His parental rights agenda, he said, reaches beyond creed. And as more people embrace those ideas, he believes his patient strategic mantra — “take as much ground as you can take at the moment” — is paying off.
“I don’t want to say it’s my personal legacy,” he said. “It’s the movement’s legacy. Have I been a key player in the movement? Absolutely. It would be false modesty to say anything other than that.”
Police officers separate protesters and counterprotesters in June outside Saticoy Elementary School in Los Angeles, which has become a flash point for Pride Month events across California. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
‘We all come to fight’
In 1980, the oldest of Farris’s 10 children, Christy, began attending kindergarten at an elementary school in eastern Washington, giving Farris and his wife, Vickie, their first and only experience as parents of a public school student. It lasted about two months.
After that, they moved to a different part of the state and enrolled Christy at a private Christian school. But even there, Farris said, they became concerned their daughter was being unduly influenced by other 6-year-olds. In 1982, they began home-schooling, part of a vanguard of evangelical Christians rejecting the secularization of American society. Vickie, the family’s primary educator, would devote the next 33 years of her life to lessons at the dining room table.
Home schooling at the time was rare, its legality uncertain. The Farris family, like others, confronted suspicion: Farris said a neighbor once asked one of his daughters, then about 6, if she was learning how to read. In Farris’s telling, the girl responded by reading aloud from the front page of the newspaper.
In many states, school administrators and prosecutors viewed home education as truancy or even child neglect. After repeatedly hearing from parents accused in such cases, Farris, a graduate of Gonzaga University School of Law, hit upon the idea of a “home-school union” of families to share court costs. In the spring of 1983 - a few months before Farris moved his family to Northern Virginia so he could work for the conservative Concerned Women for America - he co-founded the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).
The basic idea, according to Farris: “You touch one of us, we all come to fight.”
Though it frequently worked on behalf of Christians, the association also represented Black Muslims, and atheists.
“From my theological perspective, God gave those children to them, not to me,” Farris said. “And I’m going to defend their right.”
Over the next decade, Farris and the HSLDA were at the forefront of courtroom and political battles that eventually led not only to the legalization of home schooling in every state but also to notably lax oversight for home educators in much of the country.
He also showed a keen interest in reshaping the public schools his clients were fleeing.
In the early 1980s, Farris argued that a high school English class was promoting a religion of “secular humanism” by teaching “The Learning Tree,” a novel by Black filmmaker Gordon Parks. His efforts on behalf of his client to have the book removed from the curriculum were rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
But his most famous confrontation with public school officials came during a 1986 trial in Tennessee. His clients were born-again Christians who argued their children should not be required to read “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and other material that they said undermined their religious beliefs.
A federal judge agreed, ordering that the children could opt out of the school’s reading lessons. But the decision in the case, Mozert v. Hawkins, was reversed by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that merely exposing children to ideas did not violate their rights. When the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, Farris was crushed.
In a 1987 speech, he called public schools “very, very dangerous” and “per se unconstitutional” because of the worldview they conveyed to students, according to “Battleground,” a 1993 book about the case.
“Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act,” he said. “What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion, no matter what.”
Farris’s uncompromising positions gained him a following among conservative Christians, who helped him win the Republican nomination for Virginia lieutenant governor in 1993. But his views on education — especially his assertion in a 1990 book that public schools are “a godless monstrosity” — became a drag on his general election campaign. Prominent Republicans refused to endorse him. Democratic incumbent Don Beyer’s campaign tirelessly mocked Farris’s courtroom arguments against “The Wizard of Oz.”
In a good year for the GOP — Republicans won both the governor’s and attorney general’s races by double-digit margins — Farris lost by nine points.
But Farris wasn’t finished. Soon after his election loss, he began incorporating his arguments into a cause destined to dominate Republican political discourse: parental rights.
People take campaign materials as they leave a 2022 parents’ rights rally in St. Clair Shores, Mich. (Emily Elconin for The Washington Post)
‘A right which comes from God’
On an October morning in 1995, Farris, then 44, sat before a House Judiciary subcommittee and urged legislators to pass the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act. The bill had been introduced by conservatives in Congress, but Farris, as he acknowledged in his testimony, was one of its authors.
He wanted Congress to decree that parental rights are fundamental, according them the same high level of deference that courts show to freedom of speech and of worship. Confusion abounded among judges over how they should balance the rights of parents against the duties of school officials and social workers, Farris contended.
“We are simply clarifying a right that exists — a right which comes from God,” Farris said.
