A federal court in California has issued a decisive ruling that cuts through the fog of ideology and reasserts a truth as old as Scripture itself: parents are not optional in the lives of their children. In striking down “gender secrecy” policies in public schools, Judge Roger Benitez affirmed that neither the state nor school bureaucracies have the moral or constitutional authority to hide a child’s struggles from those entrusted by God with their care.
This case also exposes a troubling political and moral contradiction. Rob Bonta, California’s Attorney General—widely seen as positioning himself for a future gubernatorial run—defended these secrecy policies by arguing that parents must be excluded “for the child’s protection.”
The court rejected this premise outright, noting that it presumes parents are the primary threat to their own children.
From a Christian perspective, this logic is deeply inverted. Scripture consistently affirms parents as the primary moral guardians of children, not the state. A government that trains children to withhold intimate truths from their parents is not practicing compassion; it is undermining trust at the most foundational human level.
The irony here is impossible to miss. Progressives rightly condemned the Catholic Church for decades for fostering cultures of secrecy that isolated children from parental protection and allowed harm to flourish. Yet many of those same voices now defend gender secrecy in public schools—policies that likewise instruct children to conceal sensitive information from their parents. Secrecy was once understood as a danger. Now it is celebrated—so long as it serves an ideological end.
Judge Benitez ordered California to include the following statement in all relevant materials:
Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence. Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence. These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary.
This ruling restores moral clarity. Care for children and respect for parents rise or fall together. When secrecy ends, truth—and genuine protection—can finally begin.
On October 22, 2025, a federal judge in Mississippi handed down one of the most significant rulings yet in the legal struggle over “gender identity” mandates. In State of Tennessee et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, Judge Louis Guirola declared that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had exceeded its statutory authority when it redefined “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” under the Affordable Care Act.
The ruling does more than settle a technical dispute about regulatory authority. While the court’s purpose was to determine whether HHS exceeded its legal authority, its conclusion coincides with a deeper truth I affirm as a Christian — that our bodies are not social constructs or psychological projections, but part of the created order.
The law, in this instance, has returned to reality.
The Case: Tennessee v. HHS
In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a sweeping regulation titled “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities.” The rule reinterpreted “sex discrimination” to include five categories: sex characteristics, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex stereotypes.
That redefinition would have required states, hospitals, and insurance providers that receive federal funds to cover or perform “gender-affirming care” — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — regardless of conscience or medical judgment.
Fifteen states, led by Tennessee, sued. They argued that the rule went far beyond the authority Congress gave HHS in Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the ground prohibited under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.” And as the court noted, Title IX’s meaning of “sex” is biological, not ideological.
The plaintiffs weren’t asking for special treatment. They were asking that federal law mean what it has always meant: that “sex” refers to male and female — not to self-declared identities.
What the Court Decided
Judge Guirola’s 26-page opinion is a model of clarity. He ruled that HHS’s 2024 rule:
Exceeded its statutory authority under Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.
Misapplied the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which concerned employment discrimination under Title VII, not healthcare or education.
Was unlawful in its entirety and therefore vacated nationwide.
The opinion states plainly:
“Congress only contemplated biological sex when it enacted Title IX in 1972. Therefore, the Court finds that HHS exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender-identity discrimination.”
The judge further held that the refusal to perform or cover procedures for “gender transition” is not discrimination “because of sex.” As he explained, if a doctor performs mastectomies for women with breast cancer but declines to perform them for patients with gender dysphoria, the distinction is not based on the patient’s sex but on the diagnosis itself.
In other words: medicine is about biology, not ideology.
Bostock Doesn’t Apply Here
The court’s analysis directly confronts HHS’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling, which found that firing an employee for being homosexual or transgender violates Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination.
But Bostock explicitly limited its holding to employment law and said nothing about education, healthcare, or the broader cultural questions now before us. Title IX, unlike Title VII, contains explicit sex-based distinctions — for locker rooms, dormitories, sports teams, and bathrooms. Those provisions would be meaningless if “sex” were redefined to mean “gender identity.”
As Judge Guirola noted, interpreting “sex” as “gender identity” would create legal chaos. Schools could no longer maintain separate facilities for men and women. Sports competition would lose integrity. In the healthcare context, even legitimate medical distinctions — like sex-specific treatments — could be labeled “discrimination.”
That is precisely what the rule attempted to do, and why the court struck it down.
A Restoration of Constitutional Balance
Beyond the immediate issue of gender policy, this ruling restores a key principle of constitutional government: agencies do not have unlimited power to redefine law by executive fiat.
Quoting recent Supreme Court precedent (Loper Bright v. Raimondo), the court affirmed that statutes “have a single, best meaning fixed at the time of enactment.” Agencies are servants of Congress, not substitutes for it.
