LEXINGTON, KY – The Family Foundation, along with 30 other family policy organizations, filed a “friend of the court” legal brief urging the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold Kentucky and Tennessee’s protections for children against life-altering gender “transition” interventions that physically mutilate and disorder their healthy bodies.
The amicus brief points out that claims the laws violate a right to medical treatment and the rights of parents are seriously flawed and a distraction from the far more encompassing dispute over the anthropological and legal disruption implicated in transgender theory. The law’s authority to acknowledge the objective physical identity of persons is at stake.
Statement from David Walls, executive director of The Family Foundation:
“We urge the Sixth Circuit to uphold Kentucky’s and Tennessee’s commonsense protections for children against the irreversible physical mutilation of so-called gender ‘transition’ interventions. The challenges to these laws are legally and morally flawed and only further expose the dangerous ideological movement seeking to mutilate children in the name of denying their biological sex.
“Up to this point in history, the truth that the human person is objectively and profoundly male or female has been the cornerstone and celebrated feature of civilization. If this radical transgender theory is constitutionalized, it will only further harm children, the natural family, and parental authority. The Court must uphold the law so that these barbaric medical experiments on children will end,” Walls concluded.
In summary, the brief highlights several main arguments:
- This Isn’t About a Right to Medical Treatment
- The claim to a medical treatment is, at best, a proxy argument and distraction from the far more encompassing dispute over the anthropological and legal disruption implicated in transgender theory and its policy proposals.
- No Constitutional “Parental Right” to Harm Children’s Sexual Physiology
- Parental authority does not survive transgenderism, as the predicates of each are antithetical. For the category of “parental rights” to exist, let alone rise to constitutional significance, the law must acknowledge that male and female are objective and legally cognizable realities of human identity and significance.
- The rights of parents are derived from their natural duty, including the duty to protect their children. Consequently, a parent’s invitation to a third-party professional to injure a child’s healthy and naturally developing reproductive organs violates the duty that parent owes the child in deference to the child’s absolute right to personal security.
- States Have Authority to Protect the Vulnerable from Physical Harm
- The centuries-enduring and constitutionally foundational common-law legal precepts that authorize and inform State police-power authority to protect the vulnerable from physical harm stands firmly opposed to a parental prerogative to permanently injure their children.
The Family Foundation played an integral role in the passage of Kentucky’s Senate Bill 150 and in supporting its commonsense protections for children, including hosting a rally supporting the General Assembly’s override of Gov. Beshear’s veto of the bill. SB 150 is in full effect, a shield against a real and immediate harm threatening Kentucky’s children, who deserve to be loved, treated with dignity, and accepted for who they really are.
A copy of the amicus brief can be found here.
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The Family Foundation is the leading Christian public policy organization in Kentucky and stands for Kentucky families and the Biblical values that make them strong. Learn more at kentuckyfamily.org.
