The Mystery of Parental Dissatisfaction

Kathryn Jean Lopez notes another Ninth Circuit ruling in the Culture War today:

…there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children, either independent of their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it. We also hold that parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students.

The subsequent commentary in the Corner covers the matter pretty well. As Andy McCarthy suggests, the court's ruling isn't all that objectionable on the merits. But as a Corner emailer points out, the judges weren't content to issue a narrow ruling. Citizens shouldn't have to parse judicial decisions to get down to their actual significance. If they do, the actual significance is available for future judges to find precedent where none should have been created.

The emailer's third point precisely conveys the ways in which that process of legislation through litigation creates wholly subjective judicial dictation through ostensibly objective decisions that are supposedly even in their application:

... how would the court's decision have differed if the last question asked of the participating kids was "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?"

Supporters of the libertine leftism to which the courts cater might argue that the Constitution establishes different rules for religion and sex. There is no separation of state and libido (and I'm not speaking merely of socialist totalitarians, here). Consider, though, the following seemingly reasonable assertion from the court:

"Schools cannot be expected to accommodate the personal, moral or religious concerns of every parent," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the panel. "Such an obligation would not only contravene the educational mission of the public schools, but also would be impossible to satisfy."

Such reasoning appropriately places sexual questions within the same category as "personal, moral or religious" questions. What transforms Reinhardt's statement from something that conservatives could embrace to something that leads them to ponder migration to redder country is that instances abound in which the concerns of one or a few parents forced accommodation from the rest. Moreover, it is the least representative branch of government that has presumed to set the guidelines for deciding which parents' concerns are not impossible to satisfy — indeed, are obligatory to satisfy.