THE DISSIDENT DAD DAILY – Nov. 20th - Vol.5
They’ll tolerate your faith, just not your kids
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1. Supreme Court Circles The Question: Do Parents Still Own Their Kids?
The Supreme Court is being asked, again, to answer what should be the easiest question in the world: are children the responsibility of their parents or of the state school counselor.
In Massachusetts, a middle school quietly “socially transitioned” a child against mom and dad’s wishes, using a new name and pronouns in secret, then defended it as just another “administrative” decision, like picking the lunch menu. A federal court said parents have no constitutional right to know any of this, because schools need “flexibility” to meet “diverse student needs.” Now the family is asking the high court to step in.
So that is where we are. One side believes that hiding life-altering identity decisions from parents is “inclusive.” The other believes that if you cut mom and dad out of their own child’s life, you are no longer doing education. You are running a rival religion.
2. Maine Court: Mom Can Have Custody, Just Not Her Faith
In Maine, a Christian mother is literally banned by court order from taking her 12 year old daughter to church or even reading the Bible with her during her parenting time. The judge handed the girl’s secular father veto power over “any religious philosophy or the Bible in general,” because faithful preaching at a Calvary Chapel might cause “psychological harm.”
Liberty Counsel has taken the case to the state’s high court. They argue the obvious: if a “fit” parent can be stripped of the right to bring her child to church simply because a judge dislikes the doctrine, then every believing parent in the country is on notice. The state can tolerate you. It just reserves the right to take your kids’ soul out of your hands if you get too serious about it.
This is not a fringe case. This is the regime saying out loud what it usually tries to do through policy memos and guidance documents.
3. Colorado Tells Catholic Preschools: Conform Or Get Out
Out in Colorado, Catholic preschools are asking the Supreme Court to stop the state from locking them out of a “universal” preschool program unless they sign on to LGBT nondiscrimination language that contradicts Catholic teaching. Two parishes say they have already closed schools while secular and progressive schools down the street get taxpayer funded students.
The Tenth Circuit shrugged and said the state can do that. If you want to be part of the program, drop the parts of your faith the bureaucracy dislikes. That is the real rule: every religion is welcome, as long as it behaves like the state church of Diversity.
If the Supreme Court ducks this or upholds it, the message is simple. Christian families will pay taxes into a system that openly punishes them for believing what every generation before them believed.
4. The Numbers People Feel In Their Bones: Affordability Is Shot
CBS, of all places, has a very honest write-up on what dads already know when they sit down with the bills. Food prices are still up more than 18 percent since 2022. Housing now requires a six-figure income in many places if you want to stay under that old 30 percent of income rule. Child care clears 13 grand a year on average and often costs more than rent. Utilities are up double digits in a single year.
The central point: the “inflation is coming down” line is statistical gaslighting. Families do not live in charts. They live in grocery aisles, daycare invoices, and health insurance premiums that jump 18 percent in a year. People feel poorer because, in real life, they are.
So when you hear happy talk about the “soft landing,” remember that the plane is landing on your kid’s future, not on Wall Street’s.
5. One Good Trend: Parents Finally Turning On Smartphones At School
RealClearEducation has a solid piece arguing that parents should stop sabotaging the new “bell to bell” cellphone bans and actually back them. Thirty five states now have some form of school phone restriction. Teachers say classrooms are calmer. Kids’ brains are less scrambled. Early research backs that up.
The author’s blunt about it. Phones are not neutral tools. They pump porn, gambling, self harm content, and permanent distraction into a kid’s nervous system. Schools that lock them up during the day are not attacking parental rights. They are doing basic shepherding that used to be common sense. The challenge is at home, where kids still fall asleep worshiping the glowing rectangle.
This is one place where parents and even some state officials are, for once, rowing in the right direction.
Commentary
The Machine Wants Jurisdiction Over Your Kids. That’s The Whole Ballgame.
If you stare at today’s stories long enough, you see the real fight. It is not “right vs left” in the way cable news wants it. It is a turf war over jurisdiction. Who has the rightful say over your children.
On one side you have mom and dad. People who lose sleep over fevers, work extra hours to pay for cleats, and will probably die younger because they spent a decade waking up at 2 a.m. with crying toddlers. On the other side you have judges, administrators, program managers, and “experts” who will never meet your kid but insist they have final say over what your kid believes, how your kid identifies, and where your kid spends six or eight hours a day.
Look at Maine. A judge decided that a Bible-teaching church was a mental health hazard, so he sliced Christian formation out of a girl’s life like a tumor. He did this to a fit mother. No abuse, no cult compound, just a normal believer taking her kid to church. The order might as well say: “Your child may love Jesus, but only when the court approves the liturgy.”
Then you have Colorado telling Catholic preschools they can only be part of a “universal” program if they renounce Catholic teaching on sex. This is not neutral government. This is the state running its own theology and punishing rival creeds. We pretend it is about funding formulas and nondiscrimination language. It is really about whether the Christian understanding of man and woman, marriage and children, is still allowed to shape an institution that touches kids.
Even the cellphone story, which looks positive, carries the same theme. For a decade, the regime pushed screens into every corner of childhood. Tablets in kindergarten. Chromebooks for every student. Social media as a rite of passage. Now the damage is so bad that some officials are sprinting to clean it up. Good. But the honest question is: who gave Silicon Valley the right to colonize childhood in the first place. Who told a thirteen year old she has to live online.
Pile the affordability crisis on top of this. When food, housing, child care, and health care all spike at once, that is not just “economic headwinds.” It is soft coercion. It tells families: do not have a third kid, you cannot afford it. Do not live on one income, that would be irresponsible. Hand the baby to the daycare and both of you get back to the office. The machine gets your time, your fertility, your attention, and eventually your children’s loyalty.
My view is simple. Jurisdiction belongs closest to the child. First God. Then the family. Then the parish and real community. The state is supposed to be on the outer ring, protecting the inner ones. Instead it has climbed inside the circle and started issuing orders.
The dissident move is not to scream at the TV. It is to quietly reclaim jurisdiction. Plant your kids deep in the faith. Guard their phones. Pull them, as much as you can, out of systems that treat them as raw material. Build real community around the altar and the dinner table. Make the state and the corporations the outsiders again.
If enough dads do that, the machine does not know what to do with us.
Thanks for reading and God Bless,
Greg @ The Dissident Dad