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.
…Parental, free speech and religious rights to do what?
to ignore the privacy rights, free speech rights and religious rights of their child.
Conservatives think of childen as property, so it’s not surprising.
unsurprising, when you realize they get their ideology from an iron age reboot of bronze age legal codes written by… grumpy old pervert men.
Putting children in danger is a very Christ-like thing to do.
God damnit, this timeline sucks greasy orange balls.
I mean, the Bible includes a story about children who get mauled by bears as punishment for making fun of a bald man… So yeah that tracks.
I’m convinced the god of the OT and NT aren’t actually the same. One is vengeful, powerful and directly intervenes in the visible world, the other is merciful, subtle and their defining ability is the judgement of the dead, but they somehow need a blood sacrifice to shield them from the wrath of the first one? Doesn’t line up to be the same, imo.
I’ve got a full head canon here, if anyone cares.
Part of the issue is Yahweh kind of absorbed El, Asherah and Baal into it, so the mishmash of stories make him seem bipolar, even just in the OT.
Oh absolutely, if we’re looking at the actual way Abrahamic mythology formed historically, the whole thing becomes a little clearer… but also, “one true god that has always been and is and will always be” becomes more transparently bullshit.
Go ahead, please
I posit that there are two gods in Christian mythology, neither of which are as omnipotent and omniscient as their followers make them out to be, and neither of which is strictly benevolent.
We have one we could call Creator who fashioned the material world. It made humans, gave them curiosity to explore it, but also withheld the ability to judge good or bad or really form an independent free will so that they would remain subservient.
Then we have another, who I’ll call Judge, who also sought dominate humanity, but had no control over the material world. It disguised itself as another creation and leveraged their curiosity to open the humans’ minds to its concept of justice, revealing that enslavement.
The fruit is just a metaphor for the willingness to entertain and follow the line of thought. Likewise, the shame before their Creator isn’t strictly shame about physical nudity, but acute awareness of their vulnerability.
The Creator, wrathful that his creation was no longer as naive and easily controlled, cursed them with mortality and denied them the leisure they had enjoyed until then, figuratively throwing them out of paradise and locking it away, coercing their obedience by controlling the necessities of life instead.
As humanity multiplied, the Creator grew weaker. At some point, it decided to pour its power into mortal shape to anchor itself in the material world, hoping to re-establish its rule through a mortal avatar.
That didn’t go as planned: the Judge managed to influence that vessel, leading it to adopt (and subsequently teach) a highly controversial and definitely not wrathful-Creator-compliant philosophy that promised a way out of the trap of guilt and shame. It promised a heaven, a return to that paradise.
This eventually put that avatar at odds with the authorities, saw him sentenced to death and all. But while the Creator had obsessed over controlling the mortal world, the Judge had grown in power in the spiritual. When the vessel died, with all the power anchored to him, that power was absorbed by the Judge.
That cry of “My father, why have you abandoned me” was about the Creator’s last-ditch effort to withdraw when it realised the plan.
Anyway, the Judge proceeded to expand its control, using the shame and guilt sowed by the Creator as stick and the promise of salvation as carrot. Because obviously it couldn’t just deliver absolution without attaching strings and threats to compel obedience. Adopting the pretense that it was still the same “one true god” was a useful bait-and-switch to maintain legitimacy. That is, by the way, the same reason the Roman Emperors typically adopted some name of previous Emperors into their list of bynames: They might not actually be descended, but it’s useful to pretend.
The reason I chose to name it Judge is that it mirrors the place in Christian Eschatology that the Creator occupies in the Creation myth: Both lay claim to the title of King, both claim to be the one true god, but their roles are different. One decides what to create, the other what to destroy.
And both are callous, power-hungry egomaniacs, because that’s apparently the type it takes to reach for power in the first place.
Note: I don’t consider this an actual, serious theology to base a religion on. I’m an atheist, I don’t believe either god exists (though a thing doesn’t need to be real for the idea of it to have influence).
I just like thinking about mythology and symbolism. Human stories reflect human nature and human experience.
