By: Sue Lani Madsen | Special to unDivided
Washington parents are frustrated over the attempted gutting of the Parents’ Bill of Rights. Two bills moving through the Washington legislature effectively erase the 15 rights enumerated in current law and replace the Parents’ Bill of Rights with a list of “student rights, parental and guardian rights, employee protections, and requirements for state and local education entities . . . and declaring an emergency,” according to House Bill 1296. A similar bill working its way through the other chamber, Senate Bill 5181, also includes an emergency clause that protects it from a voter referendum.
By trying to gut the law approved by initiative, parents are waking up to how Washington Democrats have written them out of their children’s lives. Like the now viral video clip from Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle), majority leader of the Washington Senate Democrats:
“Kids over the age of 13 have the complete right to make their own decisions about their mental health care, parents don’t have a right to have notice, they don’t have a right to have consent about that.”
It’s an incredibly stupid policy. 13-year-olds have to be reminded to go to bed, go to school, do their homework, shut the door, take a shower, or “get out of the shower, you’re using all the hot water!” 13-year-olds are not well-known for their ability to make and keep medical appointments. 13-year-olds prescribed medication rely on parents to remind them when to take it, what and what not to take it with, and rescue them from adverse reactions.
In short, 13-year-olds need involved parents to thrive (and even survive).
But unfortunately, Pedersen was mostly correct. As he auto-responded to concerned constituents emailing his office last week, “That is the law in Washington and has been for 40 years.”
Rep. Travis Couture (R-Allyn) calls this deceptive and misleading. While Pedersen was technically right, he ignores the impact of healthcare mission-creep imposed by a Democratic party increasingly dragged into the swamp by its extreme left wing.
In Washington state, what started out in 1985 as a law allowing high school kids to talk to the school counselor without first calling their parents has turned into Senate Majority Leader Pedersen saying on national television, “if they’re old enough to get pregnant, they’re old enough to make decisions about their own bodies.”
Apparently, Pedersen thinks girls can make their own healthcare decisions as long as they’re menstruating, so a girl as young as eight or nine years old doesn’t need her parents’ support if she winds up pregnant. The school can tell her to lie, because according to Pedersen's standard she’s old enough to make decisions about her own body.
And parents must also be lied to by everyone in the school if their daughter has suddenly become confused about her gender after being exposed to a progressive sexual health curriculum and teachers intent on social indoctrination.
That’s not hypothetical. It happened in the Olympia School District with a 10-year-old girl in Ms. Jennifer Knight’s 5th grade class at Centennial Elementary. The unDivided podcast has the interviews and the receipts.
This year’s attempts to gut the Parents’ Bill of Rights have highlighted what parents of kids struggling with mental health challenges already knew. Once your child hits the magic age of 13, they can go it on their own.
“Mental health needs to be taken very seriously,” said one frustrated mother who spoke on condition of anonymity for her daughter’s sake. Her daughter was in treatment, mom was part of a successful treatment plan until 13 and then just like that, a fragile child was left to make her own decisions. “A 13-year-old can be severely depressed and ordered an anti-depressant, then refuse to take them. If a parent isn’t aware, how can they watch for increased risk behavior? And mental health professionals don’t necessarily follow through,” said this mother.
Who do you believe will be a child’s best advocate? An involved parent who worries about her daughter 24/7/365 or a mental health professional with a caseload of dozens of patients and a teacher who sees her at most 180 days a year?
When my own daughter was 13, I got an immediate notification while I was out of town at a meeting. That afternoon, a group of girls had reported sexual harassment, the school was investigating, and a deputy would be visiting in the morning to take her statement. I was home that night and with her in the morning. I can’t imagine being kept in the dark.
Under the law as it stands today, parents have a right “To receive immediate notification if a criminal action is deemed to have been committed against their child or by their child,” like I did. That’s simple, obvious and common sense.
Children don’t live at school; they live at home with their families. In the version of HB 1296 passed by Democrats on the House Education Committee, schools get up to 48 hours to notify parents. Two days of lying to parents by omission?
Of course, there are bad home environments out there – and bad parents. Sometimes those are the kids your kids bring home because they need a meal and a place to sleep. But the same Democratic majority that wants to let the school wait up to 48 hours before calling you – you who have done no wrong and are under no suspicion – also wants to reduce the penalty for cooking meth in front of minors and make it more difficult to remove kids from those very dysfunctional homes. That is nonsensical.
On the Senate side, Democrats amended SB 5181 to take out the 48 hour wait and put the "immediate" notification requirement back before passing it, a minor victory for common sense.