To its opponents, the bill was far from an innocuous clarification, and the stakes for kids were potentially huge.
The law could shield abusive parents and wreak havoc in schools, children’s welfare advocates testified. Then-Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) predicted a barrage of lawsuits against schools from religious parents over subjects and materials they found offensive. Melvin Watt, an African American congressman from North Carolina, worried about the bill’s implications for the perspectives of racial and religious minorities.
“Having seen for all the years of my life how the curriculum in classes in schools has been pretty much devoid of any experiences in this nation from the Black side of America, it is to me kind of scary,” Watt said.
The bill never made it out of committee.
 Passage from a proposed 1995 Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act in Congress. (Unspecified) |
 Wording from the proposed 1995 Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act. (Unspecified) |
The parental rights movement won a more modest victory later that year when Michigan legislators adopted a bill Farris helped draft. But in 1996, the heavily publicized defeat of a Colorado ballot measure that would have enshrined parental rights in the state’s constitution seemed to be the movement’s death knell, recalled Greg Erken, a conservative activist who worked on the Colorado campaign.
“As so often happens in politics, people thought it was a loser rather than a winner,” Erken said.
Not Farris. For several years, he receded from politics, founding Patrick Henry College — the country’s first catering specifically to home-schoolers — in 2000.
Michael Farris, left, stands on the balcony outside the president's office of Patrick Henry College at its dedication in 2000. Jim Gilmore, then the governor of Virginia, is beside him. (Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post)
Then, in 2007, Farris and other home-schooling leaders created a new parental rights group. Parentalrights.org, later joined by the Parental Rights Foundation, would never achieve its loftiest objective: an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring the fundamental right of parents to “direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.”
It was in state capitols — not the halls of Congress — that the organizations were destined to find success.
In 2013, Farris wrote a Virginia bill closely modeled on his proposed constitutional amendment. He took it to Brenda Pogge, a Republican state delegate who had home-schooled her own children and volunteered on his lieutenant governor’s campaign. After some revisions, the bill passed the Republican-controlled state legislature.
The new law was “kind of a sleeper,” Pogge recalled in a recent interview. That changed dramatically eight years later, when an up-and-coming Republican gubernatorial candidate began to invoke parents’ rights on the campaign trail. Farris said he was among those who urged Youngkin to promise “to get rid of all the politics in the public schools.”
“Say that a thousand times,” Farris recalled advising Youngkin. “You’ll be governor of Virginia.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) speaks to parents at Crestview Elementary School in Henrico County with state Sen. Siobhan S. Dunnavant (R-Henrico) in August. (Gregory S. Schneider/The Washington Post)
Youngkin acknowledged Farris’s counsel during his campaign and said he has continued to offer valuable input since he won office.
“Mike has been just an incredible contributor to protecting parents’ rights and advancing this whole cause,” Youngkin said in an interview.
But some doubt that Farris and his political allies truly believe that the rights of all parents are worth protecting.
In July, Youngkin once again cited the 2013 state law when he overhauled policies on how schools should deal with transgender students. Trans kids are now supposed to use single-occupant bathrooms or those matching their biological sex. School officials are not to address them by their preferred names or pronouns without a parent’s written request — and when parents do make such a request, the new policy states, teachers aren’t obligated to respect their wishes.
Labeling that a victory for parents’ rights angers Laura Jane Cohen, the mother of a recent high school graduate who identifies as transgender nonbinary.
“Whose rights? What parents? Who are these people that you claim to be representing? It’s not me,” said Cohen, a Fairfax County School Board member and Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. “It is offensive to me, the idea that this is supposedly a parents’ rights movement. Because it’s not any parents I know.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), upper right, and other GOP House members hold a press event to highlight the introduction of the “Parents Bill of Rights” in March. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
‘Attacking the Christian worldview’
While he has fought in court for parents across the political and religious spectrum, Farris said he doesn’t believe that parents should have the right to help children transition to a different gender.
“Parents who engage in a behavior that causes long-term harm to their children — that crosses the barrier of what parental rights protects,” he said.
The best way to accommodate different ideas about how schools should handle such issues is to give parents as much choice as possible in how their kids are educated, Farris said, through universal voucher programs like those created in a handful of conservative states.
It’s a goal he shares with some powerful allies.
In May 2021, Farris attended a gathering of conservative activists at which former attorney general William P. Barr denounced public schools’ “indoctrination with a secular belief system” that is “antithetical to the beliefs and values of traditional, God-centered religion.”
