You Can Fuel Exciting Opportunities in 2025!
We are seeing tremendous changes in Washington, D.C. as a result of the recent elections. And while your Parental Rights Foundation is a non-partisan organization with friends on both sides of the aisle, I believe we are uniquely positioned to take full advantage of these changes to bring about real change for America’s families.
Generous private donor partnership has empowered us to be in this specific place, poised to work with old friends and new leadership to promote the causes that matter most to our families: child welfare reform, family preservation, and the protection of parental rights in our schools, in our hospitals and clinics—and even in the very text of our Constitution.
With your continued support, I see an opportunity to make a real push for parental rights in 2025.
First, let me recount just a few of the victories you have fueled in 2024.
During the legislative season, which in most of the country spans January through June, we worked with allies in several states to bring to twenty the number of states now protecting parental rights as fundamental under state law. The biggest addition this year was Tennessee, where SB 2749, The Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act, was signed by the governor on May 28 and took effect on July 1.
This bill protects the natural role of parents in making education, healthcare, and other decisions for their minor children without undue governmental interference.
In July, I had the honor of meeting the sponsor of the House version of that bill, Rep. Faison, at the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Denver, Colorado, and I personally thanked him for his leadership on this important effort.
Meeting him is not why I was in Denver, however. It was but one highlight in a very important week.
What took me to Denver in the first place was the opportunity to present to ALEC another vital bill to protect parental rights, this one on Family Rights in Medical Investigations.
Over the last several years, we have secured ALEC’s endorsement on several bipartisan model bills, including Central Child Abuse Registry reform, Confidential (rather than anonymous) Reporting, and CPS Investigation Reforms. ALEC’s endorsement helps encourage conservative lawmakers to take up these models, edit them for their own states, and work to get them passed into law.
Texas lawmakers passed two of these measures during their last legislative session in 2023 and are poised to take up additional measures in 2025. And that’s just one state.
PRF President Michael Ramey and WV Senator Patricia Rucker at the 2024 ALEC conference in Denver
But back to Denver: this year’s model takes on Child Abuse Pediatricians (CAPs), doctors who lurk among your child’s emergency room medical team. Only they’re not there to help diagnose your child’s injury or malady; they are there to gather forensic evidence against you and accuse you of abuse or neglect.
Our model requires that CAPs identify themselves and their role in the investigation, and that they respect your right to not incriminate yourself, but to have a lawyer present during questioning. It’s a law that can save countless families across the country from being separated unnecessarily because a parent was desperately grasping at straws to try to help sort out what is wrong with their child.
These issues are so large that they were not merely contained to the weeklong ALEC conference in Denver, either.
Throughout the fall I have worked with a left-leaning partner organization in Illinois to bring about these very CAP reforms, which are desperately needed in that state. (It was in Illinois that a family was told by the judge one day, “I do not see abuse here. You are getting your children back today,” and then had a CPS investigator put their name on the abuse registry the very next day!)
Though our bill hasn’t passed yet, Illinois’s lengthy session continued into 2025, and we intend to still be there working until we win!
And as recently as this month, I was privileged to bring attention to these matters right here in Washington, D.C., as well.
On Tuesday, December 3, I was part of a parental rights panel at the Heritage Institute’s American Families in the Crosshairs symposium, alongside Tiffany Justice of Moms for Liberty and Professor Melissa Moschella of Notre Dame University. We tackled issues of parental rights in day-to-day life, especially in medical and educational settings.
Then, the very next day, I was an invited presenter at ALEC’s States and Nation conference, addressing the need for Central Registry Reform. (It is a tragedy that in most states a parent can be placed on the child abuse registry without ever being convicted of a crime, or even getting their day in court!)
But the biggest accomplishments of 2024 were not in front of an audience like these presentations. Behind the scenes, we have positioned ourselves for the new 2025 Congress.
With the Republican trifecta coming to Washington, our coalition partners who hail from the left side of the aisle are looking to us for the conservative connections our founders and board have fostered through the years. This grants us more opportunities but also places on us more responsibility within the coalition.
And that’s just regarding the reforms we have been working on to end Hidden Foster Care and the arbitrary family separation timelines in the Adoption and Safe Families Act.
Perhaps most exciting, though, is the very real opportunity we have to move the Parental Rights Amendment in 2025.
I can’t promise its passage next year. That will still require Democrats and Republicans to agree to work together, since we need a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress. Further, Congress has put the Amendment on the back burner for a while now and I can’t know for certain how it will be received in 2025.
But I am confident that this trifecta will give us an opportunity to garner enough cosponsors to generate subcommittee hearings that will further the discussion and bring us closer to eventual passage.
Already, we have a new House sponsor eager to identify a Senate co-lead and introduce the Amendment early in 2025.
And in the Senate, the problem is not too few options for the lead, but too many—a “problem” I am happy to be working through at the time of this writing.
Once we have those pieces in place, we will turn our attention again to the difficult task of reaching across the aisle. Because while that is a challenge, we have momentum with the American people.
See, the American public is not ambiguous on parental rights. Parents on both sides of the political aisle, from every religion, education level, ethnicity, or any other demographic you want to name have become very vocal over the last few years in their agreement: we know what is best for our children.
We love them more than the government ever can.
And now is the time to preserve our rights to protect them.
So, as we celebrate the gains of 2024 and look to do even more in 2025, can I count on you to help drive our success once again?
Your investment of $25, $100, or even $500 will fund a powerful push to protect children—to protect entire families—by empowering parents through meaningful reform in the states and in Congress, and through promotion and eventual passage of the Parental Rights Amendment.
This is a powerful moment in American political history. Together, we have the chance to shape that moment, to empower parents, and to redefine the limited role of government in our families’ lives.
Can I count on you to fuel this effort with your most generous gift today?
Thank you for all you do, for all of America’s families.
