Are Parental Rights Making a Comeback — Not if California Leadership Can Stop It

Judge Benitez’s order restoring parental rights, free speech, and religious conscience is a long-overdue return to sanity — and California’s Democratic leadership is already trying to stop it.

On December 22, 2025, a federal judge in California did something that would have seemed almost unthinkable just a few years ago: he reminded the state that the Constitution still exists.

In Mirabelli v. Olson, the court reviewed California’s school secrecy and compelled-speech policies, as enforced through the state’s PRISM training program (Professional Responsibilities, Instruction, and Student Matters) and related guidance — practices that systematically excluded parents from their children’s education and medical decision-making and forced teachers to comply with ideological mandates that conflict with their religious beliefs, moral convictions, and free-speech rights.

Judge Roger Benitez framed the dispute around constitutional principles long recognized and deeply rooted in American history: the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and medical care of their children; the protection of that right through the Fourteenth Amendment’s substantive due process guarantees and the First Amendment’s protections of religious freedom; and the right of teachers to speak truthfully and live according to conscience. The court held that each of these rights was violated by California’s parental-exclusion and compelled-speech regime and granted a permanent injunction barring enforcement of those policies.

He then ordered a blunt constitutional statement to be printed prominently in PRISM training materials and any state-created instruction about gender-related “rights” in schools:

“Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed… Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform… These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, regulations, or policies to the contrary.”

This was not commentary. It was the Constitution reasserting itself in a state that has spent the last five years behaving as though constitutional limits were optional.

How California Lost Its Constitutional Compass

California’s unraveling of parental authority guaranteed by the Constitution did not happen overnight. It began with SB 277 in 2015, which eliminated religious and personal belief exemptions for school vaccinations, and deepened with SB 276 in 2019, which sharply curtailed medical exemptions by placing them under heightened state control. What followed during COVID accelerated that collapse at a pace few could have imagined.

By 2020–2021, the state had moved beyond public-health regulation into a governing posture that directly confronted two foundational pillars of a free society: the right of parents to direct their children’s upbringing and medical care, and the freedom of conscience. That confrontation unfolded across COVID policy and gender-identity policy — different in subject, identical in governing impulse — each reinforcing state dominance over parents’ constitutional rights.

COVID Authoritarianism and the Assault on Parental Authority

Beginning in March 2020 and intensifying with the COVID vaccine rollout in 2021, California’s pandemic response increasingly displaced parents as primary decision-makers for their own children.

SB 866 (2022) made the direction unmistakable. The bill proposed allowing children 12 and older to consent to COVID-related medical care — including vaccination — without parental consent or notification. Though it ultimately failed after enormous public backlash, its introduction revealed how far lawmakers were willing to go in transferring parental authority from families to the state and to minors themselves.

SB 871 (2022) soon followed. It would have added COVID-19 to the list of required school immunizations and eliminated personal belief exemptions for any future vaccine requirements set by the Department of Public Health. Though SB 871 did not become law, it captured the governing ethos of the COVID years: conditioning a child’s access to school on whatever injection schedule the bureaucracy imposed — and abandoning the promise lawmakers had made in 2015 that parents would retain meaningful choice over future vaccines.

That same period produced AB 2098, which authorized the Medical Board to discipline physicians for providing COVID “misinformation” — much of which is now widely acknowledged to have been accurate. Tying a doctor’s livelihood to state-approved speech strikes at the core of free expression, informed consent, and the integrity of the doctor–patient relationship, while depriving parents of truthful information about medical decisions affecting their children.

Even where individual bills failed or were later overturned, these measures expose a governing philosophy committed to displacing parental authority and replacing it with state control — steadily eroding the presumption that families, not bureaucracies, should direct the upbringing and care of children.

The Gender Identity Push: Authority Over Parents and Families

California extended the same governing philosophy into the regulation of children’s identity, education, and medical trajectory — again at the expense of parents’ constitutional authority.

AB 1955 (2023) became one focal point. On paper, it prohibits school districts from adopting required disclosure policies regarding a student’s professed gender identity without the student’s consent. In practice, state guidance and district policies evolved into mandatory secrecy regimes, warning educators that disclosure to parents, even when truthful and voluntary, could trigger discipline, including termination. That reality sits at the heart of Mirabelli, where parents challenged policies that systematically excluded them from critical information about their own children.

In 2023, lawmakers went further with AB 957, which would have instructed courts to favor the parent who “affirmed” a child’s gender identity in custody disputes. Governor Newsom vetoed it, but the bill revealed how readily parental rights were being tethered to ideological compliance.

