Just once I would like to wake up and not be confronted by a headline that makes me wonder precisely how close we are to a full societal collapse. Sadly, today was not my day. One of the first things to light up my inbox was a report from our colleagues at Townhall about a new bill that recently passed in the Washington state senate. Washington has been leading the charge to lock up its status as the national leader in damaging or simply weird policies for a while now, and that trend is continuing. Senate Bill 5599 would allow the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families to remove children to a group home if their parents opposed any sort of “gender transition” the child expressed interest in or even an abortion, and they can do so without even informing the parents that it happened. In other words, this is state-sanctioned kidnapping.

Washington state passed a bill allowing children to legally be taken away from their parents for not consenting to gender transition procedures on their child. 

According to Senate Bill 5599, shelters could contact the Department of Children, Youth, and Families instead of parents for minors seeking reproductive health services or gender-affirming care.

The proposal would pave the way for more of a “compelling reason” to conceal a child who seeks sex change operations or reproductive health services such as abortion. 

There are still apparently a few sane people left in Washington state, such as State Senate Republican Leader John Braun. He pointed out the obvious dangers of such a process, including the possibility that the parents could be left wondering if their child had run away from home or even been kidnapped. Law enforcement could become involved and the parents would be going through an absolute nightmare until they finally learn that it was the state that had abducted their child.

And why is such a plan even being considered? Because a general madness has engulfed progressives in this country and elsewhere around the world. A revolt against thousands of years of biological science and, frankly, sanity has cropped up and I’m sad to report that the rebels seem to be winning. It’s bad enough when we have increasing numbers of adults falling under the sway of these delusions, but when this social contagion spreads to children and is abetted by adults who should know better, it’s criminal insanity.

Where are the remaining sane professionals in the medical community? Surely there must be some left out there in the wild. Or are they all more interested in creating a generation of lucrative, permanent outpatients that will require a lifetime of treatment to tend to the wounds inflicted on “transitioning” adults and children? Where are the mental health professionals who traditionally knew that the exceedingly rare patients who exhibited genuine symptoms of gender dysphoria required counseling and treatment to guide them back to reality?

We’re dealing with a social contagion that is spreading faster than COVID ever could have dreamed of doing. And we have both medical professionals and elected officials wandering around with their rainbow pins proudly attached to their shirts, nodding and smiling as if this was the most natural thing in the world.

Some day in the future, when survivors are clearing the wreckage after we fight off the army of AI robots that wipe out most of humanity, they will comb through whatever records remain to figure out when and where everything went so wrong. The west coast of the United States in 2022 and 2023 would probably be a good place to start.