What we talk about when we talk about thinking of the children
Won't someone please think of the children?
"Once again we're facing hate."
Advocate Serena Paine joined hundreds in St. John's last week, as she has done dozens of times, in an overwhelming show of support for LGBTQ-inclusive education, a response to planned demonstrations across the country critical of Pride events and inclusive material in schools.
Those demonstrations implored participants to think of the children being put at risk. "If you love children this is where you want to be," said one protest organizer on social media.
"We thought this was a battle that we won 30 years ago," said Paine. But 30 years might be a conservative estimate.
Children have been used as an excuse to push back against human rights advances over at least the past century and a half. Here's a look at some of those debates and how they panned out.
What the kids need
In modern instances, these kinds of arguments are largely targeted at the trans community, particularly trans kids. But that's only after decades of practice on the entire LGBTQ spectrum.
Organized attempts to block marriage equality ultimately failed but would frequently cite the impact that gay marriage might have on children, with protesters pleading with legislators to think of the youth who, they claimed, needed both a male and female parent in their lives.
This, in a country with close to 20 per cent of its children already growing up in single-parent households.
Canada was only the fourth country to legally recognize same-sex marriage, in 2005. The hard-fought battle for those rights lasted well after that date, with a federal attempt to reopen the debate again as early as the following year.
A concerned mother
Before marriage equality, it was the very existence of LGBTQ people that threatened women and children, according to the eponymous Save Our Children coalition.
Every argument made in 2023 at rallies to ban LGBTQ-inclusive education or gender-affirming treatment for children was made by Anita Bryant in Florida in 1977 against the entire LGBTQ community, in some cases word for word.
Bryant's anti-LGBTQ activism was a response to the increasing support that community was receiving following the Stonewall riots a decade earlier, which led directly to the first pride parades.
Bryant's argument was that the mere fact of having same-sex relationships freely seen in public, in essence given the same freedoms and protections as straight relationships, would be confusing and indoctrinating to impressionable children.
"My primary concern was voiced as a mother," wrote Bryant in her book The Anita Bryant Story. "Public approval of admitted homosexual teachers could encourage more homosexuality by inducing pupils to look upon it as an acceptable lifestyle."
Bryant was particularly concerned with a local ordinance in Florida prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, an ordinance her movement successfully had repealed.
It was reinstated in 1998.
The woman's place
Decades before Stonewall put the fight for LGBTQ rights front and centre, opponents of women's suffrage argued that allowing women the right to vote was enough to destroy traditional gender roles and leave children without a caregiver.
In Canada and in the United Kingdom, opponents of suffrage warned of women becoming "masculinized" by politics. Posters and political cartoons warned of neglected children and the topsy-turvy world of men doing housework.
These illustrated the anti-suffragist fear that upsetting current gender categories would only hurt vulnerable children.
Still, between 1916 and 1951, each province and territory ratified acts enfranchising women, though these acts almost universally limited those rights along race lines.
And speaking of which…
'More sinned against than sinning'
Before women had the vote, and before the LGBTQ community could even be spoken about in public, racialized people in North America, particularly those of Asian or African descent, were considered threats to women and children.
In the United States, journalist and civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells was already refuting the arguments in 1892 that the Florida state government used to ban people from bathrooms in May of this year — only for Wells, the debate wasn't about access, but life and death.
In her pamphlet Southern Horrors, Wells documented lynchings in the U.S., showing that accusations of African American men attacking white women and girls were unfounded and were being used to check Black economic progress, ruin business owners and terrorize the Black community.
After the public murder of Ephraim Grizzard near Nashville, she wrote:
"At the very moment these civilized whites were announcing their determination 'to protect their wives and daughters,' by murdering Grizzard, a white man was in the same jail for raping eight-year-old Maggie Reese, an Afro-American girl. He was not harmed.… The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black."
Kids aren't all right
This could go on forever, but why? Why does this argument come up again and again in protest of human rights advances?
Some theorists, such as John Meany and Kate Shuster in their book Art, Argument and Advocacy argue that "think of the children" is a rhetorical tactic; an appeal to raw emotional response designed to shut down debate.
It is hard to argue that one shouldn't think of the children, that the most vulnerable people shouldn't be given protection.
But it's also a process of othering the people fighting for rights, designed to make people feel fundamentally different from each other and, as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights suggests, "render possible the discrimination, abuse, or persecution of a group."
Our children can't be "indoctrinated," after all, unless it is toward something that isn't us.
Anti-LGBTQ advocates often frame themselves as concerned parents, merely defending their rights to raise children as they see fit. In New Brunswick, the assertion of parents' rights were key to recent school policy changes regarding the recognition of students' professed gender identities.
But Canada already restricts parental authority over children, and with good reason.
According to a Statistics Canada study released last December, of the three in ten Canadians who have experienced some form of physical abuse as a child, around 70 per cent of the time it was perpetrated by a parent.
The greatest danger to trans kids does not occur in schools. A 2022 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal determined that trans kids were over seven times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide.
The study found gender-nonconforming youths to be more exposed to risk factors such as bullying, isolation and a lack of familial support, in some cases leading to homelessness, all potentially directed at them from their parents.
Think of those children too.
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