You might, for example, consider that absorption of power a metaphor for the way a martyr may posthumously rally followers away from one position and to another: it doesn’t have to be an instant transfer so much as a process of shifting influence. You might consider the “influence” of the Judge on the young Jesus simply be the application of critical judgement, which would be the Judge’s initial gift to humanity. You might consider the whole thing a cynical comment on how, for all our enlightenment and progress, we as a species spend so much time destroying instead of building.
But that’s what I tried to do here: Create a story, taken from things others have come up with and combined in a way I hope is both original and interesting.
It’s a chance to bring suffering and perhaps death to the weakest and most vulnerable, so there was little doubt how the Republican Supreme Court would rule.
Pretty sure you can faithfully practice your religion and not know what your kids are up to 24/7.
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.
That is very troubling. I could have understood a First Amendment justification for the school and the staff, although they have to live with restrictions on what they say all the time.
Basing this on the parents’ free exercise clause means that the parents have a religious right to know the details of their children’s lives, which implies they have a right to force their religion on their children.
That is a monstrous claim, as children have a right to their own religion and exercise thereof under the First Amendment, too.
which implies they have a right to force their religion on their children.
Alito has pretty consistently implied that he believes religious freedom gives christians the right to impose their religion on others. Or that other people don’t things that christians disagree with is somehow infringing on their religious freedom.
And Thomas is just a piece of shit who has explicitly said he just wants to make liberals miserable. I don’t even think all the bribes actually influence his decisions, he would’ve been this terrible for free.
I agree, and they have more or less always been that way. If you wanted to shrink the reach of religion, you brought a case about the rights of Muslims or Native Americans. If you wanted to expand it, you brought a case about Catholicism.
I think what changed is that they were more roundabout about it and they tried to find some reasoning that got them where they wanted but not for the reasons they wanted. Sort of like the decision to let the baker discriminate, which was formally decided on the grounds that the State of Colorado discriminated against his religiosity.
Conservatives view children as property. It shouldn’t be that surprising of a ruling; its why they love pedophilia.
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.
That is a monstrous claim, as children have a right to their own religion and exercise thereof under the First Amendment, too.
How does blocking a law that forbids schools from telling parents information about their children violate the child’s first amendment rights?
See, that’s what makes SCOTUS’s argument so insidious. If the right to be notified is religious in nature, then the conflict with the child that doesn’t want to tell the parents also is religious in nature. In particular, the child asserts the freedom to be free from the parents’ religion.
If the decision were based on the free speech rights of the school, or on concern for the well-being of the child, I could have understood. But basing it on the religious rights of the parents is in direct contradiction with the fact that the child clearly doesn’t want their parents to know, which means the child is aware the parents would disapprove for religious reasons, which means the child does not share that particular religious belief.
Did they say the right to be notified was religious in nature? Is this even about a “right to be notified”?
It looks like this simply allows faculty to inform parents of their child’s transgender status, not requiring them to do it.
From the post body:
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.
So, yes, it is a religious issue. And I would have totally bought a framing that says the law infringes on the teachers’ rights or those of staff to notify the parents. I don’t know why they would frame it as the parents’ right. I suppose it’s because they couldn’t find school personnel willing to go to court over this.
I totally get your point, and you are right. But the court went out of its way to frame is as the parents’ right based on exercise of religion, which seems bonkers to me.
I suppose the post body might be wrong, too.
If you can’t trust the parents with this sort of information, and the child fears letting them know, should the child even be in the custody of those parents?
This. My first reaction to this article was “duh why wouldn’t the parent know?” Then I thought about it a little harder. Yea parents should know, and parents should be accepting / supportive. But shoulda coulda woulda doesn’t mean shit in the face of what is. If the kid hasn’t told their parents they likely fear the outcome…
The Supreme Court has been packed with religious nutjobs who don’t give a damn about the mental health of transgender students.
I hope California simply ignores this vile abortion of children’s human and Constitutional rights. What a despicable, inhuman shithole of a country. Americans need to start burying their criminal, pedophilic, predatory government. Literally.
