Attorney General Knudsen leads 23-state coalition to protect parents’ rights from woke school boards

HELENA – Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen led a 23-state coalition in support of a parent who was stripped of his longstanding fundamental right to direct his daughter’s upbringing when school officials in Delaware withheld information on his child’s gender identity decision from him.

The amicus brief was filed Monday in the case of Heaps v. Delaware Valley Regional High School Board of Education, in support of Christian Heaps, a father who filed a lawsuit to overturn a school board policy that allows school officials to withhold a child’s gender identity from their parents. The brief asks the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the U.S. District Court’s decision and allow parents – not school boards – to direct the upbringing of their children.

“The district’s policy upends centuries of natural and constitutional law. The policy gives ultimate decision-making authority to children and displaces parents of their longstanding, primary role in ensuring their child’s safety and well-being,” Attorney General Knudsen wrote in the brief. “In doing so, the district grants itself control over managing the child’s gender confusion or dysphoria – a role it has neither the qualifications, rights, nor emotional interest in serving.”

Heaps’ daughter is diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder, high-functioning autism, and anxiety. She also saw a therapist to address her gender confusion. Heaps and her doctors put together a carefully tailored healthcare plan to address her “underlying trauma and psychiatric comorbidities.” However, the school secretly promoted his daughters “social transitioning,” as allowed by school board policy, actively undermining Heaps efforts at home to help her heal.

In the brief, Knudsen notes that the district court’s decision violates parental rights protected by the due process clause. Time and time again, the U.S. Supreme Court has grounded the common-law right of parents to direct the care and custody of their minor children in the “liberty” protected the Fourteenth Amendment.

The law makes a correct and basic assumption about children; they do not have the capability to make life’s complicated decisions like adults do and that is why they can’t vote or enlist in the military without their parents’ approval. Additionally, no medical organization recommends subjecting children to social transition without the knowledge of their parents because of the severe and often irreversible effects of such transition.

“The right of parents to direct the care and custody of their children is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by the Supreme Court. But the right preexists the constitution itself and is an intrinsic human right,” the brief states.

Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and the Arizona Legislature also joined the brief.

Click here to read the brief.