As parents continue efforts to push to be included in key decisions on how their children express their gender, California Attorney Gen. Rob Bonta is suing to remove them from the equation, leading to a state Bar complaint that challenges the AG’s use of the legal system against parents.
“As the chief law enforcement officer of the State of California, Attorney General Bonta knew or should have known that his statements were false and misleading,” the complaint states. “Attorney General Bonta’s false and misleading statements have been taken by some as a license to flout the law – ignoring the direction of a duly elected school board, violating parent’s constitutional rights, pitting Californians against one another, disrupting public meetings, and putting children at risk. We ask the state board to delicense Mr. Bonta and to prohibit him from working – or even representing himself – as an attorney in California.”
Will Swaim
| https://californiapolicycenter.org/
The state Bar responded by saying the case was being handled in the courts, but didn’t rule out further examination by the Complaint Review Unit, said CPC President Will Swaim.
“We felt their response was insufficient,” Swaim said.
He added nothing has changed to cause the CPC to reconsider its position about the Attorney General's conduct, or questions about case evidence for evaluation by the state Bar.
Swaim also noted that Bonta’s legal arguments in the Chino Valley suit, still pending in San Bernardino Superior Court, contradict the findings of a federal judge in a similar case in Escondido, Mirabelli et al v. Olson et al.
In that Sept. 14 decision, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California ruled that parental involvement is essential to the healthy maturation of schoolchildren.
Benitez cited nine Supreme Court rulings and a 2022 ruling from the Ninth Circuit federal appellate court, which includes California, in declaring that “parents have a right, grounded in the Constitution, to direct the education, health, and upbringing, and to maintain the well-being of their children.”
The federal judge’s order should make the question very clear, Swaim said.
But aside from case law, there is American custom, habit and tradition, he said.
“I can't think of a world outside of North Korea or Stalinist Russia, where children were thought to be properly the wards of the State from childhood, and parents were a bourgeois intrusion on that,” Swaim said.
A Wisconsin judge earlier this month ruled in favor of notifying parents who want inclusion in gender-related decisions involving their children.
But Bonta has deployed a lawless, reckless, baseless legal theory about who has a right to protect children – parents or school officials, Swaim said, “while promulgating that – in speech and writing – his threatening letter to Chino Valley, and his subsequent lawsuit.”
To carve an exemption around one feature of a child's school behavior, and then tell parents they can’t know about it, represents a very extreme position, Swaim said.
A Rasmussen poll, he added, finds even people who are self-described liberals consider parental notification a legitimate, reasonable policy.
Bonta’s lawsuit asserts that students could suffer a number of adverse effects if the state’s policy isn’t enforced.
The next court date in the Chino Valley case is scheduled for February.