U.S. Supreme Court Protects Parental Rights and Children from the State

On March 2, the United States Supreme Court issued one of the most significant parental rights rulings in years. In a 6-3 decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Court struck down California’s secret gender transition policies in public schools. The ruling held that these policies likely violate parents’ constitutional rights under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Until this decision, California required its public schools to conceal a child’s so-called “gender transition” from the child’s own parents. Schools were directed to facilitate gender transitioning during school hours without parental knowledge or consent, and teachers were compelled to use a student’s “preferred” names and pronouns – even when parents explicitly instructed the school otherwise.

This policy was an egregious violation of parents’ rights – one of the worst I’ve ever heard of. Essentially, the State decided that it knew better than parents about something touching upon the most intimate aspects of their child’s life.

Such policies have a devastating, real-world human cost, as was made clear in the High Court case. One family, identified in the case as John and Jane Poe, had religious objections to gender transitioning. However, their daughter began presenting herself as a boy at school during seventh grade.

In parent-teacher meetings, no one informed the Poes. Their daughter attempted suicide and was hospitalized. Only then did a doctor reveal that she had gender dysphoria and had been living as a boy at school. Even after this tragedy, however, school administrators continued to withhold information about the student’s gender identification, citing California state law.

In other words: a child nearly died, and still the state of California insisted on keeping her parents in the dark.

A Sweeping Affirmation of Parental Authority

However, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, this injustice will come to an end. In the words of one of the Thomas More Society attorneys who brought the case, Peter Breen, “California built a wall of secrecy between parents and their own children, and the Supreme Court just tore it down.”

The Court’s 6-3 ruling was sweeping in its affirmation of fundamental parental rights. It held that California’s policies “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

Drawing on long-established precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that parents – not the State – hold primary authority over “the upbringing and education of children,” and that this authority includes the right not to be “shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”

Critically, the Court found that the intrusion on parents’ free exercise rights in this case was even greater than what it had already struck down in last year’s landmark Mahmoud v. Taylor decision.

In Mahmoud, the Court ruled 6-3 that parents have a religious right to opt their children out of LGBT-themed lessons in public schools. If the mere introduction of LGBTQ storybooks was sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny, the Court reasoned, how much more so the secret facilitation of a child’s gender “transition”?

‘A Watershed Moment for Parental Rights’

Parental rights advocates were jubilant in the wake of the decision.

Peter Breen, Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation at the Thomas More Society, which brought the case, declared: “No more can bureaucrats secretly facilitate a child’s gender transition while shutting out parents.” His colleague Paul Jonna called it “a watershed moment for parental rights in America,” adding that the ruling “will dismantle secret gender transition policies across the country.”

Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed an amicus brief in the case, observed that California had tried “cutting parents out of their children’s lives while forcing teachers to hide the school’s behavior from families.” That, he said, “is not child protection. That is State capture of the parent-child relationship.”

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that the decision was also a victory for teachers who had been forced into the role of deceiving the families they serve. “Teachers do their best work when aligned with families,” he wrote, “not forced to participate in secrecy regimes that invite suspicion.”

Gender ideology activists, for their part, responded with alarm, and with language that revealed just how deeply the movement has come to depend on keeping parents in the dark.

Tony Hoang, Executive Director of Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ+ organization, called the decision “deeply disturbing,” objecting that the Court had “upended California’s student privacy protections.”

Gaylynn Burroughs of the National Women’s Law Center claimed that the Court “prioritized religious exemptions over children’s success and well-being and trampled on the rights and futures of transgender students.” The ACLU of Southern California argued that a “culture of outing harms everyone” and that “LGBTQ+ students deserve to decide on their own terms if, when, and how to come out.”

Notice the framing. Parents being informed about their own child’s psychological distress is now called “outing.” A mother and father learning that their daughter has been presenting as a boy at school is treated as a violation of the child’s “privacy” – as if a twelve-year-old has the right to keep her parents in ignorance about a profound mental health crisis.

And the right of parents to guide their children’s upbringing, a right recognized in law for over a century, is now dismissed as a mere “religious exemption” imposed on children.

This language is not accidental. It reflects the core logic of gender ideology: that children belong to themselves (or to the State), and that the family is an obstacle to be circumvented. It is precisely this logic that the U.S. Supreme Court has now rejected.

