There was no judge. There was no jury. There was no due process of any kind for Sarra L, a Tucson mom unjustly prosecuted by government bureaucrats for parenting in a way that they didn’t like. And they would have gotten away with it too—until the Goldwater Institute came to Sarra’s aid and cleared her name.
Sarra’s only “crime” was to leave her 7-year-old son and his friend to play on the playground while she made a quick trip to a nearby grocery store. The children were never in danger, yet the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) unilaterally decided to place her on the state’s secretive “Do Not Hire” blacklist for abusive parents—for the next 25 years. But after the Goldwater Institute and Pacific Legal Foundation teamed up to protect Sarra’s due process rights, DCS had no choice but to drop the case.
Sarra’s ordeal is a microcosm of a troubling nationwide trend: Government bureaucrats think they know what’s best for other people’s kids. But it’s parents, not the government, who have a right and a responsibility to raise their children. The Goldwater Institute will always stand alongside parents in defense of this right—and we’ll keep showing the nation how to beat the bureaucrat bullies.
Read more at In Defense of Liberty.
It’s a reality for countless young people: Teenagers spend four years in a liberal echo chamber, where conformity to left-wing norms is required as a toxic web of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices saturate campus life and curricular programming with radical racial politics. Then they graduate unprepared for the workforce—but with hundreds of thousands of dollars in crippling debt.
“Colleges have embraced activist principles that directly undermine their core commitments to free expression, academic inquiry and fearless pursuit of truth,” Goldwater Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg writes in Discourse magazine.
But Goldwater is spearheading the charge to fix America’s broken higher education system. This year in Texas and Florida, Goldwater enacted our nation-leading reforms to completely defund DEI offices and to stop public universities from requiring faculty job applicants to submit DEI statements, respectively. We’re also promoting our landmark law to crack down on bias reporting systems, which encourage students to turn in their peers for the slightest deviation from the script of political correctness.
As Beienburg writes, “it is essential that universities act quickly to restore—not further erode—the pillars of our republic. The future of the nation, and the continued value of a college degree, may well depend on it.”
Read more at Discourse.
It doesn’t matter what the race-baiting partisans say. America was founded not on slavery, but on the proposition that all people are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s the spirit of Juneteenth, which we celebrated Monday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States, Goldwater Vice President for Legal Affairs Timothy Sandefur writes in the Washington Examiner.
“How sad, then, that we are beset today by alleged champions of justice who seek…not to realize the spirit of Juneteenth but to undermine it and instill the notion that people should be treated differently based on race,” Sandefur adds. “Those who vanquished slavery believed in realizing the American dream for everyone. But today’s race-politics leaders pursue the opposite goal: fracturing us into camps defined by ancestry.”
But the delusion of separatism is just that: delusion. As the Goldwater Institute’s new children’s book, A Is for the American Dream, reminds us, while there’s plenty of progress to be made, we can achieve that progress only if we remain faithful to the equality principle.
“Juneteenth is the perfect day for Americans, whatever their ancestry, to honor that maxim — to look to it, labor for it, and work toward its attainment,” Sandefur concludes.
Read more in the Washington Examiner.
