On Friday, May 23, 2025, Brian Heywood filed 8 Initiatives to the Legislature. While this will give him until January 2026 to collect and submit the 400,000 signatures for each of these Initiatives, it will also give the legislature the ability to pass and later repeal these initiatives without any of them ever going before a vote of the people. In this article, we will review why a Comprehensive Family Rights Initiative to the People is better than a bunch of poorly written bandaid Initiatives to the Legislature.
Before we review the problems with these Initiatives, we first need to understand why ANY Initiatives to the legislature are a bad idea. If there is one thing we should have learned from the past two years is that we need to go directly to a vote of the People if we are to protect the rights of parents and children. The Parents Rights Initiative to the 2024 legislature was a huge political mistake because it allowed those opposed to Parents Rights the opportunity to pretend to be in favor of Parents Rights in the 2024 election. If instead, the Parents Rights Initiative were taken directly to the voters, we could have made it a major election issue.
The reason a single comprehensive Initiative is better than a bunch of bandaid Initiatives is that, if we are going to go through the effort of gathering 400,000 signatures, we need to provide an Initiative that actually solves the underlying erosion of parents rights over the past 8 years by the state legislature. Solving this problem requires repealing and replacing not just one of two laws but several laws that act in combination to severely harm the parent child relationship.
Problems with the 8 Heywood Initiatives to the Legislature
The first Initiative to the legislature filed by Heywood was called Fairness in Womens Sports. It was withdrawn later on Friday due to spelling errors but will likely be resubmitted next week. It only addresses boys in girls sports and does not address boys in girls bathrooms or locker rooms or any of the other 3211 Trans Drug Cult policies. Nor does it address the need to comply with Title IX and the federal court order in Tennessee v Cardona and the loss of billions in federal funding for the failure to comply with Title IX.
The second Heywood Initiative to the Legislature relieves parents of the duty to pay for Gender Transition drugs and other medical treatments that they did not authorize. But it still allows children to be hooked on drugs without their parents consent.
The third Initiative repeals House Bill 1296 and restores the Parents Rights Initiative but does not provide the full text of the law being repealed or the law being restored. The fourth Initiative is essentially the same as it also repeals House Bill 1296 and restores the section of the Parents Rights Initiative that requires parental notice of their students medical records.
Both the third and fourth Initiatives are band-aid solutions that do not address many serious problems including but not limited to:
#1 Repealing SB 5722 (2018) which prohibits child counseling and requires gender confused kids to be given toxic Trans Drugs instead of counseling.
#2 Repealing Policy 3211 (2019) which requires schools and teachers to lie to students about being able to change from a boy to a girl, lie to parents about their children & allows Boys in Girls Sports & Privates Spaces.
#3 Repealing RCW 28A.150.250 which violated Article IX, Section 1 of the Washington State Constitution by allowing OSPI to not fully fund any public schools if their school board fails to comply with anti-parent state policies.
#4 Amending the Mature Minor Doctrine age from 13 to 17 to bring it more closely in line with the latest research on brain development.
#5 Repealing SB 5395 (2020) which requires Sex Ed for Kinders.
#6 Repealing HB 2331 (2024) which requires schools to buy & display age-inappropriate sex books.
#7 Restoring essential parents rights including not only that parents have the right to be told the truth about what is happening to their child when their child is at school but also that parents have the right to be involved in any educational or medical decisions affecting their child and parents have the right to opt their child out of any program the parent finds offensive or harmful to their child and parents have the right to the assumption of being a fit and caring parent until proven otherwise in a court of law.
#8 Adding essential student rights including the right to be told the truth, the right to privacy, the right to counseling, the right to fair sports, the right to a good education and most important the right to parental guidance.
#9 Clarifying the right of ALL STUDENTS to be free from racial discrimination & requiring compliance with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as ordered by US Supreme Court in Students v Harvard in June 2023 .
The fifth and sixth Heywood Initiatives to the legislature provide for school choice scholarships. But they do it in a way that likely violates several sections of the Washington state constitution. The way to achieve school choice that complies with the Washington state constitution is to do it through the election of pro-school choice candidates to your local school board – not by imposing one more unfunded mandate from Olympia.
The seventh and eighth Initiatives to the Legislature limit the growth of property taxes to 0.5% and cut the state property tax by 50%. Sadly, these are also written in a way that likely violates several sections of the Washington state constitution.
The 2026 Family Rights Initiative to the People - A Better Path to Restoring and Protecting the Rights of Parents and Children
In response to the disaster of sending the Parents Rights Initiative to the legislature in 2024, I have written a comprehensive Family Rights Initiative to the People which we can and should pass in 2026 that actually addresses the major policies harming parents and children by including:
#1 Restoring the Washington Parents Rights Initiative.
#2 Clarifying the right of girls not just to their own sports leagues but also to their own bathrooms and locker rooms.
#3 Amending the Mature Minor Doctrine to raise the age from 13 to 17.
#4 Clarifying the meaning of education related sections of the Washington State Constitution including clarifying that “ample” funding includes the right of all students to at least national average class sizes (which would require hiring at least 7000 additional classroom teachers and building 7000 additional classrooms for these teachers), limiting the duty of local parents to provide no more than 10% of school operating costs and school construction costs and the right of students to attend schools that meet Safe Drinking Water requirements and all Building Code requirements.
#5 Giving the legislature 10 years to clear the school construction backlog estimated to be over $40 billion by spending at least $4 billion per year on school construction until the backlog has been cleared.
#5 Adding the right of retired persons over age 62 the right to be exempt from state and local property taxes for the first $400,000 of their primary residence in order to protect them and their family from being driven out of their family homes by being unable to pay rising property taxes while living on a fixed income.
#6 Restoring local control of public schools by repealing laws which are detrimental to the local school control rights of parents and children including 2025 House Bill 1296, 2024 House Bill 2331, 2023 Senate Bill 5599, 2018 Senate Bill 5722, 2020 Senate Bill 5395 and 2019 Policy 3211 (including RCW 28A.600.477, RCW 28A.642.080, RCW 28A.300.286, RCW 28A.345.130, RCW 71.34.530 and RCW 28A.150.250.
#7 Funding the above rights by repealing all tax preferences except those approved by the voters through Initiatives (these tax breaks violate numerous sections of the Washington State Constitution including Article 2, Section 28 and Article 7, Section 1) thereby generating at least $30 billion per year in recovered state revenue.
#8 Amending the “protected classes” provisions of Washington state laws to clarify that “protected classes” that go beyond the protected classes recognized by federal laws, shall only be protected to the degree that it does not violate federal laws such as Title IX, Title VI and FERPA.
Passing the Family Rights Initiative despite significant opposition
It is likely that the Washington Education Association will spend a million dollars or more opposing the Family Rights Initiative. It is also likely that the legacy media will provide millions of dollars in misleading editorials opposing the Family Rights Initiative. This is why we need to build a series of local Community News websites this year and next to provide parents with more accurate information on the benefits of the Family Rights Initiative. The good news is that family rights issues, including providing girls with fair sports opportunities, are supported by nearly 80% of the voters. The other good news is that the federal Department of Justice Taskforce should have their investigation of the crimes of Reykdal and Ferguson completed by the summer of 2026 which can also be used to promote the Family Rights Initiative which addresses many of these same issues. Feel free to email me back with any questions or suggestions.
Regards,