Editors at National Review Online praise a recent US Supreme Court decision.
Sanity reigns again at the Supreme Court. It is a mark of the scarcity of sanity that it took the nation’s highest court — and only six of its nine justices, at that — to say that parents have a right to know if schoolteachers are propagandizing or practicing medicine on their kids in secret, even if those secrets risk driving the children to suicide.
The facts in Mirabelli v. Bonta are shocking, but all too common. California law led schools to adopt a gag rule policy of not informing parents that their child, as early as in fifth grade, was “gender transitioning” in school. Two sets of parents who found out what was happening to their children sued. In one case, parents with a religious objection to transitioning only discovered the school’s subterfuge after their daughter attempted suicide and was hospitalized.
California authorities dissembled when sued, claiming that the school policies had been altered and the lawsuits were moot, but eventually admitted that the issue was state law, and the new policies would similarly deceive parents. So heavy-handed is the state that in 2023, it sued a school district for not complying with the gag rule policy.
The parents challenging the gag rule, relying on Supreme Court doctrines on parental rights that have been settled for a century, won their case on a full evidentiary record in a federal trial court and got a permanent injunction. But sanity was short-lived. The Ninth Circuit stayed the injunction, allowing the policy and its abuse of parental rights to go forward while the litigation dragged on. The Supreme Court, in reinstating the injunction, cited its 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that schools could not mandate the teaching of storybooks with “LGBTQ+-inclusive” messages when parents object.
