SCOTUS Could Review WA State Law Removing Parental Rights

Liberty Counsel filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to review International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson, a case where a group of parents have challenged a Washington state law that allows runaway minors to access irreversibly mutilating gender surgeries without parental notification or consent.

Under amendments to the Washington Family Reconciliation Act, licensed youth shelters may facilitate secret gender interventions on runaway minors and withhold this information from parents whereby removing them from any gender-based medical decisions for their children.

According to the parents’ petition, who are represented by Schaerr Jaffe, LLP and the America First Legal Foundation, Washington’s law puts parents who wish to raise their child according to the child’s biological sex in the same category as abusive and neglectful parents.  The law voids any requirement to notify parents of their child’s location and even can delay their reunification up to 90 days.  Four of the petitioning parents have gender confused children and reportedly had to “alter their current parenting” out of “daily fear” their children will run away to a shelter where gender interventions could be secretly facilitated.  Liberty Counsel’s brief asks the High Court to take up the case.

The parents first sued in November 2023, shortly after the law’s amendments took effect. In July 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the parents’ constitutional claims for a lack of standing, holding that the parents’ harms were either “self-inflicted” or speculative because no irreversible medical interventions had yet occurred.  The Ninth Circuit also declined to rehear the case en banc with the full circuit bench.  However, a dissenting judge warned that Washington’s statutory scheme threatens to “obliterate” parental rights if allowed to stand.

The question presented to SCOTUS asks: “Whether parents have standing to challenge a law or policy that deliberately displaces their decision-making role as to ‘gender transitions’ of their children, and in so doing creates present and likely future impediments to their ability to parent their children as they deem best for them.”

In the amicus brief, Liberty Counsel argues that the Ninth District erred in dismissing the case because the parents do have standing.  The parents have standing because:

The First Amendment allows pre-enforcement challenges where parents do not have to wait until actual harm has occurred to file a challenge.

Since the Washington law allows minors to threaten to run away, escape parents’ supervision, and get state-sponsored irreversible gender interventions, the law creates a “substantial risk” of injury to parents that can be heard in court.

The Ninth Circuit ignored the First Amendment right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children by overlooking the parents’ explicit religious objections to gender interventions.

Excluding fit parents and concealing irreversible child gender interventions are not only “improper and irresponsible,” they are also “impermissible under the First Amendment,” concluded Liberty Counsel.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The Supreme Court has the chance once again to uphold the rights of parents to direct the upbringing and welfare of their children.  The First Amendment simply does not allow a state to take physical custody of children from fit parents and usher them into irreversible and mutilating medical procedures without parental knowledge and consent.  Parents have a First Amendment right to guide their children consistent with the dictates of their faith.”

 

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel