SACRAMENTO, California (LifeSiteNews) — A California judge has sided with left-wing state Attorney General Rob Bonta’s renaming of a proposed ballot initiative to uphold the reality of the two sexes and parental rights in education, forcing it to be labeled in such a way as to leave voters predisposed to oppose it.
Originally submitted as the “Protect Kids of California Act of 2024,” the initiative requires public and private schools and colleges to limit use of sex-specific restrooms and lockers to actual members of their designated sex and exclude males from female-specific athletic programs for grades seven and up, as well as requires parental notification if an underage student requests to be treated as a different gender and forbids surgical or chemical “transitioning” of gender-confused minors.
As supporters continue to collect signatures to place the measure on the November ballot, Bonta’s office made their task more difficult by forcing them to circulate it under the name “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth,” along with summary language framing the proposed changes in a negative light, such as that the parental notification requirement comes “without exception for student safety” and that even so-called “medically recommended” underage “transitions” are prohibited.
READ: ‘It almost killed me’: Ex-trans teen slams ‘gender transitioning’ in powerful speech
Protect Kids California (PKC), the group behind the initiative, sued on the grounds that the new title is “misleading, false, and prejudicial” as well as “blatantly argumentative,” biasing prospective signers against it up front. “Talking to our volunteers, we realized it did have a detrimental impact,” said PKCs Jonathan Zachreson.
This week, however, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Stephen Acquisto issued his final decision upholding Bonta’s reframing, the Sacramento Bee reports.
“The proposed measure objectively ‘restricts rights’ of transgender youth by preventing the exercise of their existing rights. ‘Restricts rights of transgender youth’ is an accurate and impartial description of the proposed measure,” Acquisto claimed, whereas the group’s original “protect” language “appears to be the type of advocacy disallowed in a title and summary,” he said.
“The mental gymnastics Judge Acquisto did to justify his erroneous ruling are not only an egregious abuse of discretion that entitles our clients to an appeal, but a chilling interpretation of law that jeopardizes the very foundation of our constitutional republic,” responded PKC attorney Nicole Pearson, who added that the group was “are reviewing our options for an appeal of these clear errors and will announce a decision shortly.”
“Other attorneys general in the past have done this,” Zachreson told the Family Research Council, but the “fact that there is not just bias, but… false information in the title and summary, is, I think, unprecedented.”
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. The influential American Library Association, currently helmed by a self-described “Marxist lesbian,” opposes denying children access to age-inappropriate materials.
READ: Thousands of young people regret their ‘gender transitions,’ and their stories are gut-wrenching
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about children’s gender confusion is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
Yet while mounting evidence against youth “gender transitions” is prompting European nations such as the United Kingdom and France, which are normally to the left of America, to move away from the practice, in America, the Biden administration continues to dig in its heels, insisting that surgical and chemical mutilation are “best practices,” calling the denial of such procedures to minors “close to sinful,” and baselessly blaming the suicides of gender-dysphoric children on failure to indulge their confusion with bodily mutilation.
READ: Mayo Clinic study on damage from puberty blockers included ‘transgender’ two-year-old
The deadline for the Protect Kids of California Act to collect the 546,651 signatures needed to appear on the ballot this fall is technically June 27, but with a length verification process to take into consideration, PKC wants all signatures in by May 15. The group said on April 10 it was only 25% of the way to its goal, but on April 16 touted picking up more than 60,000 signatures in a single day.