California tried to gut a Supreme Court order protecting parents’ right to know when their children identify as transgender at school. A federal appeals court said no.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit denied the state’s request to reinterpret the high court’s ruling more narrowly, handing parents and teachers yet another win in the ongoing case Mirabelli v. Bonta. The decision came roughly two weeks after the Supreme Court temporarily blocked California officials from interfering with school policies that require parental notification, as Fox News Digital reported.
That makes three straight losses for the state, at the district court, at the Supreme Court, and now at the 9th Circuit.
Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office turned to the 9th Circuit seeking “clarification” of the Supreme Court’s March 2 order. The real aim, critics say, was to water it down. The Thomas More Society, the Catholic-based law firm representing the parents and teachers who brought the lawsuit, said the move amounted to a “backdoor to rewrite” the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The panel acknowledged that Bonta’s office raised “important concerns” but ruled the issues belonged before the lower court at this stage. The broader case now returns to Judge Roger Benitez, a George W. Bush appointee who issued the original preliminary injunction the Supreme Court upheld.
Civil rights lawyer Laura Powell called it a failed “attempt to circumvent SCOTUS’s order.” She posted on social media:
“Good like convincing Judge [Roger] Benitez to back down after being vindicated by SCOTUS!”
The high court’s unsigned order left little room for ambiguity. It quoted language that should alarm every bureaucrat who thinks the state knows better than mom and dad:
“The State argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy. But those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”
The ruling came down 6-3, as Breitbart reported, with the majority finding that parents are likely to succeed on free exercise and due process claims. The Court indicated the parents could suffer irreparable harm if the policy stayed in effect during litigation.
National Review noted that the Court vacated the 9th Circuit’s stay of a permanent injunction against California’s school policies as applied to the parent plaintiffs. The justices wrote that “the intrusion on parents’ free exercise rights here, unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition, is greater than the introduction of LGBTQ storybooks we considered sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny in Mahmoud.”
The parents and teachers who filed Mirabelli v. Bonta challenged California policies on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds. They argued the state:
The New York Post connected the ruling to AB 1955, a California law that barred schools from informing parents when children said they wanted to change genders. The case arose after two teachers objected to policies requiring them to keep students’ gender identity changes secret from families.
Peter Breen, Executive Vice President of the Thomas More Society, framed the string of defeats bluntly:
“California has now lost at the district court, lost at the Supreme Court, and been turned away by the Ninth Circuit.”
He went further, striking at the state’s core argument:
“The state has repeatedly tried to paint parents who don’t immediately accept their children’s assertion of a new name and gender as ‘abusive.’ The courts have resoundingly rejected that premise.”
That framing matters. California officials tried to cast concerned parents as threats to their own children. Three levels of the federal judiciary have now disagreed. Courts across the country continue to wrestle with related questions about biological sex, school policy, and parental authority, as seen in a recent Title IX and biological-sex case involving San Jose State volleyball.
The broader case now moves back to Judge Benitez’s courtroom. Fox News Digital reached out to Bonta’s office for comment. The state’s options are narrowing.
The Supreme Court majority wrote that “parents, not the State, have primary authority with respect to the upbringing and education of children.” That is not a suggestion. It is settled constitutional principle, and California keeps losing because it refuses to accept it.
When the government hides a child’s life from the people who love that child most, courts should stop it. Three courts now have.
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