🍊 🇺🇸 OC Conservative Brief - 9.7.23 (we're back!!)

Good morning, happy Friday, and YES, the OC Conservative Brief is BACK!

After a long summer hiatus that included your author getting married in Cabo and honeymooning in Europe, your weekly run down of Orange County's local politics from a conservative perspective is finally back in action just in time for the Fall.

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This week, we have a rebellion against the looming specter of COVID mandates in Huntington Beach. We also finally have a court sentence for Democrat Dave Min after his DUI earlier this year. But first, parents in the city of Orange made headlines last night after winning a high-stakes culture war battle…

PARENTS PUT ORANGE SCHOOLS ON ‘NOTICE’ Advocates for parents rights in schools scored a major victory in Orange County Thursday night after the Orange Unified School District voted to approve a “parental notification” policy requiring schools to inform parents if their child is identifying as transgender, including if they request to be called by different names or pronouns or switch sports teams or changing facilities.

• Students over 12-years-old can refuse to consent to disclosure to their parents. School officials can also prevent notification if they believe it could pose a threat to the student’s safety.

According to the LA Times and the OC Register, the vote was contentious, with officers eventually kicking members of the Revolutionary Communist Party with megaphones out of the meeting hall and a shouting match and “brief scuffle” occurring between supports and opponents.

The 4-0 vote (the three school board members in opposition walked out) is the latest in a string of victories by conservative parents fighting to assert more control over schools that they worry keep them in the dark about their children.

• Their Point Of View… A school district in Monterey County recently settled with a California mother for $100,000 after she sued school officials for secretly “transitioning” her 11-year-old daughter by encouraging her to identify with different pronouns and use different bathrooms during school hours without her mother’s knowledge.

Orange Unified became the sixth school district in California in recent weeks to pass such a policy, joining Murrieta, Chino, Temecula, Rocklin, and a school district in Shasta County.

California Democrats, who killed a similar parental notification bill state-wide earlier this year, aren’t taking the string of school board victories lying down. Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit last month against the Chino Valley Unified School District, arguing that its policy is discriminatory and violates the state constitution’s equal protection, as well as students’ right to privacy. A judge halted that policy from being implemented this week pending litigation.

Legal arguments in the Chino case aside, Democrats will have a hard time painting Chino’s policy as a result of right-wing bigotry. Republicans only make up one third of voters in the area, and only 12% of students are white.

• Read Deeper: A Wall Street Journal op-ed argues Bonta’s lawsuit “encapsulates the popular view of left-wing governments: Parents can’t be trusted with their own children.”
  

• What Do The Polls Say? The media calls these types of proposals “controversial,” but are they really? A recent poll found the vast majority of adults in blue New Jersey (77%) agreed that schools should be required to notify parents if their child begins identifying as a different gender.

Democrats don’t want this issue to be about parents. They feel they are on safer ground framing the debate around bigotry and “outing” trans children, which is why they stick to their talking points. But they may still be playing with fire. Remember what happened to the Democrat Party in Virginia after they tried to bully and ridicule parents rising up in the interests of their children?

RETURN OF THE MASK WARS? Mask mandates in schools and hospitals are alarmingly popping up across the country again, but at least one city in Orange County isn’t having any of it. The Huntington Beach city council voted 4-3 this week for a resolution declaring the city free from universal mask and vaccine mandates.

The resolution, put forward by Councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark, would still allow private businesses to enforce their own requirements on masks and vaccines, but is effectively a declaration that the city will not be enforcing universal mandates from government health authorities.

• “This is all about individual liberty and standing against government intrusion,” Van Der Mark said.

The vote was not without debate and controversy. The no votes on the city council contended that the move was redundant and a waste of time, with Councilmember Dan Kalmick arguing that “There are no rumblings of mask or vaccine mandates.”

• Apparently at one point, a woman was even “forcibly removed from the audience after she began screaming at the councilmembers and calling them ‘idiots.’”

Is it a waste of time, though? It’s undeniable that COVID mandates are coming back in some capacity; several schools across the country have already announced mask requirements for classrooms, as have some hospital systems. LA County’s Department of Public Health recently made clear that, while a universal mask mandate isn’t back on the table now, it could be in the future.

As Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland, who voted for the resolution, put it: “I think it’s important for the city of Huntington Beach to say no more, no more in Huntington Beach.”

DUI DAVE GETS HIS SENTENCE You may recall that Orange County Democrat state Senator Dave Min, who is also running for Congress in Katie Porter’s vacated CA-47 seat, was arrested earlier this year after he was caught driving drunk through a red light in Sacramento.

Last week, Min finally received his sentence after pleading no contest: three years of unsupervised probation, a mandatory 30-hour alcohol education program, and a $2,050 fine.

Min may be facing legal consequences for his actions, but so far the political consequences haven’t been as dire, despite calls from a few (notably former Democrat Congressman Harley Rouda) for him to drop out. He still has the valuable endorsement of retiring Rep. Katie Porter and continues to announce endorsements from local labor unions.

What To Watch For: Min’s third quarter FEC fundraising report (due at the end of September) will shed some light on if his campaign’s fundraising and donor base has kept up with his campaign appearances.

WAIT, THERE'S MORE...

📈 A new poll of CA Republican primary voters finds former President Trump dominating the state’s primary election with 55% of the vote while Ron DeSantis, who briefly led the poll earlier this year, has plummeted to just 16%.

✈️ Sacramento Democrats are on the verge of repealing California’s so-called “travel ban” that prohibits publicly-funded travel to states they deem “anti-LGBT,” which has since jumped to 26, over concerns that the ban is “causing unintended economic consequences and preventing the exchange of ideas.”

🤑 Completing a personal finance course could be a requirement for all California high school graduates according to a new ballot measure filed with the state this week; the measure now needs to gather enough signatures to qualify for the November 2024 ballot.

👨‍⚖️ Sacramento Democrats have chosen state Sen. Mike McGuire from the North Coast to be the next leader of the Senate, replacing Toni Atkins who will be termed out next year.

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Have a tip on a news item in Orange County conservatives should know about? Drop me a line at [email protected]