Awkward title.
While my gut says this isnt a great decision, I can’t think of another scenario where teachers/school are restricted in sharing information like this. I know sometimes teachers are designated reporters (have to report), but not aware of anything being restricted.
Is there some legal precedent for what California wanted to do?
If a child tells a teacher they are being abused by a parent it seems likely that there would be rules in place for the teacher to not share that information with the parent.
I’m pretty sure that’s part of being a designated reporter.
However, that’s not a uniquely parent-child policy and it’s really about the parents behavior. I’m not sure I would consider those the same thing.
Some legislation that is slightly similar is that college students need to sign waivers to allow their parents to access their grades. But that’s because in college students are adults and therefore parents don’t have inate rights to that information.
What do you have to do to come out as trans in school? Medical treatment or just ask for new pronouns? If it’s just pronouns, maybe everyone can switch a few times per semester and it won’t really tell the parents anything since almost all the notifications will be meaningless.
That only works for kids with accepting parents that aren’t the issue anyway. If you are cis and have hyper conservative parents, telling the school to change your pronouns to provide a smoke screen for actual trans students is going to cause you a LOT of trouble at home.
“Why are you trying to hide and protect Trans kids!?”
Wow you can clearly see the brigading starting to appear here, undermining constructive discussion.
I’m not seeing the constructive discussion in your post.
When people vaguepost like that, 99% of the time they hold really abhorrent or unpopular opinions about something but are too chickenshit to just say what they feel because they can’t handle trying to defend themselves.
This is really bad and why we need to call out vagueposting because it’s just another tile in the great wall of societal atomization. There is a whole industry out there forming for parents who have been excluded from their children’s lives and empowering the parents into feeling like they’re the victims, despite the objective reality that your children’s behavior is a direct reflection of you’re doing as a parent.
Explain.
Vagueposting is a scourge on the internet. It teaches people to not have actual values and the idea that we’re all just separated niche groups who can communicate to each other via dogwhistles and gestures. It’s anti-social and lacks actual values or principles.
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What’s the problem here?
Schools shouldn’t be allowed to keep important information about students from their parents or legal guardians, let alone required by law.
Unless the kids come from an abusive household where being gay or trans would be considered ‘sinful’ behavior so the kids don’t want to come out to their parents in any way.
And then the schools will narc on them.
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Children are young people, not the parents belongings. So, yes.
Interesting.
Honor killings and similar behavior such a conversion camps put the child at risk. Which means the school actively endangered the child.
Parents generally have the right to know important facts about their children so they can parent well.
Why do children not get any right to privacy at all, like they’re just pets or something? There are some who would be put in danger if the parents found out, and they’re smart enough to know this, otherwise they’d trust their own parents enough to just tell them instead of a third party.
Parents have a right to know what their child trusts them to know. If a kid is withholding information about their identity from their parent, it’s because they fear their parents reaction. Parents do not have a right to know any piece of information at any time, nor should it be the responsibility of the school to report it to them.
Parents have a right to know what their child trusts them to know.
Lol.
Lol go fuck yourself
If your kid talks to someone else about something major and important to their lives BEFORE you, you have probably already fucked up as a parent and probably betrayed trust a number of times already. Or been a raging reactionary about something and you have to deal with the consequences of your own behavior by not being a part of your kid’s personal life.
Either way, if a kid is old enough to talk about mature subjects about themselves and their lives with anyone, they’re also old enough to decide who they feel safe enough to talk to.
This society broadly is riding a really weird line between if we’re protecting our kids to the point of treating them like they have no agency at all. Parents have a knee-jerk reactionary behavior that makes them decide protecting a child also means absolutely neutering their ability to make decisions and feel like humans. Make it make sense.
That’s true but if it results in danger or harm to the child, then the parents forfeit that right.
Yeah, I don’t see the issue here.
Having a law that forbids schools from sharing information about students with their parents is bonkers.
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Absolutely. Parents cannot parent from the dark. It is imperative they’re aware of medical and mental conditions their children are grappling with so proper care can be taken.
