Bob Unruh editorialized in a Feb. 17 WorldNetDaily article:
The justices on the Supreme Court are being asked to intervene in a case in which a child was taken from his parents when their religious beliefs “distressed” him.
According to Becket, the Catholic couple, from Indiana, is asking to hold the state accountable for taking their son and keeping him.
Their offense?
They would not refer to their son with pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biological sex.
Leftist bureaucrats across the nation, under Joe Biden’s leadership, have tried to make promoting transgenderism mandatory, even for parents. They fiddle with the regulations and rules until they can define NOT promoting transgenderism as child abuse, and then use their own definitions to take confused and troubled children away from concerned parents.
The state of Indiana “investigated” Mary and Jeremy Cox, and then took the child.
The state kept him after determining that they disagreed with the child, motivated by their religious beliefs, about human sexuality.
Because Unruh quotes only the Coxes’ attorneys, the right-wing Becket Fund, he is denying his readers the full story. Early reports indicted that the Coxes were verbally and emotionally abusive to the child, using rude and demeaning language regarding the teen’s transgender identity — at one point saying that the the child’s new female identity “sing rude and demeaning language regarding the teen’s transgender identity.” The child had been in therapy but the parents had discontinued it; the child had also developed an eating disorder, and a case manager stated that the child “would be more likely to have thoughts of self-harm and suicide if [Child] were to return to the family home due to mental and emotional abuse.” A court then issued a finding that the child needed to be removed from the home due to the Coxes’ “inability, refusal or neglect to provide shelter, care, and/or supervision at the present time.” The Indiana Court of Appeals later agreed that “this is an extreme case where Child has reacted to a disagreement with the Parents” in such a way that “seriously endangers Child’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being,” adding that while the Coxes “have the right to exercise their religious beliefs…they do not have the right to exercise them in a manner that causes physical or emotional harm” to their child.
By contrast, Unruh hyped only that the abuse allegations were later dropped but not the statements behind them and only briefly mention the child’s eating disorder which disproves his assertion that the Coxes lost custody of their child solely because “they would not refer to their son with pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biological sex.” He also uncritically repeated a quote from the parents: “This is what every parent is afraid of. We love our son and wanted to care for him, but the state of Indiana robbed us of that opportunity by taking him from our home and banning us from speaking to him about gender.”
When the Supreme Court refused to take up the case a month later, Unruh huffed that the court “abandoned” the parents in a March 19 article, repeating many of the same faulty talking points:
When state officials in Indiana took a son away from his parents because their religious beliefs “distressed” him, they asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
Those justices now have abandoned them.
[…]The [Gateway Pundit] report said the Supreme Court abandoned the parents without any comment.
Unruh claimed that “The parents previously had sought therapeutic care for their son over his gender dysphoria and an eating disorder” — but censored the fact that they had discontinued therapy because they “disagreed with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria her child received from multiple mental health professionals.” He also failed to mention the fact that the child is currently over 18 — and, in fact, had aged out of the system by early 2023, when the mother testified in favor of an proposed Indiana bill that would stop courts from intervening when a transgender child is at risk of suicide. The child has since cut off all contact with the parents.
Unruh again quoted only the Becket Fund, in addition to using the discredited Gateway Pundit as a source, which allowed the false framing that religious discrimination, and not allegedly abusive behavior by the parents, was why the parents lost custody of the child.
This is not the first time WND has misled about custody issues regarding a transgender child. We documented when columnist Michael Brown similarly falsely tried to construct a religious discrimination narrative around a similar case when, in fact, the parents repeatedly violated confidentiality orders by running to right-wing media to complain and refused to permit the state to send the child to an out-of-state facility for treatment of suicidal thoughts (this framing was repeated by the Media Research Center).