You know how America is sort of known globally as the land of frivolous litigation? Well, the lawsuit we’re going to talk about today certainly will not help to dispel that notion!
So, dear readers, are you familiar with the newest development in the concept of parents’ rights? Of course, parents making a big to do about the authority they should be allowed to have over their children isn’t new. Why, sometimes it seems like most parents barely see their children as real human beings deserving of autonomy and respect! But there has been a particularly malicious pivot over the last few years to make kids’ gender identity necessary information that all parents must be privy to, whether their kids want that or not.
Judge Roger Benitez’s ruling in California is just one example of government overreach when it comes to transgender kids’ privacy. In court, Benitez sided with parents who believed that a school refusing to automatically out trans kids to their parents was a violation of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, particularly where freedom of religion is concerned. Even if a child is at serious risk of abuse from bigoted parents, Benitez believes their asking to use different pronouns or a new name at school must be reported to those parents just as quickly as possible!
It’s their right to know, you see.
Well, another parental rights lawsuit has struck the towers, Mr. President. Per KATU News in Portland, a mother is taking her kid’s school to court partly because she believes that the school should forcibly out trans kids to their parents, partly because she believes their curriculum should not include any education about LGBTQ+ people, and partly because she was banned from the premises for harassing other parents!
She sounds lovely.
The nuclear mother in question, Allison Roberts, filed her suit against Portland Public Schools last Wednesday. She alleges many things, each as unhinged as the last. For example, Exhibit A is an on-campus bench painted with the colors of the progress pride flag, which is a typical rainbow flag with colors added to represent trans and nonwhite people, two groups of Americans enduring unending oppression and malice from the federal government every single day.
“The Progress Pride flag is not simply a symbol of equal protection under the law,” Roberts says in her filing. “It incorporates specific political, biological, and medical claims about gender identity. When a public elementary school adopts that symbol permanently across shared space, it is not neutral. It signals institutional alignment with an ideology that extends beyond sexual orientation.”
Allison Roberts doesn’t support the espousal of non-neutral political ideologies at public schools, you see, which is probably why she got into an argument about Donald Trump with another parent at her son’s school.
Now, Roberts claims that her being barred from the school is malicious reprisal from the school system because she questioned their choice of curriculum regarding gender identity, and then… you know… stood outside the school (on a public sidewalk, of course) to distribute protest fliers to anybody willing to listen. Roberts was actually barred from the school after an altercation with another parent while picking her kids up from school.
She alleges that another parent asked her if she had voted for Donald Trump and, when she confirmed that she had, the man began to repeatedly yell, “White people are disgusting!” at the top of his lungs. Children on the playground looked on in horror at the man’s outburst, Roberts says, before she told him that he was a racist, “cussed at him,” and left. She says police came to her house the very next morning to inform her that she had received a one-year trespass order from her son’s school, which would ultimately force her to miss his graduation from elementary school to middle school, an important milestone in any annoying mother’s life.
The trespass order justifies Roberts’ banishment by stating that she engaged in “harmful, unlawful and/or disruptive behavior” at the school, and “[threatened and intimidated] members of the school community.”
Roberts denies all of this, of course, but I have a hard time believing that a trespass order against a parent would be signed by a judge and served by police on short notice without some egregious behavior. Nobody from her son’s school has issued a public statement, as far as I am aware, so we only have Roberts’ side of the story right now… but let me just say it absolutely reeks of bullshit to me.
It’s far too early for significant progress to have taken place in Roberts’ suit, besides the fact that she appears to have double paid her filing fee and then been forced to file a refund request, which is super funny. That said, there are some points I’d like to touch on, the first being a question you might already be asking yourself: Can the school system ban a parent from the premises like this? Turns out, they absolutely can. The threshold is sort of high, because parents shouldn’t be denied access to their kids’ school for no good reason, but in cases where a parent is seriously misbehaving and likely to cause a significant disruption, the school system can bar them from their campus.
Next up: What curriculum is Allison Roberts so worked up about? Well, unsurprisingly, it’s a simple grade school exercise meant to teach kids about the ways in which people are different, whether that’s culturally, spiritually, or in terms of marginalized identities. It’s called an identity flower, and the particular exercise Roberts takes umbrage with appears to be from Glisten, formerly known as GLSEN, an advocacy group working to end discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the American education system.
Unsurprisingly, it is truly harmless. But given that she’s a Trump voter, it isn’t terribly surprising that Roberts is shaking with fury at the idea of her kid learning that sometimes people are different, and that’s okay.
Now, it is possible that Roberts’ suit has some merit on the grounds that educational programs funded by the Department of Education which might cover sensitive topics have to furnish course material to parents and give them an opportunity to withdraw their kid from participating, per the 1978 Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment. We talked about that a few weeks ago when we were discussing the ED’s baseless investigation of Minnesota schools.
The rest of her complaint, as far as I can tell (while not being a legal professional in any capacity, mind you), is hogwash. Absolute, unadulterated rubbish. Balderdash. Twaddle, even. Just a real load of crap. Either way, hopefully she loses and has to pay the school’s legal fees!
