Cites erosion of parental rights
By 
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
By Tyler O’Neil
The Daily Signal
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—A Christian who faced persecution for her faith in Communist Romania in the 1980s and barely survived an assassination attempt orchestrated by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu warns that the undermining of parental rights in the U.S. today echoes Ceausescu’s totalitarian government.
“It’s the same system that the socialists use in order for parents to be put in jail that the students, kids, will be taught in school to report their [parents] to school,” Virginia Prodan, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Communist Romania but came to the U.S. after President Ronald Reagan secured her release, tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
She raised the alarm in a February interview at the National Religious Broadcasters convention here in Nashville.
“Never in the history of the United States [did] the government work to teach children from a young age prostitution and to teach children values against what parents’ values are, to control, even at the point where they want to do things with children at school that the parents will not be allowed to find out,” Prodan says.
She is referring to the debate over parental rights in education, which began as parents began to see what their kids were learning as they took classes over Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid outcry about schools’ requiring face masks and pushing racial lessons, parents began sounding the alarm about sexualized materials in school libraries.
When parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty demand schools remove sexually explicit materials, however, opponents claim these groups are “banning books” and targeting the LGBTQ community.
California has passed a law forcing schools to train teachers to identify vulnerable “LGBTQ+ youth” and watch out for “non-affirming” parents. The Biden administration is considering a rule to exclude parents from fostering children if they refuse to toe the line on gender ideology.
Prodan recalls growing up in Communist Romania, where students would be encouraged to rat out their parents for opposing the government.