Gilford School District Lawsuit – Dismissed Due to “Lack of Standing”

My Gilford school district lawsuit has been dismissed due to “lack of standing”- Summary:

ORDER ON DEFENDANTS’ MOTION TO DISMISS

The plaintiff David “Skip” Murphy brought this action for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief against the defendants, Robert Gadomski, Gretchen Gandini, Karen Thurston, Jeanin Onos, Kyle Sanborn, Audra Kelly, SAU #73, and the Gilford School District (collectively “the defendants”).1 (Court index #1.) The defendants now move to dismiss the complaint. (Court index #5.) The plaintiff objects. (Court index # 9.) Based on the parties’ arguments by pleading, the relevant facts, and the applicable law, the defendants’ motion to dismiss is GRANTED.

I had sued on two points of the Gilford School Board’s Policy JBAB (Transgender and non-conforming students):

• That the School Board, given that NH is a Dillon’s Rule State, does not have the Power to grant a new Right to a minor child to coerce the speech of others (“a transgender student has the Right to be called by their preferred pronouns and name”)
• That the School Board does not have the Power to grant itself the Power to tell staff to lie to Parents, either by commission or omission, about the transgender status of their child while on school grounds.

When my lawyer sent over the ruling, I, of course, started to read it and I knew that once I saw this phrase, this inning was over:

Analysis

The defendants move to dismiss the complaint on three grounds: (1) the plaintiff lacks standing; (2) there exists no private right of action for violation of the two federal law claims; and (3) the matter is not ripe for review. (See generally Mot. Dismiss.) The plaintiff objects. (See generally Pl.’s Obj.)

Translation – the merits of the case, the breaching of the Constitutional (both US and NH) stricture on Government to private Free Speech, and that lying to Parents is illegal, were not even discussed.  It’s that I, nor my son (my adopted grandson) have suffered no “harm” to this point. While I claimed that my free speech was chilled because of the presence of Policy JBAB instructing me to use only that speech towards transgender individual that the Government had decreed, that was not held in high esteem.  Yet, while Superintendent Beitler told me that “should” was mandatory, the judge did not take that into account.

And this, I found to my second point, is a circular, Catch-22 illogical reasoning for denying status:

The plaintiff also asserts violations of his parental rights. Specifically, the plaintiff challenges that the Policy allows the defendants to “purposefully withhold[ ] information from parents directly related to their minor children’s support, care, nurture, welfare, safety, and education” and “withhold[ ] information with respect to their children’s desire to consider becoming or identifying as transgender…” (Compl. ¶¶ 76, 85.) The Policy provides, in part, “[s]chool personnel should not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status or gender non-conforming presentation to others, including parents. . .” (Id. at ¶ 37; see also Pl.’s Ex. 1) The Policy, therefore, explicitly applies to transgender and gender non-conforming students. Indeed, the plaintiff does not allege that he has a transgender or gender non-conforming child in the school to whom this policy would apply. Accordingly, his parental rights are not implicated by the Policy.

Well, how would I ever know?  If my child is hiding it at home, and the school district, knowing that he is “presenting” as transgender but refuses to tell me, how could I allege anything?  That’s the point – the school is refusing to let me know.  THEY have decided, IMHO, that their “parental right” has now superseded my legal right to raise my child as I wish.

Now, there is the Exeter lawsuit where SAU16 “harmed” a freshman football player who maintained that his religious beliefs as a Catholic were violated because he refused to call he a she/she a he in a conversation with another student that is pro-transgender (but not transgender himself)  to which the school retaliated and revoked his ability to play in a game for “bullying” (where the court filing by the school defined bullying as merely not using the proscribed pronouns as set forth by the school).

There is also the Manchester School Board lawsuit by a Mom who found out that school staff not only were lying to her by omission in not informing her of her daughter’s transitioning to a boy but found out that staff were counseling her daughter to do so.

In both cases, the Parents have “standing” as they can point to something that invoked JBAB whereas I only recognized, from the get-go that this policy itself has no standing before any NH State Statute providing for the Power that the Gilford School Board claims for itself.

Because the court finds that the plaintiff lacks standing, the defendants are entitled to dismissal of all claims.

However, this isn’t over. I pointed out the Catch-22 error above in the judge’s reasoning as well as a couple of other areas of misapplied and dubious reasoning and he agreed – there is enough there for an appeal.

And this time, I’m going to, once again, use Alinsky’s Rules to force a couple of issues (“RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.“”)

Order: