A BILL THAT ENDANGERS CHILDREN AND CRIMINALIZES PARENTS

Colorado HB 25-1312, “The Kelly Loving Act,” introduced by State Reps. Lorena Garcia (D) and Rebekah Stewart (D), effectively criminalizes disagreement with gender ideology. This bill represents a grave assault on parental rights, the freedom of speech, religious liberty, reason and science, and, most importantly, the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children.

MAIN PROVISIONS OF HB 25-1312

Attack on Parental Rights. Children’s brains are not fully developed until their mid-twenties. This is particularly true of areas of the limbic system associated with impulse control and decision making. Children are not permitted to make major life-altering decisions such as smoking, drinking alcohol, or even getting tattoos because they are not yet competent to make these decisions in the eyes of the law; parents must act on children’s behalf and in their stead. HB 25-1312 subverts this authority by bringing the state into the homes of Colorado families. Worse still, it puts the force of law behind the absurdity that a boy can become a girl or vice vera. This bill doesn’t just take children away from their parents, it takes children away from good parents—parents with sound minds who can act as responsible guardians for their children.

Attack on Reason and Science. The standard by which HB 25-1312 would violate parental autonomy is a farce. Sex is biological, binary, and immutable. The recent move to reclassify childhood gender confusion—from gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria—reflected a change in the politics surrounding transgenderism rather than a change in the underlying science. Much of the impetus for this trend can be traced to activist, “postmodern” scholarship rooted in an explicit rejection of reason, science, and objectivity. Transgender activist groups purporting to be scientific bodies have recently been exposed for compromising scientific and ethical standards in the service their ideological goals. Consequently, other developed countries are rapidly turning away from medically affirming gender confusion, as is the United States, in terms of both public policy and public opinion.

Attack on Free Speech. HB 25-1312 tramples Coloradans’ First Amendment rights. This bill would distort Colorado antidiscrimination law to target speech by parents, educators, and anyone working in a place of public accommodation (e.g., employers and employees) who doesn’t support the radical premises of gender ideology. So-called “misgendering” and “deadnaming” describe referring to an individual by their biologically correct pronouns and birth names, respectively. Both would be effectively criminalized in Colorado if this bill passes. Parents guilty of saying government-disfavored (but true) things could lose access to their children. Employees could lose their jobs. Employers could be sued by individuals claiming that an employee’s speech violated their civil rights.

Attack on Religious Liberty. For many Christians and Jews, the binary nature of sex is a matter of religious conviction as well as observable scientific fact. Genesis 1:27 states, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Americans are, of course, entitled to believe and to say other things. Free people do not ask the government for permission to express themselves nor do they seek to censor people with whom they disagree.

Attack on Vulnerable Children. Recent years have seen explosive increases in children suffering from gender confusion and a concurrent increase in children accessing so-called “gender-affirming” medical procedures. These procedures—sex change surgeries and hormone therapies—are medically unnecessary as well as dangerous. Contrary to claims by their proponents, treatments like puberty blockers are not safe, effective, or “fully reversible.” Ninety-eight percent of children prescribed these drugs proceed to irreversible and sterilizing cross-sex hormones. These drugs are additionally associated with reduced bone density, stunted growth, infertility, blood clots, and cancer. The culmination of the school-to-clinic pipeline that begins with the social transitioning is sex-reassignment surgeries: barbaric procedures that create, at best, an imperfect facsimile of the opposite sex at the cost of a host of debilitating health conditions.

No child, however confused, should be guided towards medical horrors as a matter of state policy. Fortunately, researchers, whistle-blowers, and detransitioners are shedding light on the transgender social contagion, and widespread medical abuses inflicted on vulnerable children by a new unscrupulous, medical-industrial complex. HB 25-1312 is on the wrong side of history—as well as the wrong side of the First Amendment, science, parents, and children.

If enacted, this legislation would:

• Remove children from the care of loving and responsible parents.
• Cause children to be trafficked across state lines into Colorado to receive dangerous and harmful procedures.
• Force educators to socially transition malleable children, creating a pipeline to future castration and mutilation.
• Force totalitarian speech control on anyone operating in a place of public accommodation—business owners, professionals, and workers of all stripes—under the guise of anti-discrimination law.
• Create a precedent for similar action in other states undermining efforts by the federal government and by the majority of states to protect children from these medical abominations.