Week in Review: Families, Not Bureaucrats

From Fox News to the Maine Wire, news outlets across the country are taking notice of the Goldwater Institute’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Amber Lavigne, a Maine mom who discovered that public school officials were aiding her child in a gender transition without her knowledge or consent.

Amber only learned what was happening after a discovering a chest binder—a garment to flatten breasts to make the wearer appear male—while cleaning her child’s room. As Fox reports, Goldwater is “asking the Supreme Court to step in and make it clear that parents like Amber have a right to know when public school officials make important decisions affecting” their kids health and well-being.

“Parents do not lose their rights because a school employee thinks they know better,” a Red State columnist writes. “If the Constitution means anything, it means that families come before bureaucracies.” Of course, the Goldwater Institute will always stand with parents when bureaucrats come between them and their kids.

Read Fox News’ coverage here.

Appeals Court Rules Compelled DEI ‘Training’ Unconstitutional

When two Missouri teachers objected to a DEI training that taught that American institutions are saturated with “covert white supremacy,” they were told they were “confused and wrong” and forced into silence. On a test, which they were required to pass, answers that ran counter to social justice orthodoxy were deemed “incorrect.”

In a victory for color-blind justice, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals—agreeing with arguments offered by the Goldwater Institute in a friend of the court brief—ruled that the teachers’ free speech rights were violated when they were forced into a DEI indoctrination session and compelled to agree with its racist tenets. The government simply isn’t allowed to tell people what to believe or shut them up when they disagree.

DEI may be retreating, but it’s not dead. That’s why states need to implement the Goldwater Institute’s Freedom from Indoctrination Act to help stamp out this perverse ideology once and for all.

Read more.

Montana Court Oks Challenge to Anti-Competitive Licensing Law

It should go without saying that prospective business owners shouldn’t need their competitors’ approval to launch a new venture—but that’s exactly what the law requires in Montana. That’s why the Goldwater Institute filed a friend of the court brief supporting a local businessman who was barred by the government from starting a debris-removal company without the permission of other, entrenched debris-haulers.

Now, the Montana Supreme Court has agreed that the budding entrepreneur can challenge Montana’s anti-competitive certificate of need law, which allows existing businesses to weaponize the government to block new entrants to the market on the grounds that they’re not needed. Certificate of need laws like Montana’s are sold as tools to control costs and avoid the unnecessary duplication of efforts, but what they really do is monopolize industries, increase costs, and limit innovation and consumer choice.

The Goldwater Institute will continue to advocate for economic liberty and the right of hardworking Americans to start businesses and serve their communities without needing to beg for their competitors’ permission.

Read more.