California Assembly Bill 1967 requires social workers, when conducting a safety assessment or substitute care provider safety assessment, “to also assess the safety of the home of those who hold custodial rights of the minor.” Sounds good, but it’s not just about “safety.”
The bill’s author is Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur, former executive director of Equality California, “the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization.” According to the Los Angeles Democrat, “This bill ensures that youth in foster care — who are disproportionately LGBTQ+, Black, Latino, and Native American— receive the timely support and crucial interventions required to care for them and keep them safe.” Under this legislation, the safety is tied to the “crucial interventions.”
As noted by Katy Grimes of the California Globe, the bill allows any minor residing in any residential facility to file a legal application against their parents without cause or evidence of harm. In effect, the bill would “allow children to ‘divorce’ their parents,” who might not approve of irreversible surgeries and treatments advertised as “gender affirming care.”
The evangelists of transgenderism portray the male-female biological reality as a construct, which is not the case. Bruce Bawer, author of A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, notes that transgenderism and homosexuality are “two utterly different phenomena,” and queer “can mean anything.”
Zbur’s LGBTQ+ formulation is the true construct and, strictly speaking, there is no LGBTQ “community.” Should that be doubted, consider the prospect of a Lawyer, Gardner, Banker, Trucker, Quaker community. As AB1967 moves through the legislature, there’s more that parents and taxpayers should know.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) maintains a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender Business (LGBTBE) requirement in its supplier diversity program. LGBTBE sets up a 1.5 percent procurement goal for LGBT-owned business enterprises that routes millions in utility contracts toward firms certified on the basis of the owner’s sexual identity.
“The Equal Protection Clause doesn’t come with a carve-out for fashionable identities,” notes financial professional Jay Rogers. “The Fourteenth Amendment protects individuals, not groups,” contends the Northeastern and Harvard alum, and in California, there’s more to it.
In 1996, Californians passed the California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209), which prohibits preferential treatment in government education, employment, and contracting based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, and national origin. In 2020, Californians rejected Proposition 16, which would have repealed CCRI.
“The LGBTBE program extends the same identity-preference architecture to a new category,” notes Rogers, “but the equal-protection principle the voters encoded in the state constitution is identical.”
Sexual orientation of any kind is not an achievement or claim for special treatment. No one who “identifies” as any part of the LGBTQ construct is denied the opportunity to bid on contracts or denied admission to state colleges and universities. Indeed, some state colleges offer LGBTQ “studies,” which is not exactly an academic discipline. Long after the passage of Proposition 209, California maintains a vast DEI bureaucracy that rewards identity over merit.
As Rogers notes, the CPUC’s LGBTBE program’s own compliance record – 0.44 percent, spent against a 1.5 percent goal at full compliance cost — “doesn’t justify its existence on any metric.” So California should “repeal it and build something that actually works.” That would require a system based on merit alone.
DEI and reality dysphoria are no basis for public policy, and parents should understand that AB 1967 is not a one-off. In 2022, California became a sanctuary state for “transgender youth seeking gender-affirming medical care.” In his signing message, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “parents know what’s best for their kids, and they should be able to make decisions around the health of their children without fear. We must take a stand for parental choice.”
As parents might note, Newsom, with ties to the Brown, Pelosi, and Getty families, sends his own children to exclusive private schools. On the other hand, the wealthy governor opposes parental choice for low-income students in California’s underperforming government schools.
California also passed a law barring schools from notifying parents about their children’s gender issues. Assembly Bill 1955, from 2024, is known as the “Safety Act,” in the style of AB 1967. The Globe’s Katy Grimes believes these measures “erase parental rights,” and if parents agree, it would be hard to blame them.
READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley:
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Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.
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