A West Virginia family is asking the Supreme Court to settle a question that federal appeals courts have answered in sharply different ways: how far do recent rulings protecting parental rights reach when a public school policy collides with religious conviction? The petition from Krystle and Anthony Perry tests whether a state vaccine mandate that grants secular exemptions but no religious one can survive constitutional review. The answer could shape how courts treat parental rights in public education for years, including on questions of gender and sexuality.

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From Just the News:

Krystle and Anthony Perry are petitioning the Supreme Court to review an appeals court’s refusal to block The Mountain State’s requirement that their daughter be “fully vaccinated” to remotely attend the West Virginia Virtual Academy, with all learning at home, violating their religious objections to “vaccinations developed using aborted fetal cells.”

Krystle Perry is the “sole breadwinner” and Anthony is “totally disabled,” so he can’t perform “all the duties of homeschooling,” Niemeyer wrote. “The Perrys thus faced potential criminal prosecution” under West Virginia law for failure to educate their daughter unless they violated their religious beliefs by fully vaccinating her to keep attending free virtual school.

The high court must put down a mutiny in the lower courts on Mahmoud, the petition says. “The misreading is taking root and growing. This Court should intervene now before the lower courts bear more bad fruit.”

The dispute arrives as the lower courts have splintered over the reach of two recent Supreme Court actions. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, decided in June 2025, the Court sided with religious parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who objected to elementary school instruction on gender and sexuality and asked to be notified and permitted to opt their children out. In Mirabelli, an emergency order this spring, the Court reinstated an injunction blocking California’s policy of withholding students’ gender transitions from their parents.

The Perrys’ attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom argue those decisions establish a broad principle: strict scrutiny applies whenever a government requirement substantially burdens a parent’s religious duty to raise a child, even when the disputed activity is not itself religious. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit disagreed in April, upholding West Virginia’s mandate under rational basis review. The state exempts homeschooled students and those in learning pods or microschools, but the panel majority concluded the Perrys had not shown their daughter’s desire to attend the virtual academy was religiously motivated. Judge Paul Niemeyer dissented, noting the family’s financial constraints and warning that his colleagues had ignored Mirabelli.

The same legal team has filed a separate suit seeking to extend Mahmoud and Mirabelli to public schools and athletic associations that allow males identifying as girls to compete in girls’ sports. Democracy Forward, the litigation group chaired by Marc Elias, has countered that conservative organizations are attempting to stretch Mahmoud far beyond what the Court decided, and says it is preparing a report on those efforts. A related case is also pending: an Orthodox Jewish man in Ohio, Daniel Grand, is challenging his town’s requirement that he obtain a permit to pray with others in his own home.

Parents, not the state, carry the God-given responsibility to raise and teach their children, and scripture is explicit that this duty includes their spiritual formation. When governments create exemptions for secular convenience while denying them to religious conviction, they send a message that faith is a second-class reason for a decision, which is precisely the kind of burden the First Amendment exists to prevent. The Perrys’ objection to vaccines developed using cells from aborted children also touches a question of conscience that many Christian families share, and no family should be forced to choose between violating that conscience and facing prosecution for how they educate their child.

Let us pray for the Perry family and for the justices as they weigh this petition, and for courts to uphold the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.

How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.

(Excerpt from Just the News. Photo Credit: Soho A Studio via Canva Teams).