This decision from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals speaks for itself (hat tip: Folding Aces, via The Anchoress):


“When parents of schoolchildren in Palmdale, California learned from their sons and daughters that they had been questioned in their public elementary school about sexual topics such as the frequency of ‘thinking about having sex” and ‘thinking about touching other peoples’ private parts,’ some of them exercised their constitutional right to take their grievance to the courts. The questioning was part of a survey the Palmdale School District was conducting regarding psychological barriers to learning.”


A no-brainer, right? If a bunch of teachers were quizzing my 10-year-old about whether she was “thinking about touching other peope’s private parts,” the school district would be hearing from me, too. And that’s leaving aside the issue of whether teachers should be wasting the taxpayers’ money trying to figure out whether “thinking about having sex” is a “psychological barrier to learning.” Isn’t the answer to that one pretty obvious?


But, nooo, the 9th Circuit isn’t labeled the nation’s nuttiest federal court for nothing. Here’s how it ruled:


“We…hold that there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children, either independent of their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it. We also hold that parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students….


“In summary, we hold that there is no free-standing fundamental right of parents ‘to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex in accordance with their personal and religious values and beliefs’ and that the asserted right is not encompassed by any other fundamental right.”


In other words, the government, not you, owns your children and has the right to override any decisions you might make about the values to which they should be exposed. This from the court that ruled the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because it contains the words “under God.”


Folding Aces comments:


“The only bright spot is that it’s from the 9th Circuit. The bench whose opinions get overturned regularly by the Supreme Court.”