Parents’ Rights in Childrearing Advance in California

The right of parents to raise as they deem fit their children is being bolstered by the Supreme Court’s ruling against California in a case involving transgender public school students. The Golden State, seemingly in thrall to the militant ideology of transgender activists, had sought to bar schools from notifying parents if their children, say, “engage in gender transitioning at school,” the high court said. In a preliminary ruling the Nine is halting such policies — for now. The parents’ grievances in Mirabelli v. Bonta put a spotlight on how transgender activism has taken root within certain precincts of the public education establishment. Two of the parents in the case, the Nine said, “were not told by their daughter’s school when she began to present as a boy and use a male name and male pronouns during her seventh-grade year.” Nor were these developments disclosed during “parent-teacher meetings,” the ruling said.Two other parents reported that, starting in fifth grade, “their daughter has sometimes identified as a boy,” the ruling said. When the child was in seventh grade, the parents “confronted the school principal about their daughter’s transitioning” because “they believed the school was using a male name and pronouns for their daughter behind their backs.” What kind of justification could educators have for this kind of dissimulation toward parents? California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, frets that “the consequences of compelling the disclosure of confidential information about their gender identity would be irreversible.” This argument cut no ice with a majority on the high court, which held that the Coast’s policies of keeping parents in the dark “substantially interfere with” what the justices call the “right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.” The court’s concern for the religious rights of parents echoes the ruling last year in Mahmoud v. Taylor. That case backed religious parents who objected to children as young as kindergarten-age being given what the court calls “LGBTQ+-inclusive” books. The teaching materials associated with these books included language like “Kate prefers the pronouns they/their/them,” the high court reported, and asked students “what pronouns fit you best?”The California parents, the high court finds, “have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs.” California’s “policies violate those beliefs,” imposing a “burden on religious exercise” that the court back in 1972 in Wisconsin v. Yoder “found unacceptable.” That earlier case held that Amish parents had the right to keep their children out of public schools after eighth grade.In Yoder, the Nine backed the Amish parents’ right to maintain “a church community separate and apart from the world and worldly influence.” One can only imagine what those parents would make of today’s public schools’ encouragement of children selecting their own gender identity and the schools’ withholding this information from parents. In Mirabelli, though, the high court’s liberal justices appear less concerned about such practices.Justice Sonia Sotomayor allows as how she would have denied the parents’ case. Justice Elena Kagan, who is joined in a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, gripes that the majority rushed to act in the dispute, which she deems is “raising novel legal questions and arousing strong views.” That, though, could be seen to give too much credit to California’s position in this dispute, which traverses one of the most fundamental rights of American parents.

Parents’ Rights in Childrearing Advance in California

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