‘Parental rights’ bill is now protecting child abusers. GOP lawmakers were warned | Opinion
Last legislative session, Senate Majority Leader Kelly Anthon stood up for parental rights and against government overreach.
“Parents love and know their children the best,” Anthon said. “They have the right and the responsibility to (make) decisions that are in the child’s best interest. And they have that right without the undue interference of the government.”
And with that, the majority leader cast a principled vote against the bill criminalizing medical care for transgender youth.
Not really, though.
The legislative majority’s deep commitment to parental rights is fake. Anthon had voted in favor of the blanket stripping of health care decision-making rights of parents of transgender children the prior year.
Instead, Anthon’s forceful stand for parental rights came just before voting in favor of a bill that increased the use of government force by allowing parents to sue health care providers that give care with only the child’s consent or who won’t release information to parents without the child’s consent.
And that bill is now preventing the collection of rape kits from minors if their parents won’t consent, according to Ruth Brown of Idaho Reports, whose reporting in the mid-2010s was a major catalyst to a law forcing police agencies around the state to test their massive collections of untested rape kits or explain why they weren’t.
That’s especially problematic in cases where the parent is the abuser — family members are the perpetrators of child sexual abuse more than a third of the time, Brown noted.
The bill provides an exception if a parent has been found guilty of abuse or is under investigation for abuse. But rape kits need to be collected relatively quickly. If a sexually abusive parent can prevent evidence from being collected for several days until health care providers determine they won’t be liable for collecting a rape kit, the parent may have effectively destroyed the evidence that could be used to prosecute them.
Anthon claims that this was an unintended and unforeseen effect of the bill.
“It was certainly not the intent of the law to limit police investigation of these kinds of crimes. I will be happy to look at the language of the statute to see if a change is needed. To my knowledge, no one from the Idaho State Police has contacted me on this matter,” Anthon wrote in an email to Brown.
But Anthon was warned, clearly and repeatedly. Sen. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, was moved to tears debating against the bill. Sen. Rick Just, D-Boise, warned of exactly this outcome.
“Not every parent is a good parent,” Just said during floor debate. “A child may be experiencing abuse in their home or even incest. Those children are seeking protection from their parents or some other person. It has to be confidential. … The consequences of this bill would be to prevent many children from seeking help when they’re in danger.”
But Republican lawmakers, holding a supermajority in the Legislature, showed once again they don’t and won’t listen to the other side.
Repeatedly over the last few sessions, Republican lawmakers have denied parents the right to make medical decisions involving their children by criminalizing specific medical treatments, substituting the judgment of the state for parents’. They’ve denied parents the right to decide what library books their children have access to by passing laws that, in some cases, got libraries closed to kids entirely, substituting the state’s muddled definition of what’s appropriate for parental judgment.
The true interest of the Legislature has been in accruing more power for itself and for state government, increasing the number of bases for lawsuits and criminal charges for cultural phenomena lawmakers oppose.
In this line, it’s clear Anthon’s bill was a just another power grab, plain and simple. And, as has been the case with several of the Legislature’s recent power grabs, children are the ones suffering from this expansion of government authority.
This story was originally published August 7, 2024 at 4:00 AM.