Parents, not bureaucrats, raise America’s children and the Supreme Court agrees

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Ainsley Earhardt discusses the Supreme Court's decision to halt California's policy regarding parent notification on student gender identity changes with Thomas More Society executive vice president Peter Breen.

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The United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) issued a landmark ruling that should strike fear into woke school boards across America. In Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Court held that a California law preventing schools from disclosing to parents their child’s claimed "gender identity" at school violated parents’ free exercise rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment and their substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court determined that California’s policy of socially transitioning children to a different gender at school without parental consent likely violates the free exercise rights of those who have "sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs." The Court went on to note that this "unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition is greater than the indoctrination of LGBTQ story books" that the Court addressed last summer in Mahmoud v. Taylor. The Court similarly found in Mahmoud that Montgomery County Public Schools violated the rights of objecting parents. That school district paid out $1.5 million to settle the case.
SCOTUS also made clear that California’s policy requiring schools to keep a student’s "gender identity" secret from parents likely violated their well-established "rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children" and that the denial of these rights "constitutes irreparable harm."
The importance of this decision for parents cannot be overstated. Schools across America must now request parental consent before facilitating a child’s social transition to a different sex. In other words, if a student wants to be addressed at school by pronouns of the opposite sex or use the bathroom or locker room of the opposite sex, the school must get parental consent. Schools can no longer hide or abet the facilitation of a student’s gender transition from parents and pretend it is lawful.
Anyone who has been paying attention to what has been going on in America’s public schools over the last five years knows that California is not the only place where K-12 school districts have been actively hiding a student’s social transition from parents. For example, in Virginia, Loudoun County Public Schools’ Regulation 8040 states that "[a] student’s gender identity or transgender status should not be shared without the student’s consent." The district’s teacher training documents state that "privacy and confidentiality are critical for transgender students who have family that do not support or affirm their gender identity," and that when students "do not want their parents to know about their gender identity [] schools should address this on a case-by-case basis."
Applying the Supreme Court’s holding in Mirabelli to those policies leads to only one conclusion — they are blatantly unconstitutional. School boards that continue to maintain these policies will do so at their own peril, which arguably could include school board members and other officials being sued in their individual capacity and for punitive damages. And to be clear, the risk of litigation is not limited to parents whose children have been socially transitioned at school. Rather, as the Court made clear, "parents who object to the challenged policies or seek religious exemptions" have standing to sue "because they are objects of the challenged policy." That means that any parent whose school district has a policy like Loudoun’s can sue, either individually or as part of a class action, for deprivation of their free exercise and substantive due process rights.
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The Mirabelli decision provides robust rights for parents to demand that schools seek parental consent before their own child is referred to by opposite-sex pronouns, a different name, or uses a bathroom or locker room of the opposite sex. And, it doesn’t require a huge leap to argue that parents’ free exercise and substantive due process rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children can also be violated when someone else’s child begins using locker rooms or common restrooms of the opposite sex.
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Consider a boy who is allowed to use a girls’ locker room as part of his social transition at school. Parents of the girls using that locker room may very well have religious, philosophical, or safety objections to their daughters changing with members of the opposite sex. Unless the school informs parents that their daughters will be exposed to a male student in their locker room before it happens, the girls’ parents are denied the ability to take action they deem necessary to direct the upbringing and education of their children. That is exactly what happens in Loudoun County.
Unfortunately, even with the United States Supreme Court’s clear ruling, some of America’s woke school boards and administrators will likely continue violating the Constitution. They need to be hauled into court and forced to stop and then pay serious money for their intransigence. SCOTUS’s ruling re-affirms what the Constitution states and legal precedent has affirmed: parents have a Constitutional right to parent their children. Parents have the legal authority and power to do exactly this — and they should use it.
Ian Prior is Senior Counsel at America First Legal and the author of Parents of the World Unite. He previously served as Deputy Director of Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice.