can't read at grade level. The state agreed to pay $53 million to its lowest-performing elementary schools.

In 2021, Democratic legislators killed a Republican bill to require schools to post sex-ed course materials online so that parents could see what their kids are learning.

Last year, Newsom posed with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird and other novels, tweeting, "Reading some banned books to figure out what these states are so afraid of." Contrary to widespread claims, the classic novel was not banned in Florida. The book was, however, removed from several-Democrat dominated school districts, including one near Los Angeles.

Newsom's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Gavin Newsom Brags That California Doesn't 'Ban' Far-Left Books. Instead, It Requires Them. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Boudin says Berkeley Law's new Criminal Law and Justice Center offers a better pathway toward "lasting progress" for criminal justice reform than politics, saying that he will not run to regain his position in 2024 due to "devastating" public discourse. San Francisco voters recalled Boudin from office last year after the city suffered a sharp uptick in burglary and theft during his tenure that propelled the liberal city into a potential "doom loop."

"In my new role, just as I did as district attorney, I will continue to draw on networks of advocates, activists, judges, and legal practitioners to support reform and advance safety in ways that are rigorous, principled, and responsive to the lived experiences of directly impacted communities," Boudin wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The university-sponsored project in the heart of the Bay Area comes as the region reels from the soft-on-crime policies supported by Boudin. Violence and property crime in Berkeley is at a 10-year high, and the college town’s next-door neighbor, Oakland, is seeing a groundswell of anger from residents who blame city leaders’ leniency for a sharp uptick in violent assaults.

"UC Berkeley law school continues the progressive strategy of gaslighting Californians—as Boudin puts it—dismissing the public’s concerns as ‘fear mongering’ and ‘scare tactics,’" said Steve Smith, a senior fellow at the conservative Pacific Research Institute and author of a new study on crime in California.

Smith noted that the project doesn’t bode well for the future of prosecution in the Golden State.

"The fears of California’s more than one million crime victims are real and justified, and they don’t want new prosecutors being trained to follow Boudin’s reckless path in communities across the state," Smith said.

The university does not list the center’s funders. Neither Boudin nor Berkeley responded to a request for a list of donors for the new center.

Boudin’s political rise was bankrolled by groups funded by liberal megadonor George Soros, although the Democrat-aligned billionaire distanced himself from the prosecutor after the recall.

He is not the only progressive prosecutor to face voter backlash in the Bay Area. Soros-backed Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who presides over Berkeley, Oakland, and surrounding cities, is following in Boudin’s footsteps after her 2022 election, much to the public’s dismay.

In the past few months, Price has tried to slash a triple-murderer’s sentence, enraged the Asian community with her handling of the death of an Asian toddler slain by gangsters, and angered families of other murder victims who say they aren’t seeing justice. Veteran prosecutors are resigning, accusing Price of using racial favoritism in deciding how to pursue cases and emboldening criminals.

The post Berkeley Hires Axed San Francisco Prosecutor Chesa Boudin to Train California Law Students appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Democratic state senators passed Senate Bill 227 by Sen. María Elena Durazo (D.) with a 30-7 vote, sending the measure to the Assembly for approval. The legislation would offer undocumented aliens up to 20 weeks of unemployment benefits if they meet minimal work requirements.

California’s unemployment insurance fund, which was defrauded of some $31 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic, would be in charge of dispensing the checks. California employers are on the hook for the fund’s $20 billion debt in the form of higher payroll taxes that threaten employee-heavy small businesses and restaurants already devastated by California Democrats’ strict COVID-19 lockdowns.

Under SB 227, unemployment fund officials would be barred from asking for claimants’ social security number eligibility or contacting past or present employers to verify their job status. Instead, applicants would self-attest that they meet the requirements for the weekly checks: having earned at least $1,300 or worked at least 93 hours over three months. Acceptable documentation would include tax returns, transaction logs on payment apps, and receipts that show a commuting pattern.

The State Senate passed the measure just months after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) said the undocumented migrant influx could "break" California. Earlier this month, when President Joe Biden lifted the federal Title 42 health order restricting immigration, Democratic San Diego mayor Todd Gloria complained that his city would be overwhelmed and lacks "the resources to address an influx of migrants," according to the New York Times.

The Golden State already offers free health coverage and driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. More than two million illegal immigrants live in California.

Tuesday's measure sailed easily through the State Senate. A formidable list of Democratic-aligned lobbying groups are pushing for its passage, including immigration, LGBT, and environmental organizations as well as powerful labor unions.

The law is expected to pass the Assembly, but Newsom has not said whether he plans to sign it. When he was inaugurated, Newsom labeled California a "sanctuary" state
welcoming illegal immigrants. He has called the state a "model of partnership for a safe and welcoming border." Last year, however, Newsom vetoed a similar bill that would have established an unemployment insurance pilot program for undocumented workers, saying "this bill needs further work to address the operational issues and fiscal concerns, including a dedicated funding source for benefits."

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The runners, Athena Ryan and Lorelei Barrett, skipped the championship girls' 1,600-meter race amid backlash to the participation. In a statement to the Los Angeles Times on Friday, California's governing body for high school sports said it was "disappointed" that "the actions of others" led the students and their families to fear for their "well being."

"The CIF strongly denounces discriminatory or harassing behaviors that impact our student-athletes’ opportunities to participate in interscholastic competitions," the California Interscholastic Federation said.

Ryan and Barrett's no-shows at the championships were an anticlimactic finish to a week of protests and public debate over the runners' qualification for the elite meet. Similar disagreements erupted elsewhere in the country as transgender-identifying boys competed in girls' track championships in Washington State, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.

The Independent Council on Women’s Sports, an advocacy group, helped publicize the outcry against transgender-identifying boys' participation in female sports. ICONS cofounder Kim Jones said many girls and parents fear speaking out will lead to retaliation or loss of collegiate scholarships or other athletic opportunities.

"There are people saying we shouldn’t be talking about kids in sports, but we have a moral imperative to share the truth," Jones said in a statement. "Girls placed in dangerous and unfair situations are deflated and left to believe their fair treatment doesn’t matter as much as not hurting a boy."

She added that schools’ policies letting trans-identifying males compete with girls "are ripping apart women’s sports."

California law has required schools to allow transgender students to compete on the single-sex teams they identify with since 2014. The California Interscholastic Federation bylaws state that "students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on a student’s records." The federation does not address evidence that men, even those taking cross-sex hormones, are much stronger and faster than women on average.

Nationwide, since 2020, at least 21 states have enacted laws or policies that ban transgender-identifying boys from playing on school sports teams with women and girls, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Meanwhile, 16 states and the District of Columbia have transgender-"friendly" high school sports policies, according to the Transathlete website.

House Republicans last month passed a bill to ban transgender athletes from participating in female school sports, but President Joe Biden promised to veto the legislation, which cannot advance anyway in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Last week, the Biden administration delayed new Title IX rules that would restrict schools' ability to bar transgender athletes from female sports, saying it needed more time to review more than 240,000 comments about the proposal.

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