Attorneys with the Thomas More Society have turned to the U.S. Supreme Court with an urgent plea to intervene in a California case that pits state secrecy against family transparency. On Thursday, they filed an emergency application in the ongoing lawsuit Mirabelli v. Bonta, asking the justices to block policies that compel public schools to conceal children’s gender transitions from their parents. This move comes just days after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on a lower court’s injunction, effectively allowing the state’s rules to snap back into place across California’s education system.
The policies in question, rooted in Assembly Bill 1955 signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2024, prohibit school staff from notifying parents if a student expresses a desire to change their gender identity, pronouns, or name at school. Schools must accommodate these changes without parental input, even if families hold strong religious or moral objections. Critics argue this setup not only erodes the foundational bond between parents and children but also forces educators into a web of deception, punishing those who choose honesty over compliance.
The lawsuit began in 2023 when two Christian teachers challenged the rules, claiming they violated their First Amendment rights by requiring them to participate in what they saw as misleading families. By 2024, several parents joined the fray, including a Catholic couple identified as John and Jane Poe. Their junior-high daughter had been treated as male by school staff for almost a year, complete with a new name and pronouns, all without their knowledge. They only discovered the situation after her suicide attempt, a heartbreaking revelation that underscored the potential dangers of such secrecy.
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez delivered a decisive blow to the policies on December 22, 2025, issuing a permanent injunction that halted their enforcement statewide for the certified class of plaintiffs—those with religious or moral objections. He ruled that the state’s approach unconstitutionally interfered with parents’ rights to direct their children’s upbringing and compelled teachers to speak against their beliefs. However, California Attorney General Rob Bonta quickly appealed, and on January 5, 2026, a Ninth Circuit panel granted a stay, citing procedural concerns and mischaracterizing the injunction’s scope as overly broad.
In their Supreme Court filing, the attorneys contend that the Ninth Circuit’s decision ignored key precedents and distorted the record, allowing irreparable harm to continue. “Right now, California’s parental deception scheme is keeping families in the dark and causing irreparable harm,” said Paul M. Jonna, special counsel for the Thomas More Society. “The state is inserting itself unconstitutionally between parents and children, forcing schools to deceive families, and punishing teachers who tell the truth.” The team has also requested an en banc review from the full Ninth Circuit, signaling their determination to fight on multiple fronts.
This isn’t the first time California’s education mandates have sparked backlash. Similar policies have faced scrutiny in other states, with courts increasingly siding with parental rights. For instance, a federal judge in Kansas ruled in 2025 that schools cannot withhold gender-related information from parents, echoing arguments in Mirabelli. Meanwhile, advocates point to broader patterns, suggesting these rules form part of a concerted effort by progressive lawmakers to sideline traditional family structures, potentially exposing vulnerable children to influences without oversight.
From a faith perspective, the case resonates deeply with those who view parenting as a divine responsibility. Scriptures like Proverbs 22:6—”Train up a child in the way he should go”—remind believers of the duty to guide their offspring, a role the state seems eager to usurp. The Poes’ story, where their daughter’s crisis unfolded in shadows, serves as a stark warning: when government steps in as the primary authority, the fallout can be devastating and irreversible.
As the Supreme Court weighs this emergency request, families across California hang in the balance. If the justices act swiftly, they could restore a measure of sanity to schools, affirming that parents, not bureaucrats, hold the reins on their children’s well-being. Without intervention, the policies risk entrenching a system where secrecy trumps trust, leaving more parents blindsided and more children adrift in confusion. The outcome could set a national tone, either curbing state overreach or emboldening similar measures elsewhere.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.