Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, left, and Clarence Thomas observe the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, Washington, January 20, 2025. (Chip Somodevilla/Pool Photo via AP).
When the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to examine a Colorado case regarding parental rights to “direct the care, custody, and control of their children,” three conservative justices agreed but raised concerns over claims that public schools were endorsing or facilitating a minor’s gender transition “without parental knowledge.”
In the case of Jonathan Lee, et al. v. Poudre School District R-1, two sets of parents and two minor children petitioned the high court in July, asking if “school districts may ignore the presumption that fit parents act in the best interests of their children” by assuming that role themselves.
Justice Samuel Alito, backed by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, encouraged lower courts to address a “particularly contentious constitutional questio[n]” on parental rights. This was included in a brief statement attached to SCOTUS’ Tuesday orders list, although Alito and his colleagues eventually agreed not to review this specific 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals case at present.
Justice Alito, after writing the majority opinion supporting parents who wanted their children exempt from “LGBTQ+-inclusive” book reading in Montgomery County, Maryland public schools, noted that the Lee petitioners did not achieve a writ of certiorari as they did not “challenge the ground for the ruling below.”
The 10th Circuit had found the parents had not “explained how policies that assume the district is more informed than parents, or that discourage disclosure, directly resulted in district staff” behaving in various ways, such as:
• recruit students to attend GSA [Gender and Sexuality Alliance] meetings (including by misleading one student to coax her attendance),
• present dubious information to students about being transgender and about suicide,
• award prizes to students if they identify as transgender at the meeting,
• offer the staffs’ personal contact information to students so they could talk any time, and
• tell students that they didn’t have to tell their parents about what happened at the meeting, and that it might be unsafe to talk with their parents about gender-identity issues.
Alito, not moved to act at this time, nonetheless said he was “concerned,” both about the issues and how “some” federal courts have been “tempt[ed]” not to address “whether a school district violates parents’ fundamental rights ‘when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process.'”
“Petitioners tell us that nearly 6,000 public schools have policies — as respondent allegedly does — that purposefully interfere with parents’ access to critical information about their children’s gender-identity choices and school personnel’s involvement in and influence on those choices,” the justice wrote. “The troubling — and tragic — allegations in this case underscore the ‘great and growing national importance’ of the question that these parent petitioners present.”
The rejected case was brought by America First Legal, a law firm co-founded by Trump White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
