Opinion

ROOKE: Maine Follows Blueprint To Legalize New Form Of Child Trafficking

OPINION
Protesters rally against Christynne Wood, a transgender woman who was criticized for using the female locker room at the YMCA, in Santee, a suburban city in San Diego County California, January 21, 2023. (Photo by SANDY HUFFAKER / AFP) (Photo by SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP via Getty Images)

(Photo by SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP via Getty Images)

Mary Rooke Commentary and Analysis Writer
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After reading through Maine’s new legislation — “An Act to Safeguard Gender-affirming Health Care” — which effectively makes Maine a “sanctuary state” for minors seeking sex change treatment, I had one simple question: If this becomes law, could someone out of state, say from a groomer organization like the Trevor Project, lure a minor and traffic the child to Maine to get castrated?

As if to confirm the worst nightmares of conservative parents everywhere, lawyers told me unequivocally: yes.

Two family litigators, independent of each other, reviewed the language of the bill (LD1735). Proponents say the law would simply protect transgender youth from “bigoted” restrictions on sex changes in red states.

However, the two attorneys concluded that adults could, in theory, traffic and deliver confused teens to Maine to receive life-altering medical treatments without parental consent.

Additionally, parents living outside Maine would have no legal standing to stop the state from transitioning their children and no recourse for bringing their children home, according to Maine state Rep. Katrina Smith.

Smith told the Daily Caller that Sheriff’s offices are dreading what this means for them when parents attempt to bring their children home. “Law enforcement cannot enforce any out-of-state order that gets sent to them. I talked to Sheriffs about it. They were horrified. They do not want to deal with this at all. That they would have something brought to their office and basically have to ignore it and not work on a warrant or anything that is seeking a child back from another state,” Smith said.

New York licensed family lawyer Alexander Lonstein told the Daily Caller that the most alarming part of LD1735 is that it strips parental rights away, not just from Maine residents, but from parents who do not live in the state and therefore are not under the state’s jurisdiction. (ROOKE: The Left’s Transgender Hysteria Is Harming People In Ways We Never Could’ve Imagined)

“It forces jurisdiction upon Maine Courts and requires the Court to make judgments on non-Maine residents regarding an issue that demands Congressional Action,” Lonstein said. “The way this law is written is so blatantly unconstitutional on its face that it is offensive to me as an attorney that a duly elected legislator would even suggest something like this. This undermines the fundamental bedrock principle of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution.”

“This is political lawfare at the state level, and it is disgusting,” he continued. “States do not have the extra-judicial authority to effectively grant sovereignty over non-residents because of their stance on an issue that is hotly debated. We need to ask ourselves as a nation what is considered a true emergency?”

“This is insanity if you ask me,” Lonstein added.

Another glaring issue with the bill is that it redefines what Maine authorities consider an emergency abusive situation to include parents who do not provide “gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.” The term “gender-affirming care” is activist doublespeak to obfuscate treatment that has permanent negative effects on children, such as cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and surgeries that remove healthy sex organs.

Under the new law, if parents disagree with giving children any of these irreversible treatments as a remedy for their mental health crisis, Maine will consider them as “abusive” as parents who beat their child bloody every night.

Smith told the Daily Caller that transgender activists don’t want to hear the evidence about these barbaric “treatments” that often leave children sterilized, scarred and with life-altering complications because their purpose is to push the subversive ideology no matter the cost. (ROOKE: If It’s Really A ‘Right Wing Conspiracy Theory,’ Why Do Democrats Keep Proving It’s Real?)

Attorney Joel Thornton, who is not a lawyer in Maine but advises Courage Is A Habit, the organization fighting LD1735, said on a federal level, the bill is unconstitutional.

“[Rather than list what is unconstitutional,] it would be easier to state what is constitutionally appropriate in this law,” Thornton told the Daily Caller in a statement. He added that the language of the bill strips legal rights from out-of-state parents by defining “an ‘abandoned’ child in a manner that defies logic.”

Alvin Lui, president of Courage Is A Habit, told the Daily Caller that Maine’s legislators feel emboldened to overstep their authority after seeing California successfully pass SB-107, making it the first state to become a so-called “sanctuary” for “transgender youth.” Lui said that Maine is following the “California blueprint” by passing bills that attack parental rights in small increments, making it hard for parents to fight back before it is too late.

