Category: Breitbart
If parental rights can be bypassed in Alabama, no state is safe
Millions of Americans fled deep-blue states like California and New York because they believed the rules were different elsewhere. They moved to places like Alabama to escape lockdowns, mandates, and ideological capture of public institutions. They believed red states meant red lines.
That belief is proving dangerously naïve.
If red states cannot enforce their own parental rights laws, then the red-state refuge is a myth.
Alabama is one of the most conservative states in the country. It has a Republican supermajority and some of the strongest parental rights laws on the books: bans on gender-transition procedures for minors, curriculum transparency requirements, legal definitions of male and female, protections for girls’ sports, and a rare requirement that parents must opt in before schools provide any mental health services, including discussions of suicide or bullying.
And yet those protections are now being quietly hollowed out — not by legislators, but by bureaucratic subversion.
The footnote loophole
The Alabama State Department of Education is undermining parental consent by inserting exceptions into the fine print of a required opt-in form distributed after a new parental consent law took effect Oct. 1.
The law itself is unambiguous. Parents must provide prior written consent before schools offer mental health services, including discussions related to suicide or bullying. But the department claims in the footnotes that mental health-related conversations may still occur “as appropriate” in other school settings — and that these interactions do not require parental permission.
The ALSDE has stated that “instruction, advisement, and occasional interventions are not subject to opt-in requirements, as these are regular duties of school counselors and other educators.”
That language does more than stretch the statute. It appears designed to bypass it entirely. When schools engage minors in discussions with clear psychological or therapeutic implications — trauma, gender identity, suicidal ideation — without parental consent, they move into legally and constitutionally questionable territory.
Same playbook, new label
Parents have seen this before. During COVID, mandates were imposed first and justified later. Dissent was sidelined. Authority flowed downward, not outward.
Now the same model is being applied to school-based mental health. Whether embedded in social-emotional learning, “student wellness,” or character education, the result is the same: psychological interventions delivered by school employees, not licensed physicians, without parental oversight.
This is not a gray area. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed parents’ fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children. When school systems create end runs around opt-in requirements — especially on matters involving suicide or gender ideology — they invite serious legal and civil rights challenges.
No state is immune
This is not an Alabama anomaly.
Illinois now mandates mental health screenings for public school students, with no opt-in. Mississippi is rolling out a statewide “youth wellness platform.” Tennessee is placing mental health clinicians in every public school through a $250 million trust fund. Ohio is expanding school-based health centers that embed mental health treatment directly on campus.
These programs erase the line between education and health care. They normalize a system in which children’s emotions are monitored, recorded, and interpreted by the state without parental consent. That is state-sponsored emotional profiling.
Who decides what helps?
This debate is not about whether children need support. It is about who decides what support looks like — and who has the authority to provide it.
Parents possess a fundamental right to make decisions about their children’s mental and physical health. The Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor reaffirmed that when schools impose ideologically loaded services or content without notice or opt-out, they burden parental rights and religious liberty.
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Photo by Luis Soto/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Alabama’s counseling framework includes DEI-driven language encouraging students to “identify individual differences” and “describe and respect differences among individuals.” In practice, that language provides a vehicle for embedding gender ideology and values-based content into guidance lessons.
When that content is paired with school-based interventions, the issue is no longer education. It is ideological formation funded by taxpayers and imposed without consent.
Alabama’s warning
If this can happen in Alabama — arguably the most pro-parental-rights state in the country — then no state is safe.
Agencies should not be allowed to bury statutes in footnotes, reinterpret laws by memo, or use therapeutic language to bypass parental authority. These are not technical disagreements. They are unconstitutional and demand legal pushback.
If red states cannot enforce their own parental rights laws, then the red-state refuge is a myth.
Strong laws matter, but enforcement matters more. Parents must demand both.
Preparedness isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
A certain smug comfort belongs to people who have never stood between a riot line and a camera, never smelled accelerant on the wind, never watched their phones lose signal while fire chewed through an entire neighborhood. They talk about “heated rhetoric” and “charged atmospheres” as if danger were theoretical. For women reporters on the ground, it isn’t.
