Kids Divorcing Parents: California Pols Keep the Crazy Coming

Outsider Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt saw his surging campaign derailed in controversial fashion earlier this month. Pratt was taken out by a flood of mail-in ballots that suspiciously supported the third-place rival to deny him a spot in a runoff election with the incumbent mayor he had greatly embarrassed, Karen Bass. But the repercussions won’t stop in the LA city limits. California politicians have yet to feel a serious brake on their radical leftist social engineering. This is nowhere more evident than in the state’s Legislature. 

How about a bill to allow children to divorce their parents, for example? “Assembly Bill 1967 is moving through the California Legislature with barely a ripple of public attention. The bill, authored by LGBTQ rights activist-turned-Assemblymember Rick Zbur, would allow children of any age to initiate state dependency proceedings against their own parents. The parents will not even know this has happened until the die is already cast,” The Post Millennial reported June 17.

‘Equity and Justice for All Young People’

The bill is expressly designed to make it easier for children to escape parental authority and become wards of the state. It relies on the term “abuse” as justification, a word which anyone who has been paying attention to the leftist cultural insanity of the first quarter of this century should realize encompasses anything not in line with “progressive” social values.

“Youth who experience abuse, neglect, or unsafe home environments often face inconsistent or delayed responses when they independently seek help from Child Protective Services. These gaps can leave young people – particularly those experiencing homelessness or family instability – without a reliable pathway to safety or care,” Zbur’s office wrote in a February news release announcing the bill. It passed the State Assembly in May and is now before the California Senate.

A group called the California Coalition for Youth is named by Zbur as a sponsor. “CCY is a grassroots, statewide nonprofit organization that serves disconnected youth ages 12-24 throughout California,” the Coalition declares on its website. “CCY advocates tirelessly for public policies, programs, and services that protect and empower California’s youth. Through a multifaceted approach, we work to make lasting change in the lives of young people across the state.”

CCY works closely with another listed sponsor of Zbur’s legislation, the Alliance for Children’s Rights. This organization tellingly cloaks its efforts on behalf of children in the verbal garb of leftist social activism.

“To more effectively achieve our mission of stability, equity, and justice for all young people across the state, the Alliance identifies systemic issues and barriers that impact our clients, and advocates for broad solutions and improvements through ground-breaking child welfare policy reform,” the group writes on its website.

“We have to change policy if we want to change the world for children,” the Alliance proclaims.

As The Post Millennial notes, SB 1967 is far more elastic than Zbur and these organizations would have Californians believe.

“The bill allows any minor residing in any residential facility to file a legal application against their parents, without cause or evidence of harm,” the news site relates. “Residential facilities include drug rehabilitation programs, boarding schools, wilderness therapy programs, faith-based residential programs, and runaway shelters. It does not matter whether the facility is safe and an appropriate placement chosen by the parents.”

A child’s statement alone would be enough “to trigger a mandatory assessment of the parents’ home. This assessment can occur without the parents’ knowledge.” And here is the most important point of all:

“The investigation includes a social worker assessment of the parents’ home. The use of the word ‘assessment’ instead of ‘investigation’ is legally significant: an assessment carries no requirement of a physical home visit and can be completed entirely on the basis of the child’s statements alone, without the parents ever being contacted,” The Post-Millennial reports.

California Channels Its Inner 1973 Hillary

This would perhaps be a good time to remind readers that none of this is new. Democrat icon Hillary Clinton was a vociferous champion of radical “children’s rights” measures back in the 1970s.

In 2002, Canada’s woke Justice Department cited Clinton’s work as a source on the issue:

“Another advocate of the child liberationist school, Hillary Rodham, also takes the position that children are the best judge of their own interests. In an article published in 1973 in the Harvard Education Review entitled ‘Children Under the Law,’ Rodham argues that because children have interests independent of their parents, they cannot be represented by anyone other than themselves.

“She asserts that the competence of children to make their own decisions must be recognized, and that children should be treated as rights-bearing individuals rather than as members of families. Rodham advocates the reversal of the presumption of incapacity for children, the abolition of minority status, and the endowment to children of the same rights as adults.”

Why haven’t you heard more about this? The leftist social engineers running California don’t want citizens to know what they are really up to. Another bill introduced this year seeks to further address the problem.

“Transparency advocates are enraged over a sneaky change to a California bill that would make it harder to get details on what government agencies are doing – and could even haul people seeking public records to court,” The California Post reported June 18.

“News publishers and other First Amendment supporters had already opposed Assembly Bill 1821 by [Democrat] Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, which initially just sought to extend the timeline for when government entities, such as city halls or state agencies, needed to respond to a request for public records,” the paper writes.

“But Pacheco adjusted her measure so that steep fees can be charged for the time staff spends to find publicly available records: an administrative fee of $22.35 per hour and a ‘professional fee’ of $66.26 per hour, both subject to cost-of-living increases.”

Do you see how it’s all related? Social radicals are using the California state government as a petri dish for “transformative” cultural change so profound it reaches into the family unit itself. And they are endeavoring to set up whatever roadblocks they can muster to prevent light being shed upon them as they do so.