Parental rights group Moms for Liberty has filed a federal lawsuit against the School District of the Chathams Board of Education for allegedly “pushing secret gender transitions behind closed doors,” the Daily Caller News Foundation first learned.
The lawsuit, filed by the Thomas More Society on behalf of Moms for Liberty in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, partly alleges that the district’s Policy 5145.7 violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause by allowing school counselors to hide a student’s “gender transition” from parents.
“Activist school boards across the country are radically interfering with the moral and religious development of the impressionable and suggestible children in their captive audiences by imposing ‘gender transition’ policies,” the verified complaint alleges. “Under these policies, parents have no right to know of a child’s supposed ‘social transition’ to a gender other than their biological gender, which religiously motivated parents view as an ineradicable divine election, not a child’s personal choice.”
“As alleged more particularly below, by enacting its Policy 5145.7, the District has followed this trend of arrogant usurpation of the constitutionally protected right of parents to guide the religious and moral formation of their children according to their belief in God, His creation of only two biologically determined sexes/genders — male and female — and the eternal destiny of every human soul as affected by conformity to His eternal law,” the verified complaint adds.
School District of the Chathams’ Board of Education did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
“When Thomas More Society prevailed at the Supreme Court, we made a promise: any school board or district that kept hiding a child’s so-called ‘gender transition’ from parents, or that punished kids for refusing to bow down to an ideology they don’t believe, would be held accountable,” Thomas More Society senior counsel Christopher Ferrara told the DCNF in a statement.
The lawsuit also alleges that Policy 5145.7 allows students to be referred to outside LGBTQ advocacy groups without parental notice or consent.
“Parents are the primary educators and caregivers of their children, not school boards, not counselors, and not ideologues pushing secret gender transitions behind closed doors,” Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich said in a statement. “The Chathams Board of Education’s open defiance of the Supreme Court’s clear rulings in Mirabelli and Mahmoud is an assault on the constitutional rights of every family in that district. Moms for Liberty will not stand by while schools hide life-altering decisions from parents or persuade children to affirm an ideology that violates their conscience and faith. We are proud to partner with the Thomas More Society to defend parental rights in New Jersey and across America.”
File Code 5145.7 says in part that “the Commissioner of Education directs school districts to accept a student’s asserted gender identity regardless of parent consent or involvement.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has notably prioritized dismantling gender ideology across the U.S. during his second term.
(DCNF)