“LD 1735 is a Transgender Trafficking Bill which would permit the state of Maine to receive minors from other states seeking transgender treatments, such as breast binding, penis tucking, irreversible puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or mutilation surgeries. The bill allows the state to take these minors from their parents and make them wards of the state, with state-funded programs covering the cost of their treatment,” Courage Is A Habit’s website stated.

After speaking with Lui, Smith, Lonstein and Thornton about LD1735, it seems undeniable that if the bill becomes law, Americans could see it used to enable evil adults seeking to prey on other people’s vulnerable children, as we did in Virginia when Michele Blair gave a tragic testimony about the abuse her granddaughter experienced at the hands of such predators.

Blair told the Virginia House of Delegates that she adopted her granddaughter Sage after she was sent to six different foster homes once her father died. Sage was experiencing mental health issues that only got worse after enrolling in their local public high school, according to her grandmother’s testimony.

At Sage’s request, the school began transitioning her using male pronouns and a new name, Draco, without her grandmother knowing. The night her grandmother found a bathroom pass with the name Draco instead of Sage, the nightmare really began. A third party lured Sage away from her home in Virginia to Maryland and Washington D.C., where she was locked in a room, drugged and raped for days by countless men, according to the grandmother’s testimony.

Maryland authorities told Blair to come pick Sage up, but when she got to Maryland, it wasn’t as simple as walking into a building and walking out with her granddaughter. Maryland forced the grandmother to attend a court hearing where Sage wasn’t physically present, Blair testified. She said the court brought Sage into the preceding through a Zoom call. Her grandmother yelled out: “I love you, Sage!” Sage responded: “I love you, Nana.” (RELATED: ‘Sold Kids Out’: Democrats Vote In Support Of Schools Keeping Gender Transition Secret From Parents)

That was when the state’s lawyer reprimanded her and said: “He is a boy, not a girl. His name is Draco,” according to the grandmother’s testimony. The judge allowed the grandmother to take her back to Virginia with the condition that she be entered into a psychiatric facility that would affirm her male identity. Blair said her granddaughter was pressured by counselors at the facility to get a double mastectomy but that at this point, Sage became aware she wasn’t a boy and refused the irreversible treatment.

She asked her grandmother to buy her girls’ clothes and hide them in her car to wear during visitation, according to Blair, who added that after a year in the facility, a lawyer was able to fight the court on their behalf, and Sage was able to finally come home to her grandmother.

Sage’s nightmare illustrates that we don’t need to hypothesize that state laws “protecting” gender-confused children can actually be used by activists to harm them — it already happens.

The experts who spoke to the Caller all agree that the ambiguous language in LD1735 enables a situation where a 12-year-old-girl can be picked up from her home in a state like Florida by a third party, driven across several states to Maine and presented to the Maine court system without parental approval.

If that wasn’t shocking enough, once passed, LD1735 will require the state’s court system to ignore any attempts by authorities to bring that child back to their state of residency and are now required to see Maine as the only proper jurisdiction to decide on the case, according to Lonstein and Thornton.

In the hypothetical case involving the pre-teen girl, this means that even if her parents successfully get their state to request to extradite their daughter to Florida, Maine authorities are required to ignore the lawful order, the lawyers argued. Although the Court can never take custody of the child, only jurisdiction over the case, Smith told the Daily Caller the child would be put into Maine’s foster care system while the State decides if her parents are abusive for not providing “gender-affirming” treatments.

Smith said it is shocking that this bill would imply parents who do not provide these sex change treatments for their children are considered abusive when her fellow legislators are fully aware of how unsafe Maine’s foster care system is for vulnerable children.

Maine’s childcare system reported a record 32 children died in state custody in 2021 and an additional 48 children from 2022-2023.

“Our state foster system is in complete shambles,” Smith said. “It’s not like foster care would be a good place for these children to go. A shocking number of children have died in state custody.”

She added that progressive activists see Maine as a “cheap date” where they don’t have to spend very much money in order to pass bills targeted at vulnerable families. “You can spend a million dollars here and get this legislation passed,” Smith said. “It would cost twice as much anywhere else. We are a progressive activist’s cheap date.”

Over the last several years, the Maine legislature has lowered the requirement for parental consent to perform medical treatment for children, given the authority to school counselors and social workers to transition children without parents’ knowledge and now wants to extend the power grab to include having jurisdiction over children who aren’t even official Maine residents.

State Senators are set to decide whether to pass this bill out of committee for a full floor vote on Jan. 25. If there was ever a time parents should rally together to protect children, it’s now and against bills like LD1735.