17th Annual Rosenkranz Debate & Luncheon [2025 NLC]
Hat-tip to TWITCHY and with a thanks to the fighting spirit of the likes of Kristen Waggoner and THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY:
“We have a moral obligation to end this madness, and the state has no constitutional mandate to shape a child’s moral or psychological identity against parental direction. As the Court has recognized, the child is not the mere creature of the state. Each child, every child is a creature of a loving God made in his image and entrusted to parents, charged with the high duty and invested with the fundamental right to love, care for, and form that precious child. Parents form conscience and character; the state’s role is to assist and not replace. Secret transitions invert that core truth, and they violate parents’ fundamental constitutional rights.”
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“Parental rights are a fundamental liberty interest because they are vital to a child’s well-being, healthy development, and the stability of families. The law defers to fit parents’ judgment, because parents are best positioned to know their child’s needs and to provide the stable, nurturing environment that a child requires to flourish.”
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“Secret policies convert exceptional cases into universal rules, and they replace evidence-based protection with ideology, and it is causing great, great harm.”
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“No one is stopping the parents from raising their child as they wish; they can talk to their child, they can issue instructions to their child. They can, and many of these parents did seek outside psychological help for their child… It’s a question of what the state can do to the parents, which is very little; those parents were not required to use the Social Security number, nor are these parents required to submit to their child’s preference of pronouns, but that very much differs from the right to dictate to the state how it must behave.”
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“As this is a therapeutic intervention, who is transing the child? The child isn’t doing it, the school is doing it! The school is changing their names on the records, and then changing them when they go home. The school is saying to use the male bathrooms. It is the school that is actively engaging in this transition.”
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“The school is in no case saying use a particular bathroom… the most the school is doing is asking the child… I have not seen cases in which the dynamic isn’t the school saying, ‘What would you, the child, like? What would you, the child, like as a name? What would you, the child, like as a pronoun? What would you, the child, like as a bathroom?’ That’s very different from being marched into a bathroom or addressed by a name.”