The front line is not a metaphor. It is a place. And it is getting more dangerous by the year.
This is not a gadget story. It is a survival story.
I have covered Antifa riots where the mob knew my name before I reached the sidewalk. I have been screamed at, followed, and threatened by people who publicly denounce violence while privately practicing it. I have watched law enforcement stand down under progressive policies that place the comfort of agitators above the safety of citizens. And I have learned, the hard way, that when cities become unlivable, women pay first.
The left loves to talk about “lived experience.” Here is mine: Democrat governance has made America’s major cities objectively less safe, and being a female independent journalist in them now requires the mindset of a survivalist.
That became brutally clear during the Los Angeles wildfires of 2025.
I was there when the sky turned orange and evacuation orders contradicted one another. Cell towers failed. Emergency lines were overwhelmed. Friends and family lost homes — not hypothetically, not statistically, but completely. In that chaos, the only reason I was able to coordinate help, locate people, and call for assistance was a satellite phone. While 911 systems collapsed, that device worked. No signal dependency. No excuses.
That is not a gadget story. It is a survival story.
The same lesson repeats itself elsewhere. In Washington, D.C., shootings now occur in places that once felt immune — near offices, events, and corridors of power. I was at Butler. I have been steps away from moments that could have gone very differently. Anyone insisting that “these things don’t happen here” is either lying or sheltered by privilege.
When whistleblowers reach out to me, they do not do it over casual cell calls. They use secure satellite communications, because they understand something our leaders prefer not to acknowledge: privacy is safety. Satellite phones are resistant to interception, independent of fragile infrastructure, and immune to spam and shutdowns. When people have something dangerous to say, they choose tools that help keep them alive.
This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.
People have died hiking because there was no signal. Boaters have vanished because help could not be reached. Hurricanes do not care about ideology. Fires do not check voter registration. Yet one party consistently opposes disaster preparedness, energy independence, and resilient infrastructure — while demanding blind trust in systems that fail precisely when they are needed most.
Preparedness is not extremism. It is common sense.
Redundancy in communication is not political. Neither are solar-powered backups or hardened devices. Nor is concern about electromagnetic vulnerabilities when our lives run through centralized, fragile networks. Thinking ahead does not make you radical. It makes you female in a country that keeps telling women to be brave while stripping away the tools that make bravery survivable.
And yes, it matters who builds those tools.
If I am calling for help, I want American customer service — American voices, American-owned companies. Safety should not come with a foreign accent and a hold button. Trust is part of security.
This is why satellite phones, solar chargers, emergency kits, and hardened cases are no longer niche products. They are rational responses to an increasingly unstable political and physical environment. They are also meaningful gifts — because nothing says you care like giving someone a way to come home alive.
RELATED: A nation without trust is a nation on borrowed time
Photo by Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images
Which brings us to 2026.
Around President Trump, TPUSA events, or Republican members of Congress, the threat environment is asymmetric. The left has normalized political violence while denying it exists. Media figures excuse it. Politicians minimize it. Prosecutors decline to prosecute it. And women journalists who refuse to conform are expected to absorb the consequences quietly.
I won’t.
The question voters should ask heading into the midterms is not which party sounds kinder on cable news. It is which party acknowledges reality — and equips Americans, especially women, to survive it.
One side treats chaos as a political tool. The other treats safety as the foundation of freedom.
I know which one kept me connected when the fires closed in. I know which one refuses to pretend riots are “mostly peaceful.” And I know which one understands that strong borders, strong policing, resilient infrastructure, and personal preparedness are not luxuries in dangerous times.
The front line is expanding. It runs through our cities, our forests, our streets, and our inboxes. Women are already on it — whether policymakers realize it or not.
The only question left is whether America will choose leaders who take our safety seriously or continue sacrificing us to ideology.
Because the danger is real. And pretending otherwise is the most reckless policy of all.
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