Pam Bondi Moves to Combat ‘Disturbing Trend’ Undermining Parental Rights

Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Wednesday to champion parental rights at schools and monitor attempts to undermine them.

“Recent years have seen a disturbing trend in which state and local authorities have brought radical gender and racial ideology into our public schools while suppressing dissenting viewpoints,” Bondi warned in a memo to the division. “Worse still, they have ignored, dismissed, and even retaliated against concerned parents who speak out against these morally and factually bankrupt ideologies and in defense of their own children.”

Bondi directed the Civil Rights Division “to be alert to violations of parental rights and First Amendment liberties in educational settings.” She also directed U.S. Attorneys to “work with federal, state, and local partners to identify and respond to credible threats against parents and violations of their federal rights.”

She noted that “parents have a fundamental right to direct the moral and religious education of their children. Schools receiving public funds must ensure compliance with federal protections, including mechanisms for parents to exempt their children from instruction that conflicts with the family’s sincerely held religious beliefs, such as content related to sexuality and gender identity.”

Supreme Court Precedent

Bondi cited the case Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), in which the Supreme Court held that Maryland parents were entitled to a preliminary injunction, allowing them to opt their kids out of instruction that utilizes LGBTQ books that Montgomery County Public Schools mandated.

“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “A government cannot condition the benefit of free public education on parents’ acceptance of such instruction.”

Bondi’s memorandum noted that “compelled exposure to such materials over parental objections may violate federal protections.” She warned that “any attempt to burden these rights will face scrutiny and action from the Department of Justice.”

The attorney general also noted a “rise in abusive conduct by government actors against parents exercising their constitutional freedoms.”

“Let me be clear: When school board members, administrators, and other government officials threaten law-abiding parents, they can and will be held accountable,” she warned. “Conspiring to violate constitutional rights is a crime under federal law.”

Bondi’s Parental Rights Sea Change

Bondi’s memo represents a sea change in how the Justice Department considers these issues.

Under President Joe Biden, the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division not only championed LGBTQ activism but also worked with an organization that attacked parental rights groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center puts parental rights organizations on a “hate map” with Ku Klux Klan chapters, claiming parental rights groups are part of the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy” in America.

Then-SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in a 2021 donor meeting that “many agencies in the new Biden administration” reached out to “solicit our expertise” to “help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat.”

Kristen Clarke, former assistant attorney general for civil rights, planned to meet with Huang in 2023, The Daily Signal previously reported.

Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship. The Biden White House welcomed SPLC leaders and staff at least 18 times. The Justice Department received a briefing from the SPLC shortly after it added Moms for Liberty to the “hate map” in June 2023. The FBI cited the SPLC in its notorious memo on “radical-traditional Catholics.”

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