Back-to-School Guide for Parents

Family Policy Alliance (FPA) is the brainchild of the recently deceased James Dobson. It monitors legislative and regulatory developments with a direct impact on parental rights which, in many ways, is ground zero in the contemporary assault on the family. Make no mistake about it: When Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine opined that the idea of rights coming from God is a “theocratic” notion more at home with Iranian ayatollahs than Americans, it was not a lapsus linguae, a “slip of the tongue.” Democrats understand that if you recognize parental rights are pre-political, i.e., they precede and do not depend on the State, they cannot control the upbringing of your child.

As Americans enter a new school year, parents are often confused, unaware of what’s really being pushed in their local schools under the guise of “educational” jargon. FPA has a wonderful, free guide available to parents that cuts through this morass. “Back to School for Parents” gives practical advice for protecting your child in the classroom, in school-based “health” and counseling services, the school library, sports, clubs, and online. It gives you model letters to protest forcing your child into “trans-friendly” private spaces (e.g., boys in girls locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms) and to identify sexually objectionable material offered for “reading” in “comprehensive sex education” programs. It’s a resource parents need. Sign up to download it FREE here: https://familypolicyalliance.com/back-to-school-guide/

ERA is Dead

A federal appeals court in August threw out as “meritless” a case whose main argument depended on the claim that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been validly ratified and is part of the Constitution, reports Matt Lamb at the Human Life Review (see here). Plaintiffs brought suit trying to have the requirement for Selective Service registration at age 18 declared unconstitutional, claiming its application only to men violated the “28th Amendment.” The appellate judges (in the very liberal 9th circuit) upheld the lower court’s dismissal of the claim.

ERA was proposed as a constitutional amendment in 1972 with the stipulation it had to be ratified within seven years. As 1979 approached, it was clear the amendment was going nowhere, so Congress (arguably unconstitutionally) decided to tack on an extension through 1982, an effort that also went nowhere. In the mid-2010s, blue states developed a novel idea that because the seven-year limit was in the resolution proposing the amendment for ratification and not written into the amendment text itself, it was not binding. On the basis of that theory, a number of states piled on and Joe Biden — just before leaving office – actually declared the Zombie Amendment part of the Constitution.

The courts have not been as kind.

Why the push to put ERA on extraordinary life support? One simple reason: its proponents are dishonest enough not to admit the truth that if they had to start all over again, they’d lose. Even liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg admitted ERA was dead and they needed to start over. So, why would they lose? Because ERA proponents have played a game of straddle. They claim ERA has nothing to do with abortion but, as Gertrude says in Hamlet, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” If ERA has nothing to do with abortion, start anew and add language saying exactly that.

But ERA advocates won’t support such language because they always hoped ERA might be the perch to provide a Constitutional foundation for Harry Blackmun’s gaseous penumbrae that, together with “raw judicial power,” sustained the farse of Roe v. Wade for half a century. ERA proponents need that fiction even more today, because an ERA that guarantees abortion overturns Dobbs and all the civil rights progress made since 2022 that Dobbs enabled.

Pro-abortion ERA advocates will not vote for language that says ERA has nothing to do with abortion. But without that language, ERA cannot get the two-thirds vote to pass either the House or Senate. It’s that simple, which is why its advocates instead insist on the lie that an amendment dead over 46 years can somehow be ratified.

Besides its pro-life implications, Catholics have another stake in seeing that ERA remains dead. The amendment bars discrimination based on “sex.” In 1972, “sex” meant “man and woman.” In 2025 it may mean men and women and rainbows and unicorns and 48 flavors of gender. Which meaning is controlling? ERA proponents don’t want to open that can of worms, either, but know that a fresh debate would force it open — and defeat the amendment.

So, there’s plenty of Catholic reasons for celebrating the judicial acknowledgement that the 1972 ERA belongs in the tomb, not the Constitution.

Tim Kaine on the Origins of Human Rights

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) showed himself the latest Catholic political and historical ignoramus when he announced that the idea that human rights come from God, not government, is a “theocratic” notion more at home in Islamic Iran than Judeo-Christian America (see here). (National Review branded Kaine’s remarks those of an “ignoramus.” See here.) Almost 250 years removed from the Declaration of Independence that built its theory of revolution on the thesis that a sovereign who violates his subject’s “inalienable” rights forfeits rule over them, one would hope the junior Senator from Virginia spend some time reading his fellow Virginian’s musings, considering they are slightly deeper than his own. One would also hope that a Senator who trafficked in his Catholic identity when running for vice president might also realize that the Catholic social tradition affirms rights are based in nature, not positive law enactment.

Surrogacy

Over at the Pillar, JD Flynn posted a picture of a billboard recruiting women to be surrogates, advertising they can “earn $72,000.” Flynn rightly brands it “exploitation” and notes surrogates really won’t make $72K under the fine print. Let’s assume, however, for argument’s sake, they would. At 24 hours/day for an average 30 days/month times nine months, a mother spends about 6,480 hours pregnant. That comes to $11.11/hour before taxes for a continuous 24/7 “job” for nine consecutive months. Methinks the lady would make out better at Mickey D’s — she’d at least get breaks.

Let’s be serious: Pregnancy may involve labor but it is not a “job.” Our priorities are skewed when we present it as a “job”(which means family has to compete with career and the whole “greedy work” phenomenon I treat here). But it also commodifies the child. Surrogacy is the 21st century’s chattel slavery, commercial trafficking in babies by the monied at the expense of children and women. That this barbarism is not outlawed tells us something about our barbarities. Or is it not a barbarity (at least according to Senator Tim Kaine) if the law gives the barbarians the “right”?