U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez issued a permanent injunction against the policies in December, ruling that parents hold a constitutional right to know what is happening with their own children. The Ninth Circuit stayed that injunction, but the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the stay in a 6-3 ruling in March and sent the case back down, where it now awaits a decision on the merits.
Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota), Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), and Jim Banks (R-Indiana) signed a brief arguing that parental authority over children is rooted in centuries of legal tradition and protected by the Constitution. The Thomas More Society, lead counsel for the parents and teachers who brought the suit, was joined in the filings by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Manhattan Institute, Defending Education, and Concerned Women for America, among other organizations.
In its own brief, the Thomas More Society did not mince words: "California's response to the Supreme Court is not nuanced. In doubling down on exactly the same arguments the Supreme Court rejected, California's audacious request is that this Court override the Supreme Court's ruling in this case." The Ninth Circuit has not yet set a date for its ruling.
What a Child Is Owed
Strip away the docket numbers and the twelve briefs, and one plain question is left standing in the hallway: who does a child belong to? Not in the cold, legal sense only, but in the sense that matters when a boy comes home troubled, or a girl stops eating, or a twelve-year-old starts asking questions no twelve-year-old should have to carry alone. Somebody is supposed to be there. Scripture never leaves that in doubt.
God did not hand children to the state, to a school counselor, or to a bureaucracy. He handed them to mothers and fathers. Before there was a Department of Education, there was a father teaching his son the law of the Lord "when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way" (Deuteronomy 6:7). That is not a suggestion. It is the pattern woven into creation itself.
"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6)
Notice what that verse assumes: someone is doing the training, up close, day after day, with full knowledge of the child's heart and struggles. You cannot train up a child you are kept in the dark about. A policy built to conceal is a policy built to break that verse in two. It substitutes a stranger's silence for a parent's care, and calls the silence compassion.
The commandment stands just as plain on the other side: "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee" (Exodus 20:12). Honor runs both directions in a healthy home — a child honors the parent, and the parent, in turn, earns that honor by showing up, by knowing, by refusing to let a son or daughter walk through confusion alone. Take away the parent's knowledge, and you have not protected the child. You have orphaned him inside his own family.
None of this requires contempt for the counselors and teachers caught in these policies. Many of them love the children in their classrooms and believe, sincerely, that secrecy is kindness. But sincerity does not rewrite the order God set at the beginning. The gospel does not traffic in hidden things done for a person's supposed good. Christ dealt in the open, in the light, and He said plainly that the truth — however hard — is what sets a soul free, not what is kept from it.
A courtroom in San Francisco will decide a statute. It cannot decide who a child belongs to. That was settled before the founding of any court, in the heart of the God who "setteth the solitary in families" (Psalm 68:6) and never once asked a stranger to keep a parent in the dark.