On Monday afternoon, the Supreme Court of the United States did something remarkable: It told the State of California, in no uncertain terms, that parents are not the enemy.

In a 6-3 decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Court lifted a stay on a class-action injunction secured by the Thomas More Society on behalf of California parents, restoring protections against the state’s policy of secretly facilitating the social gender transition of children at school without parental knowledge or consent and, in many cases, through active deception.

Two of the named plaintiff families put a human face on what that secrecy regime actually meant in practice. Both are devout Catholics whose faith shapes their understanding of sex and the human person, and both were systematically cut out of their own children’s lives by the state.

One family had no idea their daughter had been presenting as a boy at school, under a different name, with different pronouns through all of seventh grade, including during parent-teacher meetings where staff said nothing. They learned the truth only when their daughter attempted suicide at the start of eighth grade. Even after her hospitalization, teachers at a new school continued to defy the parents’ explicit instructions.

The second family confronted their daughter’s school principal directly when they suspected the same was happening to their child. The principal’s response was candid and chilling: State law forbade the school from disclosing anything about a child’s gender identity without the child’s consent. Unable to afford private school, those parents had no choice but to transfer their daughter and place her in therapy.

Confronted with this horrifying situation, a majority of the Court concluded that the parents were likely to succeed on two distinct constitutional grounds: the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. 

With regard to the religious-liberty claim, the majority held that California’s unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition represents an even graver intrusion on parental rights than the government conduct the Court struck down last year in Mahmoud v. Taylor. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote separately to address what dissenting Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned: whether substantive due process could still anchor parental rights after the Court struck down Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Her answer was both careful and clarifying. “[T]he doctrine of substantive due process has long embraced a parent’s right to raise her child, which includes the right to participate in significant decisions about her child’s mental health.” 

Also significant and deserving far more attention than it will likely receive in secular media is what the Court implicitly rejected: the increasingly fashionable bureaucratic assumption that parents are a threat to their own children. California’s secrecy regime was built on exactly that premise. It presumed that a child claiming a transgender identity needed to be protected from his or her parents, rather than that those parents needed to be informed and engaged as partners in their child’s care. The Court found no basis for that sweeping presumption. 

As Mark Rienzi, president of Becket, observed, California tried cutting parents out of their children’s lives while forcing teachers to hide the school’s behavior from families. That is not child protection. That is state capture of the parent-child relationship. Becket, which represented the families in Mahmoud, filed an amicus brief in support of the parents in this case. Citing the Court’s 1923 decision in Meyer v. Nebraska, the group sharply stated, “America is not Sparta, and unlike Sparta we do not wrest children away from their parents so they can be taught to live and believe what the State holds to be true.”

For Catholics, this ruling carries a significance beyond the legal technicalities. The Church has always taught that the family is the first and most essential society, that parents hold a primary and irreplaceable role in the education and moral formation of their children, and that this authority derives not from the state but from God. What the Court has now affirmed in constitutional law, the Church has proclaimed in natural law for two millennia. As Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society noted, “California built a wall of secrecy between parents and their own children, and the Supreme Court just tore it down.”

This decision is not the end of the battle. The case returns to the 9th Circuit for full proceedings, and California may not yield quietly. But it is a genuine turning point. The highest court in the land looked at a state’s systematic effort to replace parents with government functionaries in the most intimate decisions of a child’s life and said, “No.”