In Chatham, New Jersey, a school district decided a guidance counselor, not a parent, gets to determine whether a child's gender transition is any of that parent's business. Two mothers found out their elementary school daughters were living a second identity at school that their own parents were never told about. Now they are suing, and the case is a preview of a fight that is about to spread statewide.

For decades, federal bureaucrats have told faith-based charities the same thing: your money is welcome, your services are welcome, but keep your faith out of it or keep your hand out of the till. Last week, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel finally said what conservatives have argued for a generation. That policy was never legal in the first place.

There is something almost quaint about watching a young journalist become a minor sensation for stating facts that a community college economics professor would have taught for free in 1975. Emma Camp, a University of Virginia graduate now writing for the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression section after cutting her teeth at Reason, has built a following this year by doing exactly that. 

This column is not a verdict on Lindsay Clancy. That is not our job, and it was never going to be settled by a Tuesday deadline for a column deadline. What is worth examining, closely and without the squeamishness that has come to define public conversation about crime and mental illness, is why an American jury in the year 2026 finds it so difficult to look at the strangulation of three children and render a clean moral judgment either way. That difficulty did not begin in a Plymouth County jury room. It began in the classroom, the therapist's office, and the op-ed page, decades before these particular twelve citizens were ever summoned.