Recently I was talking with a friend who is homeschooling her daughter in the eastern part of Washington state — which is far more conservative than the Seattle area, where I live.
The key question: She was agonizing over whether to return her child to public school.
She’s not afraid of COVID-19. Washington state was one of the most careful states on that score, and masks were mandated longer here than most other places. What she really feared was the state’s liberal sex-education law, passed when the pandemic was beginning to ravage the local population.
Washington state was the first place in the nation to face the coronavirus, but what was our governor, Jay Inslee, doing at the time? Pushing through a graphic sex ed curriculum. The floor debate on it went on until 2 a.m., as I described here. A recall election to zero out the curriculum failed.
Which is all to say that when the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “New Laws Moves Blue and Red States Further Apart,” it didn’t mention some of the more obvious reasons why people are walking away from some blue states. Guess what? Many of these reasons are linked to issues of morality, culture and religion.
SACRAMENTO — After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.
When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from out-of-state.
The Idaho ban is slated to begin April 22, unless some federal judge knocks it down.
Abortion clinics in Oregon, particularly Bend, are expecting a deluge, as the central Oregon clinic is the nearest one to Boise that has easy abortion access. (Other nearer cities, like Walla Walla, Wash., have a Planned Parenthood clinic, but that clinic doesn’t do abortions after 10 weeks. And clinics in Salt Lake City require a 72-hour waiting period.)
As Republican activists aggressively pursue conservative social policies in state legislatures across the country, liberal states are taking defensive actions. Spurred by a U.S. Supreme Court that is expected to soon upend an array of longstanding rights, including the constitutional right to abortion, left-leaning lawmakers from Washington to Vermont have begun to expand access to abortion, bolster voting rights and denounce laws in conservative states targeting L.G.B.T.Q. minors.
That last phrase there is a loaded one. Another way to word that might have been “laws in conservative states limiting certain sexual topics being taught, without the consent of their parents, to kids who have no way of processing this information.”
Again, it’s whose ox is getting gored. Democrats have been pursuing liberal social policies continuously for decades. Here in Washington state in the 1990s, laws were passed setting 13 as the age of medical consent. That means my 16-year-old can seek any medical treatment (think abortion) without me knowing.
Who has fought this law? Not just the nasty Republicans but many professionals in the mental-health community, which has been aghast for years over the thought of suicidal 13-year-olds and up being able to dump their therapists and meds at will.
Sadly, the cultural left didn’t think *that* one through.
Americans have been sorting into opposing partisan camps for at least a generation, choosing more and more to live among like-minded neighbors, while legislatures, through gerrymandering, are reinforcing their states’ political identities by solidifying one-party rule.
The article goes on to describe all the restrictive measures that red states are setting in motion re guns, abortion, voting, then swings into a lengthy recital of a California vs. Florida fight in which each state tries to outdo the other regarding the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida.
Often in such pieces, one side is often portrayed as reasonable while the other side is portrayed as manic. As a rule, these articles give away the point of view of the newsroom by using “gender-affirming” to describe sex-change strategies for minors or even prebubescent children — a thought that makes many conservatives blanche.
I don’t think most reporters get the widespread alarm out there, alarm that moves people like my friend in eastern Washington to keep her daughter out of public school because some teacher might think she is not “gender-affirming” enough should her daughter follow her friends (or strangers on social media) into trying out another gender identity.
Think that can’t happen? Two months ago, I overheard one of my daughter’s friends offer to ship her some boys’ clothes so my daughter could experiment with being a boy. It happens.
As I have written about here, Christians and other conservatives are pulling their kids out of public schools all over the country. Two years ago, I was part of a small church start-up in Tacoma (30 miles south of Seattle) whose pastor, after less than two years on the job, announced to us one Sunday he was leaving godless western Washington for more Christian climes in northern Idaho.
As we sat there open-mouthed, he added that this was his last Sunday on the job. So there.
The Times did not categorize those who were moving from one part of the country to another by religion. If they had, would they have been like this pastor? Are they people who noticed how churches in blue states stayed closed a lot longer because of COVID and — should this plague linger — they don’t want to be shut out of their houses of worship again? Maybe those moving out of California didn’t appreciate how Gov. Gavin Newsom went out of his way to keep their churches closed while allowing many businesses — along with Black Lives Matter demonstrators — to gather and do what they wished?
There is a real fear out there. As tmatt points out here, quoting pundit David French, conservatives are hoping that a core group of Supreme Court justices will bring about the change they want (after all, it was those justices who got us into some of this pickle in the first place by passing Roe v. Wade in 1973). Some feel that COVID was just the warm-up for our society going “soft totalitarian.” If Big Tech decides to limit the free speech rights of those people who aren’t on the approved side of the culture wars, then you’re on your own. Perhaps you need a new zip code?
Some people feel they need to take charge of their destinies now and move to more friendlier climes while they can. This story praises those on the left (a Texas woman, Violet Augustine, who wants to take her 5-year-old transgender daughter to California) who do so. Moving a small child toward a world of puberty blockers, bottom surgery and infertility is, of course, enlightened.
Yet, when those on the right move from, say, Portland to Pearland (Texas), they tend to be flogged in the press. A case in point is this recent Los Angeles Times piece on conservatives moving to Sandpoint, Idaho. The newcomers were portrayed as white nationalists, not as reasonable people who’ve had it with the Golden State.
Tracy Simmons of SpokaneFavs fame understood what the LAT did not; people were coming to Idaho searching for religious freedom. In this 2020 piece she did for ReligionUnplugged, she actually went and interviewed these folks and made faith front and center of her story.
For the record, my kid attends public school here. I’ve subbed in three local school districts and there are still churches we attend in godless western Washington. But it does get tiring of always going against the grain and it’s understandable, after awhile, why people just want to move to a part of the country where they’re not considered freaks.
Those Americans have reasons for what they do. It would help if journalists were willing to listen to them.
FIRST IMAGE: Illustration at 54realestate.com