WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal of an Indiana couple who lost custody of their gender-confused teenage son solely because they refused to indulge his desire to be addressed by a female name and pronouns, despite a lack of any actual parental abuse in the case.
In 2019, Mary and Jeremy Cox began seeking mental health treatment for their son, identified in the case only as AC, who considered himself “transgendered.” Two years later, the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) began investigating the Catholic couple based on a report that they were not using his preferred female name or female pronouns. AC was removed from the home, and despite a state court finding no evidence of abuse or neglect, it ruled that he should be placed somewhere that would affirm his “gender identity,” citing AC’s worsening of an eating disorder around the time he was removed.
An appeals court upheld the ruling in 2022, and the Coxes filed an appeal to the nation’s highest court in 2023. “With increasing frequency, governments run roughshod over parents’ religious beliefs on gender identity, including removing children from parents, favoring certain beliefs in divorce custody disputes, and preventing adoptions, these cases are sure to proliferate,” they wrote.
However, on March 18, the Court released an order list confirming it is refusing to review the case, without elaboration or identifying how individual justices voted.
In response, the Coxes said that losing their son “will stay with us forever” and that “we can’t change the past, but we will continue to fight for a future where parents of faith can raise their children without fear of state officials knocking on their doors,” USA Today reports.
Indiana Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita, who is tasked with representing the state, issued a statement expressing “sympathy” with the Coxes, declaring that Indiana “always protect[s] parental rights and religious liberty” and does not “believe that the State can remove a child because of a parent’s religious beliefs, views about gender identity, or anything of the sort,” while maintaining removal in this case was strictly about treatment for AC’s “extreme eating disorder.”
But the parents’ brief to the Supreme Court, prepared by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, explains that the parents “agreed that A.C. needed intervention since A.C. ‘denie[d]’ the eating disorder, ‘believe[d] that additional treatment [was] unnecessary,’ ‘fueled’ the eating disorder by isolating from Petitioners, and claimed isolation would continue if placed back in Petitioners’ safe home […] Children do best with their fit parents, and Indiana and constitutional standards do not leave up to unemancipated minors the decision of residing with fit parents […] Thus Petitioners agreed A.C. needed services not because they were unwilling to provide treatment, but because A.C. wasn’t prepared to accept it without court supervision.”
“Mary and Jeremy plan to continue the fight for parental rights and religious freedom, so that this nightmare doesn’t happen to other families,” says Beckett.
For conservatives, the outcome is the latest cause for concern about the current Supreme Court. Six of its nine members were appointed by Republican presidents, yet with only four votes needed to get the court to take a case, at least three of those justices supported on the expectation they would uphold parental rights and religious liberty opted not to here.
The Court has delivered conservatives major victories on gun rights, environmental regulation, affirmative action, and most significantly abortion with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but it has also issued dismissive rulings on COVID-19 shot mandates, religious freedom, and LGBT ideology, to the point that Bush-appointed Justice Samuel Alito has taken the rare step of criticizing Trump-appointed Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh for lacking the “fortitude” to resolve such issues.