Legislative Update: Three Letters

Sometimes, the Parental Rights Foundation lets you know about legislation in the works in your state and urges you to contact your lawmakers to support (or, when necessary, to oppose) the bill in question. Other times, the proper approach is to send a letter of support (or opposition) to the appropriate lawmaker or committee.

Already this legislative session, we have sent three such letters, referencing bills in Wyoming, New York, and Virginia, respectively.

In Wyoming, Rep. Tomi Strock introduced House Bill 46 (HB46), the Homeschool Freedom Act. This bill would remove some of the bureaucratic red tape for parents who choose to exercise their right to direct the education of their children outside the public school norms.

When the bill passed the House last week with a solid majority (54-6, 2 not voting), it appeared calls and emails would not be necessary to move it forward in the Senate. What might be helpful, however, would be a letter of support. So, I wrote one up and sent it to members of the Senate Education Committee, urging them to take up the bill.

In the letter, I pointed out that the liberty of parents to direct the education of their children has long been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court, and that requiring parents to file an annual letter of intent and curriculum with the local school district creates a burden on this right and unneeded bureaucracy for both the parents and the school district.

While we have not yet seen the committee move the bill forward, we have made sure they know where we stand. If they still fail to act, an email alert may be coming in the days ahead so that they can hear from Wyoming’s parental rights supporters directly.

In New York, Senator Anthony Palumbo has introduced Senate Bill 513 (S513) amending the state’s grandparent visitation statute to include a presumption that a parent’s decision is in the child’s best interest. And he has in his arsenal a letter of support from the Parental Rights Foundation.

“The ‘strong presumption that the parent’s decision is in the child’s best interest’ called for in the bill reflects the presumption called for by the U.S. Supreme Court in Parham v. J.R.,” I explain in that letter. “Yet, curiously, this presumption has been and remains missing from New York law.”

This bill, like HB46 in Wyoming, remains in committee in the Senate—in this case, New York’s Senate Children and Families Committee. Again, we support this bill and stand ready to send an alert if it should prove necessary to move the bill forward in the New York legislature. Fit parents should make their own decisions, without the help of a judge, about who their children should spend time with.

And in Virginia, Senate Bill 1031 (SB1031) threatened a 40-year-old law that preserves the freedom of parents to homeschool their children under a religious exemption. We joined several allies in talking with lawmakers to try to defeat the bill.

But we also took a different approach: I reached out to the Governor’s office in hopes of securing a backstop. Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin, who ran on a platform of parental rights, would very likely not let the bill safely cross his desk. So, I wrote and asked him.

And though I didn’t get a direct response to my query, I received a clear answer through another channel, as the governor appeared in a friend’s video saying that he opposed the bill. We had our backstop.

All of this became moot when the bill’s patron, feeling the overwhelming pressure that we and our Virginia allies brought to bear, amended the bill to create a non-binding study committee, which then failed to pass the Appropriations Committee. The bill died long before it would ever have reached the governor.

But it was comforting to know, even before that, that there was simply no path for the power grab measure to actually become law.

By Any Means

Now, by far the most exciting of our political action is when you get involved and we make our voices heard as one. But every year, there are also letters and phone calls going on behind the scenes, like these three recent letters. By whatever means, we are making your voice heard for laws and policies that empower parents to protect and provide for their children without unwanted government intrusion.

Thank you for standing with us, and for making these letters—and the laws they support—possible.

P.S.—As the Parental Rights Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization, we do not spend a substantive part of our time or expense on lobbying. This email focuses on that small part of our mission, but the much larger part is educating judges, lawmakers, and the public on the fundamental liberty of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.