Florida’s attorney general has joined with 21 other states in siding with a Tallahassee couple in a case about parental rights that is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This is a fight for parents across the country,” said Attorney General James Uthmeier in a video posted to X on Oct. 6.
The states that have signed onto the friend-of-the-court brief in support of January and Jeffrey Littlejohn are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia.
“We’re excited to stand behind Mrs. Littlejohn in her case and fight for parents at the Supreme Court,” Uthmeier said. Florida’s brief is one of five filed with the Supreme Court on Monday, according to online dockets.
Legal battle involving Littlejohns began in 2021
The Littlejohns have been fighting in court against the Leon County School Board since 2021, when they asked for damages, including for emotional distress, saying their relationship with their child was damaged because of the district.
Even though they have lost their case in two federal courts, the couple continues to argue the Leon County School District violated their parental rights when they spoke to their child about a gender support plan without informing them. The child wanted to express a gender identity and use pronouns the parents didn’t support, reports said.
January Littlejohn has since become a spokesperson for the parents’ rights movement, appearing alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis and Uthmeier during press conferences and also speaking at numerous events for conservative groups, including Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation. This year, she was invited by First Lady Melania Trump to attend President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress in March.
As previously reported, the Littlejohns on Sept. 3 requested that the U.S. Supreme Court review a decision from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March, where a sharply divided panel upheld a district court’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit.
The filing contends that lower courts were “confused” when making decisions in the past, and that the nation’s highest court should review this case to answer one primary question: Whether the Leon County public schools violated the parent’s “fundamental constitutional right” to make decisions for their child.
In March, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision by U.S. District Judge Mark Walker to dismiss the 2021 lawsuit. The appeals court said the case involved a challenge to government executive actions and, as a result, the legal test under court precedents was whether school officials’ actions “shocked the conscience.” Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who penned the main opinion, concluded that the actions did not rise to that level.
“The child was not physically harmed, much less permanently so,” Rosenbaum wrote. “Defendants did not remove the Littlejohns’ child from their custody. And defendants did not force the child to attend a Student Support Plan meeting, to not invite the Littlejohns to that meeting, or to socially transition at school. In fact, defendants did not force the Littlejohns’ child to do anything at all. And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”
This case was the catalyst for the “Parental Rights in Education” law in Florida, known as “Don’t Say Gay” by critics. The law originally prohibited public school teachers from instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity up to third grade, but education officials later expanded the law to limit instructional materials in all grades in public school.
In 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law (HB 1069) that said a person’s sex “is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” This law also prohibited teachers from using their preferred pronouns in classrooms and barred books in school libraries with LGBTQ+ themes that “describe sexual conduct.”
Ana Goñi-Lessan, state watchdog reporter for the USA TODAY Network – Florida, can be reached at agonilessan@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Uthmeier asks US Supreme Court to review school gender case
Reporting by Ana Goñi-Lessan, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Tallahassee Democrat
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
