This was recently underscored when an Ohio family lost custody of their 17-year-old daughter, who claims to be a transgender individual (i.e., really a boy) and wanted to begin sex transitioning, which her parents blocked. A description of sex transitioning, the current emphasis of legal efforts to require transitioning of children, and its threat to parental rights, families and the freedom of everyone was discussed by Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation at the Catholic Information Center on February 27, discussing his new book, When Harry Became Sally.

After generations of focusing on economics as the key to the liberation of humanity, the political and cultural left has, in the wake of the collapse of communism, moved on to sex and religion as the new focus of attack on the culture inherited from the pre-modern past. This involves the regulation of ordinary, everyday life according to the values of social engineers, replacing religious belief and the family as the basic, stable unit of society. There is “no fault” (really unilateral) divorce, a commercial culture that emphasizes gratification and scorns traditional values and duties, and in the more liberal jurisdictions, human rights commissions staffed by social liberals who apply their ideologies to regulate ordinary life in the interest of protecting minorities.

A growing – and very fundamental – line of attack is the denial of parental rights. This was also seen under communism, and really can be expected whenever the government holds an official doctrine. People who disagree with the doctrine are then in danger of losing control of their children. This is now being seen in the Western world as social liberalism in practice becomes state doctrine. The entire Western world is affected, although at this point the grievous cases happen only in more liberal jurisdictions.

Recent cases in Europe show both secular liberalism’s animosity to traditional Christianity and its desire to control the details of ordinary life. One of the longest running cases is that of the Swedish couple, Christer and Annie Johansson, who lost their son, Dominic, in 2009 at age 7, when he was seized from a plane before it took off to leave the country. Claiming poor dental care and lack of a vaccination as the justification, Swedish social services also objected to the homeschooling which the Johannsens intended for their son. In the nearly 10 intervening years, they have ultimately been denied all contact with their son, and the Swedish court system has repeatedly refused to restore their child to them.

Another more recent case in Norway involved a more frank attack on religious education of children by their parents. In late 2015, a Romanian Pentecostal couple, Marius and Ruth Bodnariu, were deprived of their five children by the Barnevernet, or child protective services, because it objected to their teaching that God punishes sin. This resulted in thousands of Romanian Pentecostals protesting, after which the Barnevernet agreed to return the children to the parents in the first half of 2016. As the LifeSiteNews article cited points out, the Barnevernet can take action from its own nonpublic deliberations and need not justify its actions in open court, although they can be challenged there.

But in another case involving the Barnevernet, the agency seized an American child because it objected to the mother’s breastfeeding, and has kept him for six years. As with the Johannsons in Sweden, in this case legal options within the country have been exhausted, and the parents are looking the European Court of Human Rights. That court, however, also exists in the environment of social liberalism favored by the Western elite. Yet another Barnevernet case involved a Canadian child forcibly removed from his family because of their decision to home school him after he was bullied at the public school. He was returned to his family in late February, after his family agreed to give up their passports until May. As these cases show, publicity, more than anything else, keeps these cases alive with the possibility of a just restoration of families.

The appearance of transgenderism, or self-defined sexuality, on the cultural scene in the Western world adds a dramatic new dimension to the struggle between the family and the state for control of children. This was recently underscored when an Ohio family lost custody of their 17-year-old daughter, who claims to be a transgender individual (i.e., really a boy) and wanted to begin sex transitioning, which her parents blocked. A description of sex transitioning, the current emphasis of legal efforts to require transitioning of children, and its threat to parental rights, families and the freedom of everyone was discussed by Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation at the Catholic Information Center on February 27, discussing his new book, When Harry Became Sally.

Anderson recounted the history of transgenderism in this country, which began decades ago, but only succeeded in capturing establishment support in the last several years. He said that decades ago, Dr. Paul McHugh, Psychiatrist in Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, “thought he had convinced the vast majority of his professional colleagues not to go along with radical claims that were being made about the human body and the human person back then.” McHugh “shut down Hopkins’ then new sex reassignment clinic” in 1979. This decision was made on the basis of a study he had done of the long-term result of surgical sex reassignment. The clinic remained shut down from 1979 to 2017. It was reopened, Anderson said, “not in light of new evidence, but in light of new ideology.”

Unhappily, transgenderism, the belief that one is really of a different sex than the sex of one’s body, is now focused on children, and the taking of medical action to reorient them to become a member of the sex that they claim to be part of.

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