Joseph Clement writes for the Federalist about the significance of a recent US Supreme Court ruling.
Parents should be the ones raising their children. While this seems like common sense, public school boards across the country have cut parents out of a deeply vulnerable part of their kids’ lives. “Parental exclusion policies” direct school staff to affirm their students’ gender dysphoria by referring to children by whatever pronouns and names they request and to lie to parents who object.
While many legal challenges have been filed, the Supreme Court recently issued an opinion addressing these policies for the first time. In Mirabelli v. Bonta, a case from the emergency docket, the court recently held that California’s parental exclusion policy likely violates the First and 14th Amendments. This decision, while necessary and important in itself, offers broader insight into the justices’ minds and the future of the court. …
… Thankfully, half of the majority’s decision in Mirabelli relies on the precedent set by Mahmoud. It expressly corrects the lower court’s choice to “brush[] aside Mahmoud v. Taylor as a ‘narrow decision focused on uniquely coercive “curricular requirements.”’” In so doing, Mirabelli signals to lower courts that Mahmoud should be applied broadly; it really is the game-changer that parents were hoping it would be.
This opinion clarifies that the court’s decision last year was not just about extremism in English lessons. Rather, it was about the protection that the First Amendment offers to religious parents when the government tries to replace their beliefs with the state’s preferred ideology.
Two related but distinct groups of parents and teachers brought Mirabelli; one group argued from a religious perspective. They claimed that the free exercise clause protected their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. The other class, however, did not seek out First Amendment protections, but rather argued that the state’s parental exclusion policies violated their right to substantive due process.
