The national Democratic Party is waging a fierce and bizarre war against parents.

On March 24, House Republicans passed and sent to the Senate a simple, entirely commonsensical bill to ensure parents’ right to know about and comment on the policies, budgets, and curricula of their schools. They passed it over the unanimous (repeat, unanimous) opposition of every Democrat who voted.

Let’s be direct: Not a single good reason exists to oppose the Parents Bill of Rights Act.

Right now, most public education treats parents as obstacles to the workings of the self-selected, supposedly all-knowing educrats who control our schools. Parents are told what schools their children must attend, but then they are told they have no right to basic information about the schools’ curricula or major policies, much less to speak against those practices. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) put this attitude plainly in September 2021: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

The Left, including the usual establishment media hand-wringers, portrays the innocuous bill as having what MSNBC’s Hayes Brown called “sinister motives.” They warn that just affording knowledge about school policies to parents will foment a veritable reign of terror against ethnic minorities and “gender non-binary” students, along with waves of book-banning.

Again, this is all because of a bill that merely requires schools to provide information to parents who ask. It’s a bill ensuring transparency, not mandating policy. Specifically, it requires schools to “post curriculum information publicly,” report “any revisions to the state’s academic standards,” give “timely notice of any school’s plan to eliminate gifted and talented programs,” and provide “public disclosure of school district budgets and each school’s budget.”

Oh, and horror of horrors, it requires educators and policymakers to respect the First Amendment rights of parents to speak and assemble.

Then there’s the hot-button issue of gender-bending. The bill doesn’t put a thumb on the scale here. It only requires that parents of minor children “ have a right to know ” if staff members act to “change a minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name; or allow a child the change the child’s sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms.”

In a sane world, none of this would be remotely controversial. In sane times, parents would enjoy a presumption, absent clear signs of abuse or outright abandonment, that they are responsible for decisions related to their minor children — and, even more, that parents at least have a right to mere information about how schools plan to act in loco parentis .

Democrats worry that some parents might demand bans of certain books from curricula or school libraries. Well, so what? Isn’t it the right of parents to opine on whether certain books are age-appropriate? If one lives in a free society, one accepts that public debate ultimately is the most reliable arbiter of what is or isn’t a reasonable age restriction on content. The bill every House Democrat opposed doesn’t make a single one of those decisions — it merely gives parents due notice.

By opposing the Parents Bill of Rights Act, Democrats support secrecy over transparency, school officials over parents, government over families. Their vision is what dystopian novelists George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned us about — a brave new world where it was considered “smut” to be told that, one day back in the past of “gross viviparous reproduction, children were always brought up by their parents and not in State Conditioning Centres.”

To avoid that awful new world that hates the very idea of parenting, the least we should do is let fathers and mothers know how the state’s conditioning schools are indoctrinating their children.