NJ Governor Sues Schools To Halt Parental Notification Of Gender Social Transitioning of Their Kids
NJ Parent: “They’re making it like they’re suing the Board of Ed. [But] they’re suing the parents and they’re suing the taxpayers who support the Board of Ed.”
In New Jersey, the battle over secret social transitioning in schools took a sinister turn last week when a judge temporarily blocked three school districts from notifying parents about their children’s gender struggles.
The lawfare leading up to the judge’s ruling has parents in those districts enraged and frustrated. Though they and their families have the most at stake, they are not parties to the case, leaving them without a direct say in the litigation.
In this respect, the Garden State legal battle stands out from other cases we’ve covered here and here. Typically, lawsuits over gender identity guidelines are brought by parents against their school districts. Parents are the plaintiffs, asserting their right to be notified when their children say they want to change genders. Their constitutional rights to direct their children’s upbringing, they argue, outweigh “safety concerns” and “trans rights.”
However, in this new twist to the conflict, the State of New Jersey has sued three of its own school districts for adopting policies that uphold parents’ rights to be notified when their children show signs of gender confusion. Here the State is the plaintiff, seeking to override the school boards’ authority.
While their names won’t appear on the court filings, the parents who elected those school boards to protect their interests have been put on defense. As a parent in one of the school districts told Fox News, “They’re making it like they’re suing the Board of Ed. [But] they’re suing the parents and they’re suing the taxpayers who support the Board of Ed.”
The three Monmouth County, NJ school districts—Marlboro, Middletown, and Manalapan—each adopted their new parental notification policies on June 20, 2023. Although the language of the policies varies, they each require the school to notify parents when their children assert a gender identity change. The State filed its lawsuit to block them the next day.
It’s hard to see the State’s good-faith argument against the school districts’ policies. Their purpose is to make sure parents are involved when their minor children—children as young as five—say they belong to the opposite sex. When you consider that parental notification is required for much less, for example, giving Tylenol or going on field trips, it makes no sense.
But while parents have civil rights, so do their kids, including their trans kids, the State argues. It had to sue the school districts to protect those rights, New Jersey’s Governor Phil Murphy recently explained to host Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation:
NEW JERSEY GOV. PHIL MURPHY: Listen, we took these actions, because it’s the right thing to do to protect these precious young people. … But parents are always involved. … In our administration, they’re always at the table, and they always will be. But let’s be smart about this. Let’s protect the rights of these precious kids. … And I think if we do that, in a spirit of respecting everyone’s rights, protecting the LGBTQIA+ community, we’ll land in a good place.
…
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, one of the attorneys for a school board in Marlboro, one of these districts, said that this blocking of a school counselor or a staff member from telling a parent about this is a violation of a constitutional right for a parent to direct and control the upbringing of their children. Why isn’t that compelling?
GOV. MURPHY: Obviously, parents are the existential reality in the upbringing of any child without question. I don’t deny that for one second. But let’s not violate the … constitutional and civil rights of precious young folks. … Let’s be all in this together as opposed to this … demonizing. And when that happens, invariably, it’s the LGBT community that gets it, particularly trans folks who get behind the eight ball.
That is the State’s argument against the policies: that they discriminate against students on the basis of gender identity. New Jersey Superior Court Judge David Bauman agreed last week when he blocked the school districts from notifying parents while the State’s other legal proceedings against them in the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights are ongoing. The State, for purposes of the preliminary injunction, had shown that the school’s rules discriminated against trans and LGBTQIA+ students. Their rights are protected under New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination, and they outweighed parents’ rights, the court held.
From the court’s ruling:
[I]t is … settled that the right of parental oversight is not immutable; that it should and must yield where the State can demonstrate a compelling governmental interest. At this preliminary juncture, the State has done so: to ensure that a protected class under a state law against discrimination does not suffer either disparate treatment or disparate impact because of policies requiring parental notification where a student requesting a transgender accommodation or expressing transgender identification specifically requests that their parents or guardian not be notified.
…
The State’s action is not targeting parental rights per se, but rather policies promulgated by school boards that the State contends unlawfully subjects a protected class to discrimination in violation of the LAD [New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination]. That is a subtle but critical distinction.
And a convenient one, too. Because reframing the conflict between parents and the State as one over protecting “trans rights” provides the State with the pretext to assert control over the children entrusted to its care—without having to confront their parents and their pesky rights in the courtroom. At least not directly.
According to last week’s ruling, the State doesn’t have to. It can simply sue the local school boards who dare defy it, in the name of protecting the “civil rights of precious young folks.” All the while claiming, as Attorney General Matthew Platkin did last week, that the State has never sought “a ‘ban’ on parental notification.”
And it can do so just at a time when the parents’ movement is gaining momentum in its battle to take those school boards over, which now begs the question, to what end?
Meanwhile, as the litigation plays out, the three school boards hang in limbo. Marc Zitomer, the attorney for the Marlboro school board, said it could “take years” for those proceedings to resolve. Until then, “the school district is now severely constrained in its ability to notify parents about important issues involving their minor children.”
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Comments
They really just want to castrate kids and scramble their brains. Why?
Because they can.
Nailed it.
The Left is basically anti-human.
There are conspiracies about population control/reduction. I don’t believe them, but I think anti-human is apropos.
To have those trannies voting Democrat for 200 years.
Because they’re sick. The same slime that put the pedophile in the white house
Depopulation is the overall goal. Same for the vax.
TY Jane,
I think this is lawfare, plain and simple. It is a work around of actual state government. It is a work around of any checks and balances, because the issue will be tied up in court for a long time. I guess that is the whole point. Clown world,, Those poor children, they will suffer in the long run.