The Family: A Society in Its Own Original Right

It is deeply encouraging to see the U.S. Supreme Court defending the rights of the family so vigorously. Such decisions will have long-term, positive ramifications for the health of families and the rights of parents and will place due limits on the power of the State to interfere in the life of families.

Catholic teaching has always understood that the family is not merely a subdivision of the State, nor a convenient arrangement for the care of children. The family is, in the words of Pope St. John Paul II, “a society in its own original right.”

The Church has defended this truth against every ideology that has sought to undermine it. Vladimir Lenin understood all too well the strategic importance of separating children from their parents when he declared: “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” This was not idle rhetoric. It was a program. Under communist regimes, the State systematically displaced the family as the primary educator and moral authority in the lives of children. Parents were reduced to functionaries serving the collective, and children became instruments of the State.

Pope Pius XI saw this clearly. In his 1937 encyclical Divini redemptoris, the Church’s most comprehensive condemnation of atheistic communism, he identified the assault on the family as central to the communist project:

Communism is particularly characterized by the rejection of any link that binds woman to the family and the home… The care of home and children then devolves upon the collectivity. Finally, the right of education is denied to parents, for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community, in whose name and by whose mandate alone parents may exercise this right (no. 11).

The ideology has changed, but the strategy has not. What communism pursued through direct State seizure, today’s gender ideologues pursue through institutional capture: school policies that bypass parents, curricula that undermine the moral formation families provide, and secrecy regimes that treat the parent-child bond as an obstacle to be circumvented. The common thread across every generation of ideologues – whether Marxist, sexual revolutionary, or gender theorist – is the conviction that children must be separated from the influence of their families in order to be remade in the image of the ideology.

The Church has stood against this trend in every era, defending the fundamental freedom of parents and the family against the encroachments of the State. In Familiaris consortio, his 1981 apostolic exhortation on the Christian family, Pope St. John Paul II applied the principle of subsidiarity directly to the relationship between the family and the State:

The family and society have complementary functions in defending and fostering the good of each and every human being. But society – more specifically the State – must recognize that ‘the family is a society in its own original right’ and so society is under a grave obligation in its relations with the family to adhere to the principle of subsidiarity. By virtue of this principle, the State cannot and must not take away from families the functions that they can just as well perform on their own or in free associations; instead, it must positively favor and encourage as far as possible responsible initiative by families (no. 45).

Here, Pope St. John Paul II is elucidating a fundamental principle of natural law: the family is prior to the State. The right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is not a privilege granted by civil authority but a natural right that civil authority is bound to respect and protect.

Pope Francis reaffirmed this principle in Amoris laetitia:

The overall education of children is a most serious duty and at the same time a primary right of parents. This is not just a task or a burden, but an essential and inalienable right that parents are called to defend and of which no one may claim to deprive them. The State offers educational programs in a subsidiary way, supporting the parents in their indeclinable role… Schools do not replace parents, but complement them (no. 84).

What California did was precisely what these teachings warn against. The State arrogated to itself decisions that belong, by natural right, to parents. It went further still: it actively concealed from parents information essential to their children’s well-being, and it compelled teachers to participate in this deception.

A Call to Vigilance and Gratitude

We should receive this ruling with deep gratitude, albeit without complacency.

This ruling addresses the specific context of California’s policies. However, the broader cultural struggle against gender ideology’s encroachment on parental authority, religious freedom, and freedom of conscience continues in courtrooms, legislatures, school boards, and the public square across the globe.

As we have seen in recent weeks in Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere, the forces that would separate children from their parents and silence those who speak the truth about the human person are relentless.

Pope St. John Paul II, in Familiaris consortio, issued a call that is more urgent now than ever:

The family has the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love, and this is a living reflection of and a real sharing in God’s love for humanity and the love of Christ the Lord for the Church His bride (no. 17).

Guarding love means guarding the truth about the human person – and it means insisting, in season and out, that parents have the God-given right and duty to be present at every stage of their children’s formation.

Let us pray for the parents, teachers, and legal advocates who have fought so courageously to defend these fundamental rights. And let us resolve to continue this fight – in our own families, in our parishes, and in the public square – until the natural right of parents to direct the education and formation of their children is recognized and protected everywhere.