Even more sweeping was SB 107 (2022). Enacted at the height of pandemic governance, it designates California as a sanctuary state for so-called “gender-affirming care” — now described by federal health authorities as “sex-rejecting procedures” — authorizes California courts to assume emergency jurisdiction over custody matters when a child is present in the state for such treatment, and restricts enforcement of out-of-state subpoenas, penalties, and custody orders. In practical terms, a parent from another state may have little recourse once California asserts control — even when valid custody orders already exist.

It is worth noting that federal authorities and foreign health agencies — including in the U.K., Sweden, and Finland (2020–2022) — have reversed course on pediatric gender medicine after concluding the evidence base is weak and the risks to children are profound. California, by contrast, has doubled down — subordinating parents’ constitutional rights to ideological programs with devastating, irreversible consequences now only beginning to be acknowledged.

A Shared Logic: State Domination Over Rights

These arenas differ in subject but not in approach. In both, California’s leadership asserted that the state knows best and that parents, teachers, and religious conscience must yield.

This pattern is not new. Totalitarian systems begin by weakening the family and separating parents from children. California’s COVID and gender policies follow the same logic: children are elevated as autonomous political actors while parents are portrayed as threats — even enemies — and lawmakers press for sweeping authority over life-altering medical decisions for minors who remain, ironically, legally barred from smoking, drinking, or even getting a tattoo.

Many of the most aggressive intrusions on parental authority were enacted while Californians were locked down, isolated, losing their jobs, and cut off from ordinary civic participation. The legislature did not merely respond to crisis — it used it.

The Benitez Rebuke

In Mirabelli, Judge Benitez rejected California’s claim that the case was merely a technical dispute over student privacy. He recognized what parents have warned for years: secrecy policies are not neutral. They reorder loyalties, insert the state between parent and child, and force teachers to choose between conscience and career.

He also rejected the state’s effort to trivialize a school’s affirmation and nondisclosure of a student’s social transition as a mere “courtesy,” finding instead that a child’s decision to assume a different gender at school is a significant event that may signal the presence or emergence of serious medical and psychological distress — information parents have a constitutional right to know in order to evaluate their child’s welfare and decide how to proceed.

He described the parental-exclusion regime as a “trifecta of harm”: children are harmed when parents are cut out of pivotal moments; parents are harmed when the state withholds the knowledge necessary to guide and protect their children; teachers are harmed when they are compelled to conceal the truth or affirm ideology against conscience.

A Broader Constitutional Shift

The Benitez ruling is not an isolated event. On December 8, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in Miller v. McDonald, a challenge brought by Amish parents after New York eliminated its longstanding religious exemption to school vaccine requirements. The Court vacated the lower ruling and remanded the case in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), a recent decision reinforcing parental religious rights in public education.

At the federal level, health policy is also shifting. HHS and the CDC have moved toward shared clinical decision-making for COVID vaccines, shifted newborn Hepatitis B guidance toward parent-clinician discretion, and there are growing indications that other vaccines may follow — properly restoring parental involvement in medical decisions.

California’s Counteroffensive

What we are witnessing is a battle over first principles: whether the individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights continue to govern this country — or whether they yield to a model of state dominance and “expert”-led governance in which families, conscience, and consent become obstacles to be managed.

California has chosen its side.

Within hours of the Benitez ruling, Attorney General Rob Bonta filed an ex parte request to stay both the summary judgment and the permanent injunction pending appeal. The very next day, Judge Benitez denied the request in full — including a request for even a temporary administrative pause — finding that the state’s legal case was “weak,” that it had failed to show irreparable harm, and that the injunction merely restored parents’ long-recognized constitutional rights. The injunction remains fully in effect.

Yet even after being schooled on the Constitution, Sacramento shows no sign of humility—or retreat.

The state continues to build upon the authoritarian architecture of the COVID years: expanding liability shields through AB 144, launching PHNIX as a permanent public-private health apparatus, and hardening emergency governance into a standing system of control.

The message from California’s leadership is unmistakable: the state, not families, should decide.

The Battle Ahead

For years during COVID, too many courts declined to do their job, hiding behind standing, mootness, and procedural escape hatches while sweeping constitutional violations went unscrutinized. Judge Benitez did not. His ruling represents long-overdue judicial courage — and together with the Supreme Court’s intervention in the Amish vaccine case, it signals something Americans have not seen in years: courts remembering that the Constitution exists to protect the people, not the state.

In 2026, the battle will continue. Courts will face intensified challenges to vaccine mandates that deny meaningful religious and medical exemptions, along with ongoing battles over compelled ideology in schools, medicine, and family life.

The Constitution is finally fighting back.

California’s leaders, sadly, appear determined to resist it.