U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez issued a permanent injunction against a policy that prevents parents from learning when their child chooses to switch their gender. Under the injunction, officials cannot enforce the policy.
The judge wrote in the ruling that California’s “desire to protect vulnerable children from harassment and discrimination is laudable, the parental exclusion policies create a trifecta of harm: they harm the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse.”
“They harm the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children, and by substantially burdening many parents’ First Amendment right to train their children in their sincerely held religious beliefs,” Benitez explained. “And finally, they harm teachers who are compelled to violate the sincerely held beliefs and the parent’s rights by forcing them to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students.”
The judge also noted that State Defendants “completely ignore the fact that parents of students possess a free exercise right to direct a child’s religious teaching.”
“California’s education policymakers may be experts on primary and secondary education but they would not receive top grades as students of Constitutional Law,” the ruling added.
According to the Thomas More Society, the firm representing the Christian teachers behind the lawsuit, California’s Parental Exclusion Policies allow children to “engage in a social transition to the opposite gender at school—forcing all teachers to use opposite-sex pronouns and a new name—and teachers were required to conceal that gender transition from the child’s parents absent the child’s affirmative consent.” With the new injunction, however, these policies are blocked.
