This is the article that appeared in the November 2024 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release, here.
Parental rights v. transgender rights. Which should prevail? In a specific case involving a public school in a Pittsburgh suburb, a federal judge ruled on September 30 that parental rights should triumph.
A U.S. District Court judge for the Western District of Pennsylvania issued a summary judgment to three mothers who objected to Mount Lebanon School District defending a teacher who was instructing her students on gender ideology; this is not part of the school curricula. These were first-grade students and no attempt was made to notify the parents, seeking their permission in advance.
The lawsuit was filed after a first-grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School, Megan Williams (who has a transgender child), allegedly told her six and seven-year-old students that sometimes “parents are wrong” and doctors “make mistakes” about whether a newborn baby is a boy or a girl.
The suit maintains that the teacher told a boy that he can dress like a girl. The boy then told his mother, saying his teacher told him, “I can wear a dress and have hair like my mom.” When objections were raised, the administration and school board reflexively took the side of the teacher.
After the mother removed her child from Williams’ class, the teacher had the audacity to call her, wanting to know what her problem was. The mother invoked her parental rights. Williams responded, “As long as I am on this Earth, I am going to teach children what I feel they need to know” and hung up.
After the lawsuit was filed on June 8, 2022, LGBTQ advocates rushed to the side of the teacher. They were indignant over the idea that parents should be given the right to have their children “opt out” of these classes. The judge, Joy Flowers Conti, saw things differently.
“The case is about the extent of constitutional rights of parents of young children in a public elementary school to notice and the ability to opt their young children out of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics. A first-grade teacher, without providing notice or opt outs, decided to observe Transgender Awareness Day by reading noncurricular books and presenting noncurricular gender identity topics to her students. During the classroom presentation, the teacher told her students ‘parents make a guess about their children’s—when children are born, parents make a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl. Sometimes parents are wrong.'”
Judge Conti wrote that it was “constitutionally impermissible” for schools to “provide teachers with unbridled discretion to teach about a noncurricular topic—transgender identity—and not to provide notice and opt out rights based on parents’ moral and religious beliefs about transgender instruction, while providing notice and opt out rights for other sensitive secular and religious topics (our italics).”
This case shows, once again, that the public school industry has nothing but contempt for parental rights and religious liberty. Wedded to the extreme LGBTQ agenda, it has become a force for intolerance and indoctrination of the sickest kind, even to the point of exploiting little kids.
If the school district wants to appeal this decision, the Catholic League will file an amicus brief on the side of the plaintiffs.
