Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was right earlier this month in complaining that his tribunal chooses to hear too few cases, and the court did it again this week in a way that leaves parental rights unprotected.

The Supreme Court denied a certiorari petition in Parents 1 v. Montgomery County Board of Education, in which parents appealed a lower court decision that the parents lacked legal standing to challenge school policy on gender confusion. If litigants lack standing, meaning a genuine, personal stake in the outcome of a real “case” or “controversy,” then courts will dismiss their claim without actually addressing the legal merits of the issues they raise.

In Parents 1, two supposedly conservative, Trump-appointed judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals outvoted Reagan-appointed Judge Paul Niemeyer in ruling that parents lacked standing to challenge school guidelines, which (in Niemeyer’s concise summary, with his emphases) “invite all students in the Montgomery County public schools to engage in gender transition plans with school Principals without the knowledge and consent of their parents.”

Not even four of the nine justices agreed to consider the baseline question of whether the specific parents who sued actually had standing. If standing were granted, the case could be revived in a lower court, with its central complaints actually examined. The justices’ refusal is odd. The “standing” issue here is important on its own, not to mention that the underlying subject of parents’ rights regarding transgender policies is roiling the culture nationwide. The high court repeatedly has dodged requests for it to rule on numerous questions raised by the transgender trend, which is why its denial of cert here in Parents 1 seems like yet another installment in its discreditable, duck-and-cover routine.

After all, Niemeyer’s dissent on the 4th Circuit made a compelling argument that the particular parents who were litigants do have significant legal standing.

His two colleagues had employed extremely narrow goalposts for access to the courts. They wrote that because these parents “have not alleged that their [own] children have gender support plans, are transgender or are even struggling with issues of gender identity,” they themselves have suffered no “injury” from the guidelines, even if other families may have done so. Without clear or imminent injury, standing doesn’t exist.

Niemeyer destroyed this argument. The parents are objecting to a policy that deliberately keeps secret from parents the plans or actions of their children, still minors, to begin gender “transitions.” Meanwhile, the school policy is to actively assist the transition. The policy itself therefore injures all the parents, who cannot know what is happening to their own children until the (purported) harm already is done. The injury is in the secrecy itself.

Niemeyer noted, accurately, that for at least a full century, the courts have recognized that parents have “primary responsibilities to determine what is in the minor children’s best interests with respect to their support, care, nurture, welfare, safety, and education.” Parental rights were ruled to be constitutionally fundamental in the 1923 case of Meyer v. Nebraska, and those rights were reaffirmed in a host of subsequent cases.

The secrecy itself injures the parents by taking them out of the loop, as Niemeyer notes that the school system is “taking over the rightful position of the Plaintiff Parents and intentionally hindering them from counseling their own minor children concerning an important decision that will have life long repercussions and from providing additional professional assistance to their children.”

Without delving into all the case law cited by Niemeyer in support of the parents’ standing, suffice it to say his dissenting opinion alone is clearly strong enough that the Supreme Court should have considered his arguments.

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Instead, the justices let the 4th Circuit decision go unexamined. Therefore, not only do these parents not even get to present their case itself to the courts, potentially all the way up to the Supreme Court, but they don’t even get to make their argument to the Supreme Court about why they qualify for access to the courts to start with.

If, in the meantime, the schools secretly help one of their children begin a gender transition, the parents won’t even know about the injury they want to challenge in court until the injury is well-nigh irreversible. The parents, thus, could lose before they are even allowed into the contest. That’s not good law, and it certainly isn’t justice.