Parental Rights Rescinded by Schools (and Judges)
Brent E. Zepke, Esq.
As I lived through the progression of being a child, and student from K-12, I never questioned who was responsible for my life, including my education: of course, it was my parents.
During my somewhat “lengthy,” (which is not the word my in-laws used), college experience, I realized that a subject conspicuous by its absence was: how to be a parent.
I applied my management courses to my family, particularly to the first rule of management: do not separate the right to manage something from the duty to be accountable for it.
For parents, this means that since under the law parents are accountable for their children until they reach 18, parents have the right to manage them.
How then to resolve some schools acting as if they have a superior right to you to manage your children?
A Pennsylvania Court
Judge Joy Flowers Conti (appointed by President George W. Bush) of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, on September 30, 2024, agreed that the right to manage may not be separated from being accountable for it, by ruling that “A teacher instructing first-graders and reading books to show that their parents’ beliefs about their children’s gender identity may be wrong, directly repudiates parental authority.”
Teacher Megan Williams read aloud to six-and-seven-year-old students’ books that discussed gender transitioning. She played a video in class called “Jacob’s New Dress,” and explained to her students that sometimes “parents are wrong” and parents and doctors “make mistakes” when they bring a child home from the hospital.
When the school district refused to stop Williams, Carmilla Tatel and other mothers of first-grade students in the Mt. Lebanon School District in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, brought a case against the district, its school board, and first-grade teacher Megan Williams.
Judge Conti, continuing her statement in favor of parental rights added, “Williams’s conduct struck at the heart of Plaintiffs’ own families and their relationship with their own children. The books [she]read and Williams’s instruction to her first-grade students taught that gender is determined by the child – not in accordance with the Parent’s beliefs by God or biological reality.
“Williams’s conduct showed intolerance and disrespect for the religious or moral beliefs and authority of the parents. A reasonable jury could only find that conduct without compelling governmental interest being shown, in the elementary school, violated the parents’ fundamental Constitutional rights to control the upbringing of their young children.”
The constructional right is in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution that provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
If Congress cannot, then legally neither can a school district or any of its employees.
Judge Conti also ruled that Mt. Lebanon School District violated the parents’ constitutional rights by refusing to give families the right to opt their children out of such lessons.
“Plaintiffs are not trying to control every aspect of their children’s education – only noncurricular teaching to their young children about a sensitive topic. The parents only seek relief related to their children and recognize other parents may choose not to opt their children out of instruction about sensitive topics, like transgender issues.”
Judge Conti’s case closely mirrors a case pending in Maryland.
A Maryland Court
In Montgomery County, Maryland, where many of the D.C. bureaucrats live, in the fall of 2022, the Montgomery County School Board (MCSB) announced it would use “Pride Storybooks,” which are a collection of around 20 books for pre-K through eighth-grade classrooms. The Pride collection promotes Pride parades, gender-transitioning, and pronoun preferences to students ranging in age from three to 14.
That is not a typo: it was three.
Pride Puppy, a story of a “queer family” that attends a pride parade, directs three-to-four-year-olds to find images from a word list that includes “drag queen.”
Older kids will be offered such books as Intersection Allies: We Make Room for All, which offers brazenly ideological definitions for “sex,” “gender,” and “transgender” and asks the students readers which pronouns “fit them best.”
The training materials accompanying the collection grievously undermine the parent-child relationship when it comes to a child’s understanding of human sexuality. If a student asks what it means to be transgender, for example, teachers can explain, “When we’re born, people make a guess about our gender and label us ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ based on our body parts. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong.”
Parents from traditional faiths, such as Islam, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, believing their religious views conflicted with the Pride Collection, brought a lawsuit seeking an injunction to prevent the implementation of the Pride Collection.
Federal Judge Deborah Boardman, appointed by President Biden, for the District of Maryland, on August 24, 2023, denied the request for an injunction to prevent the graphic and dogmatic LGBTQ inclusive books being forced on very young children even when their parents object.
The parents appealed Judge Boardman’s ruling to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the Fourth Circuit, in Mahmoud et al v. McKnight et al, on May 15, 2024, Judges George Steven Agee, and Deandrea Benjamin, appointed by Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden, respectively, joined to uphold Judge Boardman’s denial of an injunction.
Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum, Jr., appointed by President Trump, dissented, and sided with parental rights.
The MCSB, which had originally provided parents with an opt-out option, abruptly and without explanation, removed that right and announced last month that it would not allow students to opt out of gender and sexuality curricula, which “inclusive books” include such titles as Pride Puppy, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, and Prince and Knight, all of which expose children in pre-K through grade 5 to intersexuality, homosexuality, and drag queens.
The parents have indicated they will appeal to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, remember when you vote, that presidents appoint federal judges.
Santa Barbara Current’s Endorsement List (Nov 5, 2024 Election)
The most important move for parents is to organize a counter-movement that ensures parental influence and/or control of school boards. Children are no longer safe from political indoctrination by school boards, teachers, school administrators and teachers' unions. Make no mistake, the Pride movement is a political organization bent on recruitment, as are all political movements. If you want to protect your children or you grandchildren, become activists and become school board members. To kill a snake you must first cut off its head.
Who would have ever thought that our schools would have gotten to the stage that they are but I guess the old adage "he who rocks the cradle rules the world" is true. Thank you, Brent, for the update on the various court rulings. Good comments by both Montecito93108 and Derek on ways to counter this insidious movement to corrupt our kids and distroy the family unit. I also very much agree that the teacher's unions, like all government unions, should be totally abolished.