A group of parents and Christian organizations has filed a court petition against New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin for blocking a town school board from implementing a new parental notification policy regarding the gender identity of students.
Platkin claims the policy violates state discrimination laws because it targets a protected group and is thus illegal.
“Outing LGBTQ+ students against their will poses serious mental health risks, threatens physical harm to students, including risking increased suicides, and shirks the District’s duty to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all,” Platkin wrote in his complaint against the Hanover Township Board of Education.
Pacific Justice Institute attorney Karyn White, who represents the group in its petition against Platkin, called the idea that telling parents about what’s going on with their children while at school is illegal and discriminatory is “crazy.”
“This has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with vilifying parents and taking their rights away to raise their own children and hand it over to the government,” she said.
Platkin’s office did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about the matter.
White told The Epoch Times that the case could go all the way to the Supreme Court and set legal precedence nationally because Platkin is essentially asking the courts to declare it illegal for a school to tell a parent if their child is changing gender identities at school.
The group is also incensed that after winning an injunction to block the implementation of the policy in superior court, Platkin used his own Division of Civil Rights (DCR) within the attorney general’s office to file a civil rights complaint against the board for adopting the policy.
Any civil rights complaints filed with the New Jersey DCR are confidential.
Parents accused Platkin of “blatantly” abusing his own office to block the local school policy and sidestep open court legal proceedings.
Their petition seeks to block the DCR case from moving forward and keep it in superior court.
“We know the political games with New Jersey justice,” Gregory Quinlan, president of The Center For Garden State Families, told The Epoch Times, “If this goes to the DCR, the fix is in, and the public will never know what transpired. Leaving this in the Superior Court will be more transparent.”
Quinlan’s group and the New Jersey Policy Family Council have joined the parents in the petition. The group started the petition on Thursday and by Friday collected more than 1,000 signatures, according to White.
When Judge Stuart Minkowitz granted Platkin an injunction, he indicated it was only temporary until he and the school board could find a “middle ground.”
In response to Minkowitz’s order, the board amended its new notification policy to exclude language specific to LGBT sexuality.
However, less than a week later, on June 12, Platkin submitted a letter to Minkowitz indicating he had rejected the amended policy because he felt the intention to target LGBT kids was still obvious in the amended policy.
Platkin told Minkowitz the injunction thus needs to stay in place because of the school board’s “steadfast refusal” to specifically exclude LGBT-related notification requirements to parents.
He also complains the board has failed to include “safeguards to ensure that students will not be outed by school personnel.”
White said that if anyone has an agenda, it is Platkin because the policy only seeks notice about sexual orientation.
“This is about age-inappropriate sexualizing of children,” she said. “You’re not anti-LGBTQ because you don’t want your kindergarten to learn about masturbation and anal sex in school.”
Under the New Jersey Department of Education’s fairly new sex education curriculum guidelines for the state’s public calls, schools are encouraged to teach masturbation, transgender sexuality, pornography, and anal sex to students as young as kindergarteners.
Barbara Eames, a former Hanover Township School board member who is part of the petition against Platkin and now has grandchildren in New Jersey’s school system, told The Epoch Times she worries that the government is trying to teach children not to trust their own parents.
She said she is concerned that with Platkin’s influential position as an attorney general, he will create a national precedence for “erasing parental consent” if his lawsuit is successful.
Eames points to a pending bill in New Jersey seeking to allow children as young as 13 to undergo psychiatric counseling without parental consent as part of her concern that the government is “reinventing schools as one big counseling session.”
“We’re in a David versus Goliath fight,” said Eames. “No one should be keeping secrets from parents.”
Eames and others also expressed concern that Platkin’s interference with Hanover Township’s school board policymaking will discourage other boards from adopting parental notification policies when it comes to the sexual activity of children at school.
It has already had a chilling effect on at least one.
Following Minkowitz’s injunction order, the school board in Colts Neck, which is about 50 miles from Hanover Township, was scheduled to vote on a new policy that would require parents to be notified if their child was exhibiting or participating in any changes to their gender identity or sexual orientation at school. It instead removed it from its agenda.
The board also voted not to take Hanover Township’s petitioners up on their statewide request to school boards to join them in their petition against Platkin.
Quinlan said with the government on an “obvious tear” to groom children, it’s important for the school board to have strong parental notification laws.
Hanover Township school board has vowed to fight Platkin on his interference with its policymaking relevant to the sexuality of children at school. It defended its new policy as a policy that “merely requires” school staff to “say something to the parents and appropriate school administrators if they see something that could adversely affect the social/emotional well-being of a child.”
“The Hanover Township Board of Education believes that parents need to be fully informed of all material issues that could impact their children so that they—as parents—can provide the proper care and support for their children,” the board wrote in a statement on the controversy.
