Judge Roger T. Benitez of the Southern District of California is back in the news. On December 22, 2025, in Mirabelli v. Olson, No. 3:23-cv-00768 (S.D. Cal.), he granted a class-wide permanent injunction against California’s so-called “parental exclusion” policies — the rules that ordered teachers in districts like the Escondido Union School District to hide a child’s social gender transition from that child’s own mother and father. Those policies are now enjoined statewide.
I want to be upfront. This is not, strictly speaking, a Second Amendment case. It is a First and Fourteenth Amendment case about parental rights, free exercise, and the free speech rights of teachers. But it matters enormously to the right to keep and bear arms, and I will explain why at the end. First, the law.
The Policy Benitez Just Blew Up
California built a regulatory architecture that did two things at once. First, if a public school student — a child in elementary, junior high, or high school — started expressing what the state calls “gender incongruence,” school staff were forbidden from telling that child’s parents. Second, teachers who DID want to communicate honestly with parents were affirmatively prohibited from doing so. In some scenarios the policy effectively required a teacher, sitting across a desk from mom and dad at a parent-teacher conference, to withhold the truth.
The plaintiffs are two veteran Escondido teachers — Elizabeth Mirabelli, a middle-school English teacher and former Teacher of the Year, and Lori Ann West, a PE teacher — with more than five decades of classroom experience between them. They sued EUSD Superintendent Mark Olson, AG Rob Bonta, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Judge Benitez granted a preliminary injunction in 2023, certified the class in October 2025, and has now made the injunction permanent and statewide.
The Four Questions, and the Four “Yes” Answers
Benitez frames the entire case around four questions. As he writes:
This case presents the following four questions about a parent’s rights to information as against a public school’s policy of secrecy when it comes to a student’s gender identification. First, do parents have a right to gender information based on the 14th Amendment substantive due process clause? Second, do parents have a right to gender information protected by the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause? Third, do religious public school teachers have a right to provide gender information to parents based on the First Amendment’s free exercise clause? And fourth, do public school teachers have a right to communicate accurate gender information to parents based on the First Amendment free speech clause?
His answer to all four: yes. As a matter of law.
That is a doctrinally complete demolition. Benitez did not pick the easiest theory and bail. He ran the table — substantive due process for parents, free exercise for parents, free exercise for teachers, free speech for teachers. Each independently sufficient. California cannot regulate its way around any of them.
The Operative Injunction Language
This is the part of the order schools statewide are now bound by, verbatim:
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.
Read that last sentence twice. Federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws to the contrary. That is the Supremacy Clause doing exactly what it was designed to do, applied to a context where Sacramento decided the state knows better than parents do.
Parents Before Horace Mann
The opening of the opinion is where Benitez lays down his methodology, and it is pure originalism. He writes:
Long before Horace Mann advocated in the 1840s for a system of common schools and compulsory education, parents have carried out their rights and responsibility to direct the general and medical care and religious upbringing of their child. The history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental concern for the nurture and upbringing of their children. This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition. Indeed, the role of a parent includes the duty to recognize symptoms of illness and seek medical advice. These rights are protected by the First and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.
Notice the move. Benitez starts at parental authority as the historical baseline, predating public schooling by centuries, and treats government schools as the more recent intervention that has to justify itself against that baseline. Text. History. Tradition. Fundamental right. The Supreme Court built a whole line of cases around that liberty interest — Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Troxel v. Granville — and Benitez plants his flag firmly inside it.
Why This Matters for the Second Amendment
Here is the through-line. The right to keep and bear arms is not just a courtroom right — it is a cultural right that has to be transmitted, generation to generation, by families. When the government school gets between parent and child, hides identity and medical decisions from mom and dad, and trains teachers that the state’s policy preferences override parental authority, that same system is also shaping the next generation’s view of guns, of self-defense, and of constitutional liberty itself. You cannot win the 2A fight long-term if you lose the parents.
The holdings here are First and Fourteenth Amendment holdings. I am not pretending otherwise. But the methodology — start with the historical baseline of a fundamental right, treat modern regulatory schemes as the intruder that has to justify itself, refuse to let a state interest trump enumerated protections — is the same methodology that produced Heller, McDonald, and Bruen. Benitez is the same judge who in Duncan v. Becerra and Miller v. Bonta applied that framework to magazines and AR-15s. He is now applying it to the family. One conservative legal counteroffensive, fought on multiple fronts, with one originalist toolkit. That is why this win belongs on a 2A blog.
The state will appeal to the Ninth Circuit. We will see what San Francisco does. But for now, in California, parents have the law on their side, and the originalist method is doing the work it was built to do.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.