Wokeism has such a hold over Democrats that state legislators in Michigan and Virginia are trying to push through laws that infringe on parental rights and are an endangerment to children.

In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin has introduced a policy initiative that restores parental authority over their children. Under his policy, parents — who formally did not have any say in the matter — now can decide if they will allow their child to “transition” to the opposite sex. If a parent does allow a child to do so, that parent also has control over how it happens at school. Previously, schools could socially transition students — such as using preferred pronouns and new names that conform with students’ declared gender identity — without their parents’ knowledge or consent. In other words, schools acted as a gateway drug to transgenderism.

Youngkin had this to say about his new policy: “Parents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives. And, oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their life. And we needed to fix a wrong … children don’t belong to the state. They belong to families. And so, in these most important decisions, step one has to be to engage parents, not to the exclusion of a trusted teacher or an adviser, but to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives.”

Despicably, Virginia Democrat Delegate Elizabeth Guzman has a counterattack to this perfectly reasonable position of Youngkin’s (championing parental rights is the reason he got elected). She wants to introduce legislation that could have parents thrown in jail for not “affirming” their gender-confused progeny. According to Guzman, parental abuse could be something as mundane as using the “wrong” pronoun. When asked about her forthcoming legislation being framed as criminalizing parents, her response was: “No, it’s not. It’s educating parents because the law tells you the dos and don'ts. So this law is telling you do not abuse your children because they are LGBTQ.”

Political analyst Matt Vespa aptly sums up the stakes should this law go into effect: “Child abuse laws being politicized this way is going to get kids killed.” Given the suicide rate among the gender dysphoric, he’s not wrong.

Michigan is trying to codify abortion as a right in the state constitution. The language of the half-baked amendment, Proposal 3, which is on the November ballot, is so vague that it allows for minors to partake not only of abortion but any “reproductive health” interventions, including chopping off healthy breasts or accessing cross-sex hormones. Proposal 3 would not reserve the rights of the parents to be present for, advocate for, or guide their minor child in any of these matters.

The contentiousness of Proposal 3 has already resulted in a casualty. Eighty-four-year-old pro-lifer Joan Jacobson was shot while out canvasing for the “Say No” contingent of this proposal. Her attacker was the husband of a woman she had gotten into a discussion with over what constituted an abortion. Jacobson left when she was asked, but the husband shot her “by accident” without provocation. This act of political violence has widely been silenced by the mainstream media.

There is a link that leftists are trying to make between abortion and transgenderism: sexual freedom. But the real link between the two is death. Death of the soul, death of the mind, death of an unborn child, and ultimately death of the family. We cannot let that happen.