Murphy, like Dick Durbin, like Mayor Jim Kenney of Philly, claims Catholicism as his “religion,” with the latter two having gone through 12 years of Catholic schools. Each one has exchanged their initial beliefs in the Almighty for the Democrat god of power. These three are not at all unusual, quick to abandon the eternal for the temporal and the secular. Lots of Catholic pols have done it (Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Biden, Kaine, the Cuomos, just to name a few others).
How is it that the American RC bishops have been so unsuccessful, spanning decades, in teaching/passing on the faith to those who seek power? (These are the same bishops who, knowing of predator homosexual priests (boys were the targets, not girls), just moved them around their respective dioceses, never confronting the behavior.)
As noted, this issue spans decades. Maybe the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) really isn’t trying to propagate the Catholic faith as many would otherwise want to believe.
Take a look at the USCCB website. But for the life issue the bishops pretty much support a left-wing agenda. Meaning, what traditional Catholic training nominal Catholic pols might have received in their younger years becomes erased.
Translation, if you’re illy-led, you’ll likely wind up in the wrong destination.
Kenney barely graduated from his Jesuit high school. His nickname was “Mr. Summer School” because he failed at least two classes every year. Michael Nutter, his competent and intelligent predecessor in the job, went to the same high school, was an honor student and athlete, and can’t stand Kenney.
Kenney is an odd duck. Raised as a union man in a blue collar neighborhood, he turned on his constituents after his marriage failed and reinvented himself as a progressive wokester living in a swanky downtown condo. The three stooges of Kenney, Soros tool DA Krasner, and incompetent police chief Outlaw, have wrecked all the progress the city made under previous mayors. The city is a crime ridden, lawless hellhole across every neighborhood while Kenney drinks away the hours in downtown bars.
We’re not secretly transitioning your children.Ok, we are transitioning your children, and we’ll sue if you try to stop us.
The continued existence of the Democrat party is the single greatest threat to our Republic.
Evil – pure josef mengelee evil
That’s exactly what it is, and the GOP, if it weren’t cowed by our Communist media (and the kapos at the ADL), would say this. I have read about Mengele’s experiments, and what the ruling Communists are doing in mutilating these kids would not be out of bounds for him.
To the overwhelming majority of Americans who held that the granting of rights for all these perverted practices was no biggie because it didn’t hurt them, this is your tolerance reward. Something awful is going to happen.
The sheer hubris of this man, calling children “precious” while wanting to essentially sterilize them, is breathtaking.
Damn him to h*ll.
It’s truly awful for the NJ families, but they voluntarily choose to live there, so let them enjoy the high taxes and high wokeness.
Keep voting’ Dem!
I don’t understand why anyone with young children would live in CA, MN, OR or NJ given the recent legislation and/or court decisions they have that undermining parental rights.
Murphy did not win his re-election by much in 2021. Had this issue been known then he would have lost. NJ got what it voted on the crime issue as well – car and catalytic converter thieves running wild, with shoplifters not far behind.
Agreed. A few $ million from the RNC and its affiliated groups in ’21 for ads and helping to organize more ground game for his opponent and it’s very possible this unpopular Gov could have been picked off.
We’re gonna need a lot of millstones for these jerks at some point.
‘Let’s not violate the constitutional rights and civil rights of precious young folks’.
What an interesting phrasing. Is Gov Murphy also calling for constitutional carry firearm provisions for the Youth of NJ along with everyone else? Is he also calling for revelation of any/all speech codes, policies, regulations, laws which seek to censor, suppress, chill or punish free speech in NJ?
Nah. He just wants to offer up more children for sacrifice upon the alter of trans ideology by the woke weirdos who largely control public education and keep it secret from the children’s Parents. Any action involving children that includes the phrase ‘don’t tell your Parents’ as an essential part of the activity is automatically suspect and almost certainly not in the children’s best interest.
Murphy is literally sacrificing children to Moloch, while chanting strange words and phrases. It’s inexplicable behavior.
Quote: Any action involving children that includes the phrase ‘don’t tell your Parents’ as an essential part of the activity is automatically suspect and almost certainly not in the children’s best interest.
I would argue that actions should invoke the death penalty on the perpetrator.
The main question is this: No sane person over the age of (?) can suddenly believe that prepubescent children or preteens or minor children should be making permanent and irreversible elective medical decisions without parental consent.
Our leaders and half of our fellow citizens have lost control of their ability to reason. There’s only two possibilities, they are taking powerful, mind altering, psychotropics or possessed by evil spirits.
And when parents pull their kids out in
Masses. Not a few here and there because in most states you still have to pay the government, AND your new school of choice, stay home and home school if you can afford it, pod school
Whatever, but when the masses wake up the government will make a law against it I’m sure
This is not going to end well
We are all Waco now
Maryland court rules that parents can’t opt out of inclusive lessons
A Maryland court ruled this week that parents cannot opt their children out of lessons featuring inclusive LGBTQ+ books on religious grounds, stating that families do not have a “fundamental right” to disrupt public education in the name of their faith.
In the lawsuit, Tamer Mahmoud et. al. v. McKnight et. al., filed in May, three families from Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) sought to reinstate a distract policy that would allow them to remove their children from lessons featuring inclusive books because they “contradict their sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage, human sexuality, and gender,” the decision viewed by The Post explained.
Judge Deborah L. Boardman, however, denied the parents’ request for a preliminary injunction for when school starts on Aug. 28, stating that they failed to establish that their due process right to shape their children’s education in line with their religious practices was a “fundamental right,” the document continued.
https://nypost.com/2023/08/25/maryland-court-rules-that-parents-cant-opt-out-of-inclusivity/
Phil Murphy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NJEA and the AFT. He does as they command.
Nice going electing a Cultural Marxist there People’s Republic of New Jersey
And this bozo calls himself a Catholic.