Parents’ rights advocates hail SCOTUS ruling against secret gender transitions

By Tate Miller
The Center Square

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Mirabelli v. Olson deciding against California’s law that allowed for gender transitions of school children without parental knowledge has met with commendation from advocacy groups and law firms, with a legal counsel calling the decision one of the “biggest parental rights wins” in a generation.

Chief legal affairs officer at think tank America First Policy Institute Leigh Ann O’Neill told The Center Square that she hopes “to see these policies where they belong – in the waste bin of history.”

“Secrecy policies like the ones used by California schools drive a wedge between parents and their children,” O’Neill said.

“Teachers and administrators are undermining parents’ right to be the primary decision makers for their children,” O’Neill said. “The Supreme Court has signaled its clear understanding of the urgency of this case.”

President of advocacy group the American Principles Project Terry Schilling told The Center Square that “the Supreme Court recognizes what every parent knows in their heart: gender ideology violates the rights of children and their families.”

“Gavin Newsom Democrats waged a war against common sense and parents, and they lost,” Schilling said.

Schilling emphasized that “lawmakers cannot merely rely on the courts to protect families. Parents need lawmakers to step up and pass nationwide bans on the poison of child sex changes and gender ideology running rampant in our education and medical establishment.”

Vice president and legal fellow at education restoration group Defending Education stressed to The Center Square the importance of parental rights as it pertains to the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“The parental right, rooted in biology and recognized for millennia, is the cornerstone of any society,” Perry said. “We sacrifice or neglect that right at our peril.”

“Parental rights are both natural and pre-political,” Perry said. “They predate the Constitution and government itself, and when state agencies appoint themselves the arbiters of the future of our minor children, our society suffers greatly for it.”

Perry stated that “in Mirabelli v. Olson, the Court reinstated a victory for the parents from the trial court which prohibited ‘misleading parents about their children’s gender presentation’ and required schools to follow parents’ instructions regarding the names and pronouns that children use.”

Perry said however that “because this was an emergency docket disposition that related only to one case out of California – the ruling will have limited practical effect.”

“This was a victory for the California parents – but a procedural one, only,” Perry said. “The parents will now return to the lower court and continue to litigate on the policy itself, while its operation is halted for the time being.”

“It is, however, a positive sign of the Court’s desire to wade in to the increasing conflict between parents and schools on gender secrecy policies,” Perry said.

Senior Council at nonprofit law firm Becket Adele Keim called the Supreme Court case “one of the biggest parental rights wins in a generation.”

“The Supreme Court reaffirmed that parents – not the state – have primary authority over their kids’ upbringing and education,” Keim told The Center Square.

“This means that parents have the right not to be shut out of decisions relating to their kids’ mental health, which is what California’s gender transition secrecy policies did here,” Keim said.

“The Supreme Court held that parents don’t forfeit that right when they send their kids to public school,” Keim said.

Keim told The Center Square that “a liberal society like ours recognizes that kids don’t belong to the state,” but to parents.

“A healthy society flourishes when schools and governments work with parents, not against them,” Keim said. “At a minimum, that means not keeping parents in the dark about their kids’ mental health, like California did here.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled “in favor of plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a California law that allowed public schools to conceal a student’s ‘gender transitions’ from their parents,” The Center Square reported.

As Adele Keim told The Center Square, the case – Mirabelli v. Olson – “builds on Becket’s win in Mahmoud v. Taylor last year, where the Court held that parents in Maryland had the right to opt their children out of storybooks that pushed one-sided ideology on gender and sexuality and conflicted with the families’ religious beliefs.”

“These rulings make it clear that American parents don’t forfeit their rights when they send their kids to public school,” Keim said.