My children, now in kindergarten and third grade, are finally old enough to be good company in restaurants. There’s no tripping of waiters, very rarely a spilled lemonade. The restlessness they used to exhibit in public has been replaced by an almost scholarly interest in tic-tac-toe and, miraculously, the food itself.

When this change happened, we lived in Iowa, where we had plenty of affordable, kid-friendly restaurants to choose from. This was a hard-earned milestone for my wife and me. After so many failed outings when the kids were younger—a diaper blowout in a bathroom the size of a closet, $12 macaroni left untouched for being the “wrong” color cheese—dinner out had suddenly become a treat, a chance to feed hungry bellies without doing dishes. After the meal, we always stacked our plates and wiped the floor beneath the table to foster goodwill on behalf of all parents. We would ask for a box, and the bill. 

Each time, we faced the same question: “Two checks?”

When people ask why we left Iowa, there’s no simple answer. No single event was the tipping point. Rather, we began to feel increasingly unwelcome, squeezed out. What had been a blue state in the presidential elections for more than two decades (save for 2004, by a razor-thin margin) went deep red in a relatively quick period of time.

From my family’s experience, one of the hallmarks of conservative lawmaking is its tendency to remove rights rather than expand them. During our six years in Iowa, funding was stripped from public schools and diverted to........

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