I am encouraged by a couple of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions handed down in our noticeably more pro-family, pro-parent legal culture, newly-created by the Trump Administration. These decisions are important because a Supreme Court decision enshrines a precedent that may last decades or generations.
Before I address those two decisions, I would be remiss not to briefly note another recent, enormously important Supreme Court decision. This third decision directly addresses the nationwide injunctions that have been arbitrarily and partisanly entered against the Trump Administration by Leftist federal district court judges who are trying to dictate national policy. The Supreme Court has now held that a given ruling by a district court judge will be limited—as the Constitution and our Separation of Powers require—to only the parties before the court in that specific case. Not the whole nation. More about this later.
The first of the two decisions I address today involves parental rights, allowing parents to opt their children out of the cesspool of transgenderism in public schools. The second involves requiring porn sites to simply use reasonable age verification measures to screen out minors.
The parental rights case was brought by parents hailing from diverse religious backgrounds, including Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox who opposed the effort of a Maryland school their children attend to add storybooks with gender messaging into its elementary school reading lessons. Specifically, the school introduced a variety of “LGBTQ+-inclusive” texts into the public-school curriculum, approved for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, which have story lines focused on sexuality and gender.
It appears that school administrators did not even notify families in advance when the materials would be used even though they had first indicated they would provide an opt out for parents who objected. However, less than a year after the Board introduced the books, it rescinded the parental opt out policy. Among other things, the Board said that it “could not accommodate the growing number of opt out requests without causing significant disruptions to the classroom environment.”
The case is Mahmoud v. Taylor, and the Supreme Court held that this action of the school “burdens the religious exercise of parents.” The Court further stated that “a government cannot condition the benefit of free public education on parents’ acceptance of such instruction.” The author of the opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, reasoned that reading such books puts a young student in the awkward position of having to believe both that “it would be seriously harmful to deny a gender transition and that transitioning is a highly positive experience.”
No dice, the Court made clear. Parents do not have an obligation to provide limitless deference to school administrators whose view of appropriate moral and educational formation may be antithetical to that of the child’s loving and nurturing parents who—as the first and last authority over their children’s development—possess a compelling government interest in shaping their child as they see fit.
The second case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, requires, as noted above, porn sites to use “reasonable age verification methods” to screen out minors. Unsurprisingly, this Texas state law was challenged on the grounds that it infringed upon the First Amendment rights of adult Texans because, supposedly, requiring adults who were accessing porn sites to provide identification information over the internet caused “privacy and security risks.”
In response, Justice Clarence Thomas observed that Texas requires age verification to buy lottery tickets, get a tattoo or obtain a handgun license. Neither obscenity nor the internet are different. “No person—adult or child—has a First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to minors without first submitting proof of age,” he wrote.
What we are seeing in these two decisions is adherence to our constitutional system of co-federalism and the 10th Amendment guarantee of state sovereignty.
Our U.S. Constitution, and every state one as well, puts the determination of issues of this kind in the hands of the states and their state legislators. Texas, in the porn case, voted 164-1 to require this age verification to access porn sites in that state. Perhaps New York and California will choose to allow every single one of their residents with a pulse and a smartphone unrestricted access to pornography. Texas, and 21 other states, have said “no.”
As President Trump returns the education and protection of minors to parents and families, I applaud the Court’s rulings to restore our Republic to its constitutional framework.
Shreveport attorney, Royal Alexander, worked in D.C. in the U.S. House of Representatives for nearly 8 years for two different Members of Congress from Louisiana.