WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States in its ongoing litigation against the Eau Claire Area School District (ECASD) in Wisconsin.
ECASD has an explicit policy of hiding the gender transition of a child in the school district from that child’s parents. Over 1,000 school districts around the country, covering nearly 11 million students, have similar policies. However, the federal courts are ignoring their responsibility to resolve challenges to these policies by saying parents who are objecting have not been injured because their child has not yet been subject to a secret gender transition by government bureaucrats.
AFL represents the organization Parents Protecting Our Children, which comprises parents in the ECASD school district subject to this policy. Before AFL could even litigate the merits, the district court and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case because–in their view–the parents were not injured. This is not consistent with the law on “standing” and results in an egregiously wrong situation where parents cannot challenge policies until their children have already been harmed.
AFL is asking the Supreme Court to take the case to ensure that when a school district adopts an explicit policy to take away parental decision-making authority over a major health-related decision while also concealing it from parents, parents can obtain recourse through the courts to affirm fundamental parental rights
There have been approximately 30 cases with similar facts to this one, and the courts are almost uniformly finding that parents who have children subjected to these policies are not “injured” and cannot maintain a claim. This is a failure of the federal judiciary to protect parental rights. However, the Supreme Court called parental rights “perhaps the oldest fundamental liberty interest recognized by this Court.” It should act to protect this fundamental liberty interest and allow parents to exercise the responsibility and obligation of caring for their own children.
Read the Petition here.
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