Jim Minnery: Parents can be parents again, with this latest Supreme Court ruling

By JIM MINNERY | ALASKA FAMILY COUNCIL

Imagine sending your daughter to school one morning—and learning, a year later in a hospital room, that the school had spent every day building her an entirely new identity behind your back.

That is exactly what happened to one California family. Their daughter lived a double life through all of seventh grade: a male name on the roster, opposite-sex pronouns in every classroom, and a school administration that sat across the table at parent-teacher conferences, smiled, and said nothing. At the start of eighth grade, she attempted suicide. In a hospital room, a doctor told her parents what the school had known and concealed for over a year.

Even then, administrators continued withholding information—citing California state law as their cover. Sacramento had built a wall between parents and their own children, brick by deliberate brick, and dared anyone to challenge it.

Last Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States tore that wall down.

The Supreme Court Did Not Mince Words

On March 2,  the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta, vacating the Ninth Circuit’s stay of a class-wide injunction and signaling the protections for parents across California. The Court found that the state’s secrecy policies likely violate both the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The language was plain. California’s policies, the justices wrote, “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.” The Court declared that “parents — not the State — have primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children,’ ” and that this right “includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”

On religious freedom, the Court applied strict scrutiny—the most demanding constitutional test available—and found that secretly facilitating a child’s social transition at school was an even greater intrusion on parental rights than the LGBTQ curriculum the Court had already struck down in Mahmoud v. Taylor last year. California could not meet that standard. It never could.

Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society, the legal team that carried this case, put it plainly:

“California built a wall of secrecy between parents and their own children, and the Supreme Court just tore it down. This groundbreaking ruling will protect parents’ rights to raise their children as they see fit for years to come.”

Why This Matters Beyond California

This is not just a California case. Schools across the country adopted the same playbook including here in Alaska: new names, opposite-sex pronouns, and a policy of silence toward parents. Similar lawsuits are already working through federal courts in states including Massachusetts and Florida, and the Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to take up additional cases.

Alaska is no different. I’ve been contacted personally by a junior high school teacher in Anchorage, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of getting fired, about how she was being asked by a counselor and Principal to hide from the parents how they were “transitioning” a boy into a girl. This teacher needed the job and was not willing to move forward to challenge her school but was absolutely distraught about being forced to lie. At the time, the legal landscape was much more vague.

Now the Supreme Court’s Mirabelli decision puts all school districts on notice. The Court declared, on the record, that parents hold primary constitutional authority over their children’s upbringing and education. That is not a hint. That is a foundation—and it holds whether a school sits in Sacramento, South Anchorage or anywhere else bureaucrats decide that ideology matters more than a mother and a father.

Parents Can Be Parents Again

This ruling restores something California spent years methodically dismantling: the right of parents to know what is happening to their own children.

The ideology that infiltrated these classrooms did not simply offer children a new name. It told them their bodies were mistakes. It recruited them into a secret life, drove a wedge between them and the people who loved them most, and left some of them in hospital rooms before their parents ever knew anything was wrong. That right was stolen by an ideology sold as compassion. The Supreme Court just handed it back.

What This Means for Alaska Families

In a letter Alaska Family Council is now distributing for signatures from faith leaders, we are reminding the Anchorage School District, and ultimately every public school district, that Alaska State and Federal Law require schools to give advance notice to parents and allow them to opt out of any instruction on sexuality that conflicts with parent’s deeply held convictions. Although this has to do with overt instruction in the classroom, so-called secret “transitioning” tactics are obviously directly related and the U.S. Supreme Court just closed that circle.

Mirabelli strengthens the constitutional foundation beneath every state’s efforts—including ours. Alaska Family Council will continue working to ensure that our law reflects what the Supreme Court just affirmed: parents are the primary protectors of their children’s best interests, and no school, no bureaucracy, and no ideology should ever come between them.

Jim Minnery is president of Alaska Family Council.