By now, the war against parents by the political Left and the educational establishment must be labeled a deep sickness of the soul.

Witness yet another case, this one from Wisconsin, where a public school district actively “assists” children in experimenting with gender fluidity while refusing to tell parents about it. The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in the case, which has lingered for two and a half years in procedural limbo.

The legal complaint from a group of parents says the Madison Metropolitan School District “enables children, of any age, to socially transition to a different gender identity at school without parental notice or consent, requires all teachers to enable this transition, and then prohibits teachers from communicating with parents about this potentially life-altering choice without the child’s consent. Even more, the Madison School District directs its teachers and staff to deceive parents by reverting to the child’s birth name and corresponding pronouns whenever the child’s parents are nearby.”

The policy at issue is in all key aspects the same as one about which I wrote two weeks ago concerning a federal case in Kansas. The difference here is that rather than a teacher challenging the policy as a violation of her religious and speech liberties in federal court, it is the parents suing in a state court to allege a violation of their parental rights (and, again, their religious liberty as well).

Luke Berg, the deputy counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, argued the case for the parents today. He told me by phone that after hearing the justices’ questions, he is “very optimistic that we have a good shot at winning” if the state Supreme Court considers the merits rather than sends the case back to lower courts for more procedural wrangling.

For now, let’s set aside the parents’ powerful legal arguments and just consider the lack of basic human decency and morality involved in these school policies. Consciences should be staggered.

By what possible ethical construct could a school system order its teachers to deceive parents about anything intimately related to their children? Worse, what sort of twisted value system orders such deceit about something so fraught with consequences as the attempt to adopt a gender at odds with the child’s anatomy and chromosomal reality? Even worse than that, what sort of moral monsters actually encourage little children to pursue gender-bending and then help the children lie about it to their own parents while ordering teachers to echo the lies?

Even apart from one’s views about gender fluidity and transgenderism (or quasi-transgenderism) among adults, the inculcation of a strange new gender ideology in young children is outrageous. The school policy guide says that teachers who think they perceive gender uncertainty in young students should not just play along but actually work to “disrupt … the gender binary.” This actually runs counter to a leading transgender advocacy group, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which says that there is absolutely no consensus among health professionals about such “social transitions in early childhood.”

Children are impressionable. If school staff are deliberately tipping the scale in favor of gender transitions while keeping parents in the dark, a child may be led along a path that does lasting damage while giving the parents no recourse to help.

The combination of active disruption of biological gender identification with the deliberate insertion of dishonesty into the parent-child relationship is, well, evil.

That word, “evil,” is used advisedly. It should not be used lightly. It is not used lightly here. Yet it absolutely applies.