This is a vital reminder that the administrative state cannot function as an ideological laboratory for social experiments. The judiciary has begun to reassert the boundaries of delegated power, curbing the long pattern of executive agencies imposing cultural revolutions under the guise of “civil rights enforcement.”
The court’s language is unmistakable:
“Agencies do not have unlimited power to accomplish their policy preferences until Congress stops them; they have only the powers that Congress grants.”
That line deserves to be remembered.
Reality, Restored to Law
The court’s approach to statutory interpretation is refreshingly rooted in reality. Citing 1970s dictionaries, Judge Guirola observed that “sex” was universally understood to refer to biological distinctions between male and female. There was no concept of “gender identity” in 1972 law — because there was no such category in common understanding.
As simple as that sounds, it’s revolutionary in today’s legal landscape. The court refused to participate in the linguistic shell game that has corrupted public discourse. It chose to honor what words actually mean.
The Cultural and Moral Stakes
This case is not just about regulatory overreach or administrative law. It’s about truth-telling in a time of cultivated confusion.
For over a decade, we’ve watched federal agencies, medical institutions, and activist networks work to erase the distinction between man and woman — replacing embodied reality with subjective identity. In medicine, this ideology has demanded that doctors violate conscience, that parents affirm medical harm, and that the state compel participation in a collective fiction.
From a Christian Viewpoint: Creation and the Meaning of the Body
From a Christian perspective, this ruling affirms something far deeper than statutory interpretation. It affirms the created order.
Scripture tells us that humanity was made “male and female” (Genesis 1:27), and that this distinction is not arbitrary but sacramental — a sign of the divine image itself. As Notre Dame Professor Abigail Favale has written, the difference between man and woman “is not about completion, but communion.”
When law denies that created truth, it participates in what St. Paul called “the exchange of the truth of God for a lie.” The lie of our age is that the self is sovereign, that the body can be remade at will, and that nature itself must yield to the will of the autonomous individual.
This ruling marks a step back from that precipice.
Rejecting the New Gnosticism
Modern gender ideology, at its core, is a revival of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism — the belief that the material world is an obstacle to true identity, that salvation lies in self-knowledge detached from embodiment.
The court, perhaps without intending to, has reaffirmed the opposite: that embodiment is integral to who we are. Our bodies are not meaningless matter to be “corrected” by technology; they are the visible expression of the person God created.
When the judge wrote that Title IX’s use of “sex” referred to biological distinctions, he was defending more than a word. He was defending a vision of human integrity — one that law, medicine, and theology once shared.
True compassion tells the truth even when it hurts. The court did not deny anyone’s humanity; it denied the government’s power to redefine humanity.
Christians must remember: Love without truth is sentimentality. Truth without love is cruelty. But love in truth is the only path to healing.
This ruling doesn’t forbid care; it forbids coerced compliance with an untruth.
The Broader Implications
This decision will likely be appealed, but its reasoning aligns with the broader judicial trend of rejecting agency-driven redefinitions of “sex.” Other courts — particularly in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits — have already pushed back against the Biden administration’s interpretations of Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.
If upheld, the Tennessee ruling will shape how federal law treats sex distinctions in medicine, education, and beyond. It signals the end of a bureaucratic era in which ideology could rewrite biology by regulation.
For Christians and others who believe in the moral coherence of creation, this is not a moment for triumphalism but for thanksgiving and vigilance. The cultural pressure to conform to unreality will not disappear overnight. But truth has a way of resurfacing, and in this case, through the language of the law.
Conclusion: Living in the Truth
Judge Guirola closed his opinion with a reminder:
“Neither Defendants nor this Court have authority to reinterpret or expand the meaning of ‘sex’ under Title IX.”
The law is at its best when it reflects the created order rather than attempting to erase it. For years, American jurisprudence has been asked to pretend that male and female are mere social scripts. This ruling breaks that spell. For now.
In the words of St. Irenaeus, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” To be fully alive is to live in the truth of what we are — body and soul, male or female, created and loved by God.
In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case that most Christians have never heard of—Everson v. Board of Education. Yet that ruling, more than any other, reshaped the place of Christianity in American public life. In fact, the very idea that our Constitution demands a strict “separation of church and state” was essentially invented by that decision. But what if this idea wasn’t true to America’s founding? And what if it ran counter to the biblical role of government itself?
A recent Harvard Law Journal article by Timon Cline, Josh Hammer, and Yoram Hazony—three voices from both Christian and Jewish traditions—argues that the time has come to overturn Everson and restore the original vision of the First Amendment. Christians seeking to understand the world through a biblical lens, should pay close attention.
