Parents and teachers who oppose the state policies sued, claiming their parental, free speech and religious rights were violated.
The Supreme Court on Monday barred California from enforcing state rules that restrict when schools can notify parents about students who come out as transgender and requires teachers to use children’s preferred pronouns.
The court, on a 6-3 vote on ideological lines, allowed a federal judge’s ruling in favor of parents who oppose the policy on religious grounds to go into effect. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had put the judge’s decision on hold pending further litigation.
The court’s ruling focused on the parents’ claim that their rights under the free exercise clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment were violated. The court also said they have valid parental rights claims under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Rights are essentially the mirror image of duties: the right not to be killed corresponds to the duty not to murder; the right to privacy corresponds to the duty not to intrude on people’s privacy; the right to free expression corresponds to the duty not to prevent that expression.
If parents have a right to know about the child’s transgender identity, who has the corresponding duty? The implication of this line of argument is that, at the very least, schools ought to snitch on anything a child does that the parent might want to know for religious reasons, whatever they may be.
If we take the duty as primary, we can flip it and ask what right corresponds to the duty of schools to tell parents about their child’s transgender identity, in case it’s something narrower. Sometimes a duty merely creates the right to expect that a public body behaves in an appropriate way. But that is then not in the least bit a religious matter but a civil one.