The deep soul sickness of Democratic Party orthodoxy was on full display Feb. 7 when all 48 Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates voted against a bill preventing teachers from hiding children’s sex transitions from their parents.

In a sane world, no such bill would even be necessary. And although bitter experience has proven the bill necessary, no morally reasonable legislator could have come close to voting against it. The fact that it passed the House only by a 50-48 majority is a sign of a stunning inversion of the most elemental human norms.

The Daily Caller reports that the bill, called Sage’s Law (prematurely, since it’s not law yet, alas), “is named after a 14-year-old girl who was sex trafficked twice and raped after the state removed her from her parents’ custody to protect her from so-called 'misgendering.'” The school had refused to tell the parents, before an ethically degenerate judge removed Sage from their care, that the school was complying with Sage’s request to be treated as if she were a boy named Drago.

The horrors inflicted upon Sage as a consequence comprise an extreme case, of course. But even if Sage had not been removed from her own home or abused, the school was way off base in hiding her “identity change” from her parents to start with. No matter what school officials think about their own power, parents, not the officials, ordinarily have ultimate authority over how to raise children. Absent a court finding of abuse or severe abandonment, parental authority is sacrosanct.

Somehow, a bizarre notion to the contrary has taken hold across school bureaucracies and among most Democratic officeholders to the effect that “gender identity” somehow trumps the ordinary presumption of parental responsibility and authority that has existed not just as long as humankind but also in almost every observable animal species on Earth.

Why must anyone have to explain this? Why must an argument even be made for this presumption, as it is so basic a concept? For parents to raise children, and for other adults to ordinarily defer to them, is instinctual, akin to eating when one is hungry and sleeping when one is tired.

Again, exceptions exist because no child belongs with a parent who abuses him. Those exceptions, however, should be extremely rare.

It is not abusive for a parent to question what might be a child’s temporary whim of wanting to “try out” a different gender.

If school officials or lawmakers don’t understand such things, how does someone even try to reason with them? It’s like trying to explain why we should come up for air when underwater. It’s not a matter of theory or complicated logic. Parental responsibility is just a statement of what is, an assertion of basic human nature and of a morally ordered universe.

Transgender ideology became so pervasive so quickly that the abnormal has become endorsed through peer pressure. Again quoting the Daily Caller: “In tearful testimony offered before the Virginia legislature’s education committee, Michele, Sage’s grandmother, testified that Sage now says she was never a boy, and was merely trying to fit in with the rest of the kids at school.”

The consequences were tragic. This must never happen again. No ordinary parent should ever be kept in the dark about matters so important to the rest of a child’s life — but about which a child is, by definition of being a child, too immature to fathom its consequences fully. To act against parents’ authority and instinctual love is a moral monstrosity.