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The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued a landmark ruling that should strike fear into school boards across America. In Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Court held that a California law that prevented schools from disclosing to parents the alleged “gender identity” of their children at school violated parents' free exercise rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution and their substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court found 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 “sincerely held 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 “non-consensual facilitation of a child's gender transition is greater than the LGBTQ storybook indoctrination” that the Court addressed last summer in Mahmoud v. Taylor.. The Court ruled similarly in the Mahmoud case that Montgomery County Public Schools violated the rights of opposing parents. That school district paid $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 understated. Schools across the United States must now seek 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 with opposite-sex pronouns or use the opposite-sex bathroom or locker room, the school must obtain parental consent. Schools can no longer hide or encourage parents to facilitate a student's gender transition and pretend it is legal.
Anyone who has paid attention to what has been happening in America's public schools over the past 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 Policy 8040 states that “[a] 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 families 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 decision in the Mirabelli case to those policies leads to only one conclusion: they are blatantly unconstitutional. School boards that continue to maintain these policies do so at their own risk, which could possibly include school board members and other officials being sued individually and for punitive damages. And to be clear, the risk of litigation is not limited to parents whose children have gone through a social transition at school. Rather, as the Court made clear, “parents who oppose the challenged policies or seek religious exemptions” have standing to sue “because they are objects of the challenged policy.” That means 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 gives strong rights to parents to require schools to seek parental consent before their own child is referred to with opposite-sex pronouns, a different name, or uses an opposite-sex bathroom or locker room. And it doesn't take much of a leap to argue that parents' free exercise and substantive due process rights in directing the upbringing and education of their children can also be violated when someone else's child starts using the opposite sex's communal locker rooms or bathrooms.
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Consider a boy who is allowed to use the girls' locker room as part of his social transition at school. It is quite possible that the parents of girls who wear such costumes 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 this happens, the girls' parents are denied the ability to take any actions they deem necessary to direct the upbringing and education of their children. That's exactly what's happening in Loudoun County.
Unfortunately, even with the clear ruling from the United States Supreme Court, some of America's woke school boards and administrators are likely to continue violating the Constitution. They need to be taken to court and forced to stop and then pay a lot of money for their intransigence. The SCOTUS ruling reaffirms what the Constitution establishes and legal precedent has affirmed: parents have the constitutional right to raise their children. Parents have the legal authority and power to do exactly this, and they should use it.