Farris was approached after the speech by Peter Bohlinger, a Southern California real estate magnate who helps lead Ziklag, a group devoted to expanding Christian influence over American culture and government.
Membership in the organization — named after a town in the Bible that David used to organize raids against enemies of the ancient Israelites — is restricted to people with a net worth of at least $25 million, according to a page on Ziklag’s website that was viewed by The Post but has since been made private. The group envisions schools that welcome prayer and “a conservative, biblical worldview in science, humanities and the arts,” according to a Ziklag document that was among several recordings and other materials obtained by Documented and shared with The Post.
Neither Bohlinger nor several other Ziklag representatives responded to detailed questions about the recordings and documents.
As Bohlinger later recounted in one video, he approached Farris — then head of the Alliance Defending Freedom — about using the courts to achieve a far-reaching resolution to their concerns about public education.
Several weeks later, Farris was on the call with Ziklag members to make his pitch.
“Parents are being forced to choose: either pay for themselves for a form of education that is consistent with [their] moral worldview or send their kids into a system where they will be deliberately undermined,” Farris said, adding that school officials were “directly attacking the Christian worldview.”
It was a version of the argument he had been making for 40 years, but the stakes were almost inconceivably larger. Hanging in the balance were not the preferences of a tiny community of home-schoolers but the fate of tens of millions of children in America’s public schools.
Farris had recently set up a Center for Parental Rights at ADF. Bohlinger laid out the plan on the donor call: ADF lawyers would file lawsuits they hoped would lead to a Supreme Court ruling that declared a constitutional right to vouchers for private and home schools. As a result, Ziklag’s education committee estimated in one document, the public education system could lose about $238 billion a year — a third of its total funding.
“Our goal is to take down the education system as we know it today,” Bohlinger said in one of the videos reviewed by The Post.
At a Ziklag gathering in June 2021, Peter Bohlinger answered a question about how the group would take on the “Goliath” of the nation’s public education system. (Video: Obtained by Documented)
Farris declined to discuss his Ziklag conversations with The Post, saying they were confidential.
ADF received a $444,249 grant from Ziklag in 2021, according to tax records — close to the $500,000 Farris requested. Ziklag gave ADF another $514,491 the following year, tax records show.
ADF has filed several lawsuits in state courts challenging schools’ instruction on racism or gender transition policies. Among the plaintiffs are Virginia parents arguing they should be reimbursed for education costs after pulling their children out of public schools they say taught an anti-racist curriculum. ADF has also filed amicus briefs in federal lawsuits brought by its allies asserting that school policies on gender transition are unconstitutional.
None of those lawsuits ask the courts to establish a universal right to school vouchers. ADF declined an interview request but issued a statement saying that “strategies to protect parental rights are constantly evolving.”
“Mr. Farris has worked on parental rights issues for many years and accomplished much in this area,” the group said. “ADF does not share all his views and is not pursuing all his theories.”
Farris told The Post that ADF’s lawsuits reflect “a more modest approach” than he once envisioned but could help lay a foundation for his larger goals. “I don’t think that the ground is ready for moving as rapidly as I had hoped originally,” he said.
 Parents demand the right to opt their children out of books that feature LGBTQ+ characters in Montgomery County, Md., schools in June. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) |
Legal experts said that even if the Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down the school policies being challenged, it is unlikely the justices would upend America’s educational landscape by declaring a constitutional right to public funding for private and home schooling.
“I don’t see five votes for that,” said Douglas Laycock, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Virginia. “There might not be any votes for that.”
Farris himself sought to manage expectations on his call with Ziklag donors, saying that even with the court’s favorable composition they faced a hard — and possibly long — road to victory.
But so had home-schoolers during their legal battles decades earlier. Those fights had eventually led to broad acceptance of parents’ right to educate their children at home.
Now the time had come, Farris argued, for another revolution in public opinion — not toward home-schoolers but toward the education system they had left behind. Whether or not the lawsuits succeeded, he told the donors, their work would have an important consequence.
“More and more people,” Farris said, “will be upset about what’s going on in the public schools.”
Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report. Story editing by Lynda Robinson. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Video editing by Amber Ferguson. Design by Courtney Beesch. Copy editing by Thomas Heleba and Shay Quillen. Project editing by Jay Wang.
By Emma Brown
Emma Brown is an investigative reporter and author of To Raise a Boy. She joined The Washington Post in 2009 and has previously written obituaries and covered education.
By Peter Jamison
Peter Jamison is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post.
