A proposal in Colorado seeks to allow children to decide their preferred name and force public schools to comply. Refusal to use that name would be deemed discrimination, the bill states.
It’s sponsored by Colorado state Rep. Stephanie Vigil, state Sen. Faith Winter, and state Sen. Janice Marchman, all Democrats.
The measure could allow a child to identify as transgender and change his or her name at school without parental permission.
The legislation’s three sponsors didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
For parents, bills such as this represent the “complete destruction of parental rights,” local conservative activist Darcy Schoening, who works for the Colorado GOP and as the media director for the El Paso County chapter of Moms for Liberty, told The Epoch Times.
“The state is now trying to remove a parent’s ability to parent their child as they see fit,” she said.
Names are a deeply personal choice for parents, she said, and it’s a parent’s right to name their children on their birth certificates.
“When you can’t even rely on what you gave your child on their birth certificate as a name, you’ve lost a lot more than we realize,” she said.
Colorado’s new bill effectively states that her choices don’t matter to the state, Ms. Schoening said.
“Everybody in my circle thinks this is crazy,” she said. “And it’s scary.”
Power to the State
The proposal also has no provisions that keep a child from choosing a silly or inappropriate preferred name, or a preferred name selected for some other disruptive reason.Given normal teenage misbehavior, silly requests from children under the policy could lead to chaos, Ms. Schoening said. Under the proposal, a child could ask to be called “Spider-Man,” and teachers would have to honor it.
Colorado’s Democrats likely have goals of creating authoritarian power by breaking down the family, Ms. Schoening said.
“It makes the teacher the children’s advocate and the parent the child’s enemy,” she said.
The text of HB24-1039 doesn’t say whether schools will tell parents when they change a student’s name, and the bill clarifies that the name change doesn’t have legal force.
A section of the bill states that a Colorado Department of Education task force will be set up to decide whether parents get to hear about their child’s name change after the bill passes.
The task force would include two superintendents, two charter school chief administrators, one state Department of Education representative, two school counselors, one primary school teacher, and one secondary school teacher.
The group would be given a year to decide “communication plans for a student who does not go by the student’s preferred name in the student’s home,” “procedures related to parental notification,” and the “process for updating unofficial school records with a student’s preferred name.”
Democrats hold a supermajority in the Colorado House and a 23–12 majority in the state Senate, while Gov. Jared Polis also is a Democrat.
Ms. Schoening said the bill is indicative of the state of Colorado’s public school system.
“Our kids are being weaponized,” she said. “They’re being destroyed for political value.”
