West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is leading a coalition of 17 state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to recognize parental rights in a case involving a Maryland school district’s transgender policies.
The attorneys general are intervening in a case involving parents who are challenging an appeals court ruling that they did not have the right to sue a school district over a policy that would allow teachers and administrators to transition children without the parents’ knowledge or consent.
UNIVERSITIES ATTEMPT TO THREAD NEEDLE AMID GROWING PUBLIC PRESSURE AGAINST DEI
“This egregious policy completely sidesteps parents’ rights and severs them from having involvement in their child’s physical, emotional, mental and social well-being,” Morrisey said in a statement Thursday evening. “Any time any organization or institution seeks to hide what they do when our children are in their care, it’s a huge red flag. Why would a school board encourage students to keep secrets from their parents?”
The case against Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Education involves the school district’s “Guidelines for Student Gender Identity” and a provision in it that allows schools to develop a “gender-support plan” for students without the knowledge or consent of the child’s parents.
Parts of the plan can include calling a child by a different name and using pronouns that do not align with the child’s biological sex, as well as allowing the children to use the restrooms and other facilities of the opposite sex but in line with their claimed gender identity.
A 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling found that parents did not have the right or standing to challenge the policy. The three-judge panel found in a 2-1 decision that the parents’ children would have had to start identifying as transgender and have been provided a gender plan for them to have the right to sue.
“According to a majority opinion here, only parents of children that ‘have gender support plans, are transgender or are … struggling with issues of gender identity’ might have standing. But among other things, that approach presents a catch-22,” the group of state attorneys general wrote. “The Policy’s secret nature deprives parents of key information about their children’s lives and deprives them of the information they’d need to sue. And once parents know that their child is exploring his or her gender identity, the parents’ harm — and thus standing to sue — may be gone. Family ties, then, will fall by the wayside.”
The coalition of state attorneys general also said, “The oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by the Court [is] the right of parents to direct the care and custody of their children.”
Circuit Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum, the appointee of former President Donald Trump who wrote the 4th Circuit opinion, said the plaintiffs had a mere “policy disagreement,” adding that “policy disagreements should be addressed to elected policymakers at the ballot box, not to unelected judges in the courthouse.” He was joined by fellow Trump appointee Judge Allison Jones Rushing.
However, Judge Paul V. Niemeyer, the lone dissenter and appointee of former President George H. W. Bush, said the policy and parents’ right to sue has direct due process clause implications, calling the majority opinion an “abdication of judicial duty with respect to a very important constitutional issue that is directly harming and will likely continue to harm the Parents in this case by usurping their constitutionally protected role.”
“The majority reads the Parents’ complaint in this case in an unfairly narrow way and thus denies the Parents the ability to obtain relief, concluding that the Parents have no standing to challenge the Guidelines until they learn that their own children are actually considering gender transition,” Niemeyer continued. “In reaching that conclusion, the majority is, I submit, unnecessarily subjecting the Parents by default to a mandatory policy that pulls the discussion of gender issues from the family circle to the public schools without any avenue of redress by the Parents.”
The state attorneys general filed a brief in support of the parents’ request that the Supreme Court review the case.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“No parent wakes up and wants to co-parent with the government,” Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, whose state is in the 4th Circuit, said in his announcement joining the brief. “Radical school boards across the country have tried to get in between the important conversations of a parent and their child — and enough is enough.”
The attorneys general of Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah also joined the brief.
