In March of this year the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that should have been seismic for the American family. Yet while most of the conservative legal world is satisfied with them as victories, and that’s whatour two cohosts Hadley Arkes and Gerry Bradley will argue is problematic for mainstream legal conservatism. Before we hear from our cohosts, a brief primer on both cases.

First, in Mirabelli v. Bonta, California required schools tohide a child’s social gender transition—new names, new pronouns, the whole identity project—from the child’s own parents unless the child consented. The Court stepped in on the emergency docket and said those policies likely violateparents’ free-exercise and substantive-due-process rights, triggering a fascinating set of dueling opinions from Justices Barrett and Kagan, the subject of our discussion. Weeks later came Chiles v. Salazar in which  Colorado banned licensed counselors from any talk therapy that tries to help a minor align with biological sex or reduce same-sex attraction, while allowing the opposite. An 8–1 Court, in an opinionby Justice Gorsuch, called that move of Colorado’s viewpoint discrimination and demanded strict scrutiny. Both cases are indeed victories. But notice what they carefully avoided: any serious, substantive account of why parental authorityexists, what its natural boundaries are, and how far the state may go before it becomes a usurper. That is the central failing of modern conservative jurisprudence. We keep winning cases on process, speech, or thin historical tradition while refusing to grapple with the natural-law substance of thefamily itself.