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Earlier this month, when the Supreme Court preliminarily ruled on the issue of outing LGBTQ-identifying students to parents in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the headlines were straightforward: The justices sided with parents in yet another conflict over LGBTQ+ rights and public schools. The truth is much more complicated. Invoking our nation’s constitutional history and tradition, the court again dove into a growing conflict about what parents’ rights mean. In doing so, it interpreted those rights in a far more absolute way than courts have in the past. And in blocking a school district policy against the forced outing of LGBTQ+ students, the court suggests that it has again fundamentally misunderstood our nation’s history and tradition, and children themselves will be the ones to pay the price.

Last year, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court sided with parents who claimed their freedom of religion was violated when their elementary school children were read books showing gay marriage and transgender children in a positive light.  In Mirabelli, several religious parents hoped to have similar success in challenging a California school district policy against forced outing.

After Mahmoud, it wasn’t a surprise that the court saw the school district’s policy as a burden on religious liberty. But the court in Mirabelli went further, holding that the forced-outing law violated the due process rights of parents without religious objections.

The ruling signals the court’s willingness to recognize more absolute parental rights, which, the justices claim, are rooted in our nation’s deeply rooted history and tradition. The six justices in the Mirabelli majority stressed that these rights were especially broad with respect to medical decisions. Because “gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health,” the court explained, policies against forced outing violated “parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

Mirabelli wasn’t decided in a political vacuum. Since 2021, Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have run on parental rights. States have passed laws limiting classroom discussion of race, sex, and sexuality. Last year, Texas voters passed a state constitutional amendment recognizing sweeping parental rights, and more like it seem to be on tap.

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The reason for this push isn’t hard to find: The idea of parental rights has bipartisan appeal, not least because it is a frightening time to be a parent in America. War, the reemergence of measles, anxieties about affordability and gun violence—all of this makes American parents all too aware of the limits of their ability to protect their kids. It’s easy for this reason to paint cases like Mirabelli as a clash between out-of-touch bureaucrats and schools.

Our nation’s tradition tells a different story. It’s true that our common law and constitutional precedents have long protected parents’ relationship with their children—and in our view, with good reason. But our tradition never treated parents’ rights as absolute, including in cases involving medical care (if social transitioning should even be likened to medical care in the first place). Instead, from the very beginning, the law compartmentalized requirements of parental involvement in some contexts and inconsistently applied those requirements in others.

The guiding principle was not an unyielding requirement of parental involvement, as the court suggests in Mirabelli, but rather paramount concern for children’s well-being. As Supreme Justice Joseph Story wrote in 1816, the law gave mature minors more liberty to make decisions or contracts “for their benefit.” A blanket requirement of parental consent for medical treatment only emerged in the mid-20th century, and then as a matter of convention.

While assuming that forced outing promotes children’s health and safety, the court didn’t consider evidence or develop a record on this complicated issue. California, for example, pointed to evidence that forced outing damages children’s mental health, strips them of privacy, and exposes them to a serious risk of domestic violence in the home. In past decisions, the court has been more careful to ensure that parents’ interests are not advanced at their children’s expense. In Prince v. Massachusetts, the court upheld a Massachusetts law restricting children’s labor over her guardian’s objection on the ground that the state had a right to safeguard “youth’s well being.” The court declared that “the state has a wide range of power for limiting parental freedom and authority in things affecting the child’s welfare; and that this includes, to some extent, matters of conscience and religious conviction.” Similarly, in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the court premised its decision to allow Amish parents to remove older children from school on expert testimony showing that the decision caused no harm “to the physical or mental health of the child.”

Instead of our deeply rooted constitutional history and tradition, Mirabelli is part of a much more recent history, defined by conservative social movements since the 1970s. Anxious about the secularization of schools, the legalization of abortion, and the spread of sex education curricula, a new generation of advocates advanced a vision of parental-rights absolutism. Safeguarding parental authority, in this view, was the rule regardless of whether that exercise of authority benefited kids. These arguments have been particularly successful for conservatives arguing against LGBTQ+ rights. Groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom identified parental rights as an effective way to fight back against advances in those rights. Rather than appearing to oppose civil rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, conservatives could claim to champion the civil rights of parents and kids they thought were victimized by gender ideology.

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But this push for parental rights doesn’t extend to all parents. States have banned access to medical treatments for transgender minors, for instance, even if their parents consent. The Supreme Court just last term blessed such schemes. Conservative lawmakers have also stopped schools from teaching topics deemed to be woke regardless of what some parents want their children to learn. And the question of children’s well-being has often been pushed aside.

Disconnecting parental rights from children’s well-being in this way is dangerous. Indeed, the Texas Supreme Court is considering whether parental rights protect caregivers who deprive a child of food, force them to sit against a wall for hours, beat them with a belt and a wooden spoon, and force them to kneel for extended periods on grains of rice. The vehicle for this claim is the very parental rights amendment that Texas voters passed in 2025.

Americans may support parental rights, but as the court’s recent decisions suggest, they don’t agree about how far those rights should go. It will fall to other parents to say that those who have cast aside the question of children’s well-being speak neither for our nation’s traditions nor for children themselves.

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