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From The Wanderer:

In a ruling that is bound to send shock waves across the United States, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled on November 2 that parents have “no fundamental right . . . 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,” the federal court judges ruled in Fields v. Palmdale School District, “that parents have no due process or privacy rights to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students.”

One legal expert contacted by The Wanderer immediately after the ruling came down said, “This is another Kelo case, because it demonstrates the overreach of government power over families the way Kelo affirmed government power over family homes.

“Just as the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo that a private shopping mall magnate can seize grandma’s house, so now the Ninth Circuit is saying that a public school bureaucrat can overrule community values regarding intimate matters.”

Carrie Gordon Earll, senior policy analyst for Focus on the Family Action, called the decision, in the case, “perhaps the most abhorrent example of judicial tyranny in American history.”

“Anyone who wonders why pro-family organizations like ours have been so concerned about activist courts only has to look at this case,” Earll said. “The Ninth Circuit did more than rule against parents who were upset that their elementary-school-aged children were being asked explicit questions about sex in class. They told all parents they have no right to protest what public schools tell their children.

“What the court did here is declare parenthood unconstitutional,” Earll said. “It’s long been the liberal view that it takes a village to raise a child — but never before have the ‘villagers’ been elevated, as a matter of law, above mothers and fathers.”

The court’s ruling clearly represents a “usurpation” of parental rights, as the Catholic Church understands them, and as articulated by the Church since Pope Pius XI, and reaffirmed by Vatican II and numerous times by Pope John Paul II, especially in Familiaris Consortio and in The Truth & Meaning of Human Sexuality, particularly n. 43.

But the Ninth Circuit Court’s opinion is consistent with a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions of recent years, which have steadily eroded parents’ rights, as the late constitutional attorney William Bentley Ball explained in his book, Mere Creatures of the State? Education, Religion, and the Courts.

Ball argued, persuasively, that the trend of recent Supreme Court decisions was to restrict parental rights by arguing, essentially, that the need of the state for “well-educated” citizens trumps parents’ rights to raise their children according to the tenets of their religion.