But both bills would still repeal parents’ rights to be notified of any medical care offered to their children, medication provided, or follow-up care required because 13-year-olds are great at organizing their lives without their parents’ involvement. (Insert eyeroll here, the kind your teenager gives you when you remind him to wash the dishes or tell her take out the trash.)
The Parents’ Bill of Rights was approved by nearly a half-million Washington voters who signed Initiative 2081, and by the Washington legislature, where the Democrats were for it in 2024 before deciding they are against it in 2025. As one frustrated parent testified in Olympia during the first public hearing for HB 1296, it's like "taking a sledgehammer to democracy."
SB 5181 passed the Senate and is waiting for a hearing in the House Education Committee, the same committee that approved a 48-hour waiting period and voted down an amendment to bring parents in immediately. No word on when it will be heard.
HB 1296 is lingering in the House Rules Committee and may die there. Speaker Laurie Jinkins (D-Tacoma) who chairs the committee did not respond to a request for a status on the bill and Republicans are as usual shut out of the process.
But you aren’t. Flood your representatives with your opinion through the legislative website. Let them know you want the Parents’ Bill of Rights to remain the law.
You can submit your position on HB 1296 here:
https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/1296
You can submit your position on SB 5181 here:
https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/5181
About the author:
Sue Lani Madsen calls herself an accidental journalist after 30 years as an architect. She spent nine years as a weekly columnist for the Spokesman-Review, writing about public policy and other topics reflecting her experience in agriculture as a rancher, rural healthcare and urban disaster response as an EMT, and wildland fire and forest policy as a firefighter. She publishes on Substack and The Center Square. She will also be contributing her expertise to unDivided's coverage of the 2025 Legislative Session. Sue Lani lives on a ranch west of Spokane with husband Craig, 200 plus goats and three dogs.
Everything you need to know about what happened during the legislative session in Olympia this week.
A Republican election observer in Island County (WA) has been charged with a felony after he refused to wear a mask to watch ballot counting. The prosecutor who charged him has a long history of unhinged posts about MAGA and President Trump. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson brags about speeding up wait times to change the gender on your birth certificate.
Prefer to listen? https://audioboom.com/posts/8653727-election-observer-charged-with-felony-for-not-masking-2-13-25
After backlash for his comments on parental rights, Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle) turned to trusted allies for help: the legacy media. Trump administration oversteps in blocking Associated Press from Oval Office event. State government wants to track your every move. Oregon Congresswoman says Democrats need to “F**k Trump!”
Prefer to listen? https://audioboom.com/posts/8653212-media-circles-wagons-for-senator-jamie-pedersen-2-12-25
These remarks were delivered to the Snohomish County Lincoln Day Dinner on May 17, 2024.
The following remarks were delivered to the Whatcom County Lincoln Day Dinner on March 23, 2024, in Ferndale, Washington.
I struggled with what to talk to you about tonight.
Well, that’s not true. I didn't struggle with what to talk to you about – I struggled with whether I was brave enough to say what I wanted to say.
When I'm invited to speak to groups, I don't want to offend anyone or be too controversial. So, I reached out to a few of your fellow party members to ask whether any topics were off limits or wouldn't go over well with the crowd.
I got some good advice.
Then I decided to ignore that good advice entirely.
Too much is at stake to be polite.
As we sit here tonight, we are in the final battle of a war.
A war that has pit sanity against insanity.
Pragmatism against idealism.
A war that has sacrificed the public good, in favor of a twisted idea of progress.
It's a war that began long before I moved here 15 years ago. It started silently and it was mostly waged in the shadows.
Most of us didn't even realize that a war was being fought. We were too caught up in our own lives and our own problems. ...
A Republican election observer in Island County (WA) has been charged with a felony after he refused to wear a mask to watch ballot counting. The prosecutor who charged him has a long history of unhinged posts about MAGA and President Trump. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson brags about speeding up wait times to change the gender on your birth certificate.
After backlash for his comments on parental rights, Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle) turned to trusted allies for help: the legacy media. Trump administration oversteps in blocking Associated Press from Oval Office event. State government wants to track your every move. Oregon Congresswoman says Democrats need to “F**k Trump!”
As we've long expected, Washington Democrats want to put transponders in all your cars and charge you for every single mile you drive. HB 1921 has a hearing tomorrow. Take 30 seconds to tell them what you think. I'm registering CON.
Link: https://app.leg.wa.gov/csi/Testifier/Add?chamber=House&mId=32709&aId=163898&caId=25811&tId=3
When I first started dating my husband in 2018, I avoided asking who he voted for in the 2016 presidential election. Part of me already knew the answer, but I wanted to bury the uncomfortable truth: he’d voted for Donald J. Trump.