Government’s Biblical Responsibility: Promoting the Public Good
Romans 13 tells us that civil authorities are ordained by God to uphold justice and punish evil. First Peter 2 commands rulers to “praise those who do good.” This biblical principle was historically recognized by Christian thinkers and undergirded America’s early political structure. The Founders never imagined a government stripped of moral and religious foundations. Instead, they understood—as Proverbs 14:34 puts it—that “righteousness exalts a nation.”
The Harvard Law Journal scholars point out that America’s original constitutional design reflected this reality: under the First Amendment, the federal government was prohibited from establishing a national church or interfering with religious establishments at the state level. In other words, individual states were expected to shape public morality—including support for Christianity—as they saw fit.
The Great Distortion: How Everson Rewrote the First Amendment
How, then, did “separation of church and state” become national dogma?
In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Justice Hugo Black reinterpreted the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment using Thomas Jefferson’s offhand metaphor of a “wall of separation.” But Jefferson’s phrase came from a personal letter written 14 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified—and Jefferson wasn’t even in the country when the First Amendment was drafted.
This metaphor, the authors argue, was never meant to create a religiously neutral state. Yet Justice Black’s ruling applied this separationist vision to the states, effectively barring them from supporting religion in any public form. Ironically, the First Amendment’s clear limitation on federal power was transformed into a federal prohibition against state-level religious expression.
From a biblical worldview, this distortion matters deeply. Scripture never envisions the civil order as “neutral” toward the things of God. Rather, rulers are called to “kiss the Son” (Psalm 2:12)—to govern with justice that acknowledges God’s authority.
The Fruits of Everson: A Secular Public Square
What followed Everson is all too familiar. Prayer and Bible reading were banned from schools. Christian moral teachings were sidelined. Secularism—the active removal of religion from public life—became the assumed posture of government. As the legal scholars argue, this didn’t create neutrality; it created a functional state-sponsored religion of secularism.
Romans 1 describes what happens when a society “suppresses the truth” about God: moral confusion and cultural decay. We’ve witnessed this firsthand as public life—once broadly shaped by biblical norms—has become a vacuum filled by alternative ideologies.
A Forgotten American Principle: Local Freedom to Support Religion
One of the most insightful arguments from Cline, Hammer, and Hazony is that American federalism originally allowed each state to shape its religious character. States like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire maintained various forms of Christian establishment well into the 19th century. This wasn’t forced religion. Alongside these establishments, states protected freedom of conscience.
The genius of this system was local accountability. Each state, as a community, had the freedom to uphold religious practices appropriate to its people. This echoes the biblical principle of local leadership seen in Exodus 18, where Moses is told to appoint “capable men from all the people…to serve as officials” over groups at different levels.
What Christians Should Hope For
The Harvard Law Journal article calls for overturning Everson and returning decisions about public religion to the states. From a Christian worldview, this proposal aligns with key scriptural principles:
Civil rulers should promote the public good, including moral and religious formation.
Religious instruction should not be coerced but encouraged.
Parents and local communities should shape children’s moral education (Deuteronomy 6:6–7)1And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise..
Imagine a future where states once again have the freedom to support prayer in schools, Bible instruction, and moral formation—not by force, but by communal choice. Such a restoration would acknowledge the biblical truth that faith in God strengthens public virtue.
Caution: Supporting Truth Without Coercion
While we should hope for a return to public religion, Christians must remember that authentic faith cannot be imposed (2 Corinthians 4:2)2But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.. Government should create conditions favorable to righteousness, but not attempt to compel belief. This balance—supporting religion while protecting conscience—was wisely preserved in many early American states. It’s a biblical balance worth recovering.
Conclusion: A Time for Restoration
In their closing words, Cline, Hammer, and Hazony argue that Everson has become “the principal obstacle to the restoration of a genuinely conservative public life.” From a biblical worldview, they’re right. Removing Everson would not guarantee national renewal, but it would remove a legal barrier that suppresses the public expression of biblical faith.
In the end, Scripture calls both individuals and nations to acknowledge the Lord. As Psalm 33:12 declares, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”
We now live in a society where public policy denies basic realities:
That God created humans male and female (Genesis 1:27).3So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
That marriage is designed to unite one man and one woman (Genesis 2:24).4Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
That children are a gift to be welcomed, not commodities to be engineered (Psalm 127:3).5Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.
That human life, from conception to natural death, bears the image of God (Genesis 1:26).6Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
When a society suppresses these truths, it suppresses the very foundation of human dignity and moral order. Christians should not respond with apathy or with abstract appeals to “religious freedom” alone. We should desire what these scholars recommend: a restoration of public religion—not to coerce belief, but to witness to truth.
It is time for our laws, schools, and public institutions to once again affirm what creation itself teaches. This does not mean a return to coercive state churches. It means restoring the freedom of communities to encourage what is true, good, and life-giving—and removing federal barriers that prevent states from doing so.
