Supreme Court turns away Wisconsin parents who say schools are hiding transgender support plans as Alito dissents
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear an appeal from a group of parents who say their Wisconsin school district is hiding transgender support plans involving their children.
Three conservatives said they would have heard the case: Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. While the Supreme Court didn’t say why it declined to hear the case, a lower court had ruled against the parents because, it said, they didn’t have standing to sue since they didn’t demonstrate the policy affected their children.
“I am concerned that some federal courts are succumbing to the temptation” to rely on standing as a way of “avoiding particularly contentious constitutional questions,” Alito wrote.
Parents Protecting Our Children was asking the high court to allow the lawsuit against the district to continue.
The parents claim the school’s policy facilitates “gender identity transitions at school” and keeps the effort “hidden from parents who would disagree that it is in their child’s best interest.”
Eau Claire Area School District officials counter that gender support plans are included in a student’s record and are available for parents to see. The policy, school officials said, is intended “to provide support to students who express concern about their gender identity.”
“The issue in the Wisconsin case is less about the underlying question of parental rights, and more about what plaintiffs have to show before they’re allowed to challenge government actions that may not have happened and may not ever happen,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
“In that respect, it’s a bit ironic that Justice Alito is publicly dissenting from the Court’s denial of review, since he authored the 2013 ruling that makes it harder for plaintiffs to sue in such cases. Then it was because plaintiffs challenging allegedly unlawful governmental surveillance couldn’t prove that they were likely to be surveilled,” Vladeck added.
Similar cases have made their way to the Supreme Court before. The justices in May denied an appeal from a group of parents in suburban Washington who made the same argument. The challenge for the parents groups is being able to demonstrate that they were specifically harmed by the policy.
A federal district court and the Chicago-based 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the school district in the Wisconsin case.
“This lawsuit came as the ink was still drying on Eau Claire’s administrative guidance,” US Circuit Judge Michael Scudder, a Donald Trump nominee, wrote for the appeals court. “Parents Protecting seeks to pull a federal court into a range of complex and often emotional challenges on matters of gender identity, where the right policy recipe is not yet clear and the best answers are sure to come in time – through the experiences of schools, students, and families.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