If I’d asked him the question then, I’m not sure we’d be where we are today: happily married and head-over-heels in love.
When we met in the fall of 2018, I was a political reporter at the local FOX-TV affiliate in Seattle and President Trump was less than two years into his first term. While I’ve always been right of Seattle’s hard-left politics – it was difficult to break free from the groupthink of a newsroom. Especially a newsroom in one of the bluest cities in America.
Donald Trump had declared the “fake news” media the enemy of the American people and, in turn, we waged war against him, too.
To be clear, not all our coverage was unfair. It’s the media’s job to hold politicians accountable and there’s no doubt, when it came to Trump, the Fourth Estate took that job seriously. The problem, as I’ve come to realize, was they took it less seriously when it came to Democrats. They still do.
During my years at FOX 13 News, I like to think I did my best to hold Washington state progressives accountable for their failures on homelessness, crime, and the anti-business policies that were driving companies like Amazon to move jobs elsewhere. But, in truth, I spent far too much time as a local news reporter covering the White House. I even convinced my bosses to send me to the border in 2019 to cover the so-called family separation crisis – an unusual expense for a local newsroom to agree to. It’s worth noting that local FOX affiliates are different from the network and don’t necessarily share the same conservative bias. Ours certainly did not.
My family and friends knew I was vehemently anti-Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and often chided my older brother for flying a Trump flag outside his home in Minnesota. By 2019, I’d moved in with my then-boyfriend – but still avoided talking to him about Trump and left the room when he’d turn on his favorite network news show.
In hindsight, I had what the right calls Trump Derangement Syndrome. And my diagnosis had the potential to be terminal.
But things started to turn at a most unexpected time.
The January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol had a different effect on me than you might expect. Rather than deepen my disdain for Donald Trump, it opened my eyes to disturbing depths of hypocrisy that I cannot unsee.
I’d just spent six months covering acts of leftwing political violence in Seattle that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
I watched as cop cars were torched in the streets downtown. My security guard disarmed rioters of stolen police rifles. Stores were looted to the studs – bare manikins left strewn in the streets. Officers were assaulted and hit with improvised explosive devices. My crew was mobbed in what later became known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHOP) – six square blocks surrounding a police precinct that were taken over by armed anti-police extremists. A few days into the occupation, rioters tried to light the precinct on fire after putting quick-drying cement on a door to lock officers in.
Those are just a few examples of what unfolded in Seattle during the racial justice movement of 2020. Our mayor at the time, Jenny Durkan, famously referred to it as a “Summer of Love.” The acts of that summer were ignored and even supported by many in our city’s Democratic leadership. Then-Councilwoman Tammy Morales scolded anyone who questioned the behavior of criminal demonstrators.
“What I don’t want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told that looting doesn’t solve anything,” she said during the unrest.
Our state’s chief law enforcer at the time, Attorney General Bob Fergson, stayed mostly silent about the destruction happening on our streets. He had by then made a national name for himself by suing the Trump administration dozens of times and had his eye on the governor’s office (which he went on to win in 2024). There was no way he’d risk angering his base by condemning leftwing extremism. Instead, he issued a short statement focused on criminal justice reform.
The media downplayed the violence, too. Even my own station took great pains to excuse or ignore criminal acts and play up non-criminal elements of the protests.
No such pains were taken with J6ers.
That hypocrisy was the beginning of my yearslong red pilling.
In 2021, frustrated by new management and our coverage of both the riots and the pandemic, I quit my job in news to launch an independent show.
The biggest supporter of me walking away from my $185,000/year dream job?
My sweet, Trump-voting boyfriend.
I married him in the fall of 2023, five years after I almost let his support for Donald Trump steal the joy we now share. There’s little doubt that had I asked him in the early days of our relationship who he’d voted for in the 2016 election, I would have ended things.
Typing that now makes my heart hurt.
This past November, I voted for Donald. J Trump for the first time. And yes, my husband did too.
Today, more than any other emotion, I am full of hope and optimism for our country – finally free from the echo chamber that once soured me on Trump and his agenda. But I am also battling a tinge of guilt. Guilt for the viewers I let down in those early days of the Trump administration. Guilt over the wonderful life I almost cost myself.
For that, I offer a sincere apology to our 47th President (and my husband, for that matter). And I offer this advice to anyone upset by a second term of Donald J. Trump: Never let politics stand in the way of your happiness. And never be too stubborn to change your mind.
