A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed Idaho to proceed with enforcement of a new law aimed at prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors.
The decision overrides two lower federal courts that had upheld an injunction against the law as litigation over the merits continues.
The decision was backed by all six of the high court’s conservative members; the three liberal justices would have kept the law on hold.
The court did, however, allow the parents and two children who brought the case against the law to continue to obtain treatments during litigation. The children, who are not named in the suit, are said to be seeking puberty blockers and estrogen, which the families and their doctors say are critical for mental health.
In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote this was a “troubling bid for this Court’s early intervention,” and that Idaho asked the court “to wade into the middle of ongoing lower court proceedings to weigh in on a single query concerning only one aspect of a preliminary determination by the District Court: whether the temporary relief that the District Court has afforded pending its review of the merits sweeps too broadly.”
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“In my view, we should resist being conscripted into service when our involvement amounts to micromanaging the lower courts’ exercise of their discretionary authority in the midst of active litigation,” Jackson wrote.
In a joint statement, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Idaho called the ruling an “awful result.”
“While the court’s ruling today importantly does not touch upon the constitutionality of this law, it is nonetheless an awful result for transgender youth and their families across the state,” the joint statement read. “Today’s ruling allows the state to shut down the care that thousands of families rely on while sowing further confusion and disruption. Nonetheless, today’s result only leaves us all the more determined to defeat this law in the courts entirely, making Idaho a safer state to raise every family.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Source: abc news
