Summary of facts: Officials at a central New York public school district began “socially transitioning” a middle-school girl without her mother’s knowledge or consent. This involved school employees using a masculine name for her daughter and third-person plural pronouns inconsistent with her daughter’s sex. Employees actively concealed this “social transition” from her mother. Her mother discovered the school employees’ actions, withdrew her daughter from the school, and enrolled her in a private school 25 miles from her home. The mother then sued the school district in federal district court for violating her parental rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and her First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The district court dismissed the case, and she has now appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

RFI’s position: Since the founding of America, a fundamental aspect of parental rights has been the ability to guide the moral and spiritual upbringing of one’s children, including beliefs about human nature and teachings from holy texts. And history shows no principled basis to distinguish between executive and legislative intrusions upon fundamental rights, let alone that an infringement of parental rights must “shock the conscience” to be legally recognized. Whatever the test, a government act that usurps parental authority to secretly indoctrinate a child about gender, sexuality, and how God created her is an assault on what the Founders recognized as sacred rights protected by the Constitution that are essential to a free society.

Read the brief here.