Apparently, the Framers Wanted You to Listen to Your Parents (or, “From the Junk Drawer to the Kitchen Sink, SCOTUS Style”)

For more than a century, the constitutional status of religious exemptions from childhood vaccine mandates sat quietly unresolved. States offered exemptions — or didn’t — as a matter of legislative discretion. No court had to rule on whether parental religious objection was a constitutional right or merely a policy option that legislators could extend or revoke. The ambiguity was functional: schools could plan, public health authorities could enforce mandates, and the system worked.

Then came Mahmoud v. Taylor (2024), in which the Supreme Court ruled that parents have a constitutional right to opt their children out of elementary school lessons involving LGBTQ+ storybooks. The Court’s logic — that classroom exposure to disfavored viewpoints constitutes a burden on parental religious exercise — collapsed a long-standing distinction between exposure to ideas and compulsion to affirm beliefs. More consequentially, it reclassified parental religious authority as a constitutional trump card, not a legislative grace.

Once you do that, everything that was living quietly in the ambiguous middle gets swept out of the junk drawer — and into the kitchen sink.

In the first post in this series, I described the junk drawer as the place where institutions put things they don’t want to classify — not because classification is impossible, but because leaving something unclassified is often the point. The lost key goes in the junk drawer because you’ll want to find it later, and the drawer is a known, stable location. Crucially, the junk drawer is private: you know it’s there, you chose to put things there, and you don’t have to show it to guests. It’s institutionally honest without being institutionally public. And the optimal junk drawer is essentially unique to the household — what belongs in the ambiguous middle depends on local conditions, local history, and the specific edge cases a particular institution is likely to face. Maggie Penn and I have been developing this framework as part of a broader project on classification systems and their social consequences.

The kitchen sink is different from the junk drawer in ways that matter. Nobody organizes a kitchen sink. After dinner, the directive is “clear the table and put it all in the sink” — not “make sure the silverware is in the corner cage and the plates are stacked neatly on the right.” Things end up in the kitchen sink because they all need to be washed — they are unified not by a classification decision but by a shared pending obligation. Unlike the junk drawer, which stores deliberately uncategorized items, the kitchen sink accumulates unacknowledgedly pending ones: things that sit there generating a vague obligation that nobody formally owns but everybody can see.

And that visibility is the other crucial difference. Everyone who walks into the kitchen knows immediately whether there are dirty dishes in the sink. A full sink is an admission, visible to all guests, that the household is not well organized at the moment. The junk drawer, by contrast, is a private institutional choice — you don’t show it to guests when they arrive. But the contents of a non-empty sink are even more informative than its mere fullness: the organization within a loaded kitchen sink tells you about recent activity, current stress, and institutional priorities under pressure in ways the junk drawer never could.

Look at what is currently sitting in SCOTUS’s kitchen sink. In December the Court ordered the 2nd Circuit to reconsider New York’s repeal of its religious vaccine exemption — passed in 2019 after the state’s worst measles outbreak in decades — in light of Mahmoud. In March it invoked Mahmoud to block California school pronoun policies. Last week a 4th Circuit panel split over whether the new doctrine requires striking down compulsory vaccination laws entirely. The dissenting judge could plausibly claim the Supreme Court’s own writings required that result. Vaccines, pronouns, compulsory education — they’re not in the sink because nobody could figure out where else to put them. They’re in the sink because they all now need to be washed under the new Mahmoud standard, and nobody has gotten to them yet. The Court handed downstream institutions a pile of dirty dishes without telling them where the soap is.

The result is that lower courts are divided, legislatures cannot plan, and public health authorities cannot enforce — not because the underlying policy questions changed, but because a partially specified rule was imposed from the top onto institutions whose locally calibrated junk drawers were doing real work. The new rule tells lower courts that parental religious authority is constitutionally significant, but not how significant, or in precisely which contexts. It is simultaneously over-determined at the top and under-determined at the edges. The institutions downstream don’t get a new, workable classification system. They get an incomplete mandate that generates more unresolvable edge cases than the original ambiguity did, now pre-loaded with constitutional stakes. A federally imposed classification system that is simultaneously over-determined at the top and under-determined at the edges doesn’t just displace local flexibility — it replaces a functional ambiguity with a dysfunctional one.

Judge Wilkinson, writing for the 4th Circuit majority, warned against “the accumulation of particulars” that would “eviscerate general and fundamental principles.” That is an excellent judge’s intuition about what happens when the junk drawer gets emptied into the sink: the danger is not any single displaced item, but the cascading accumulation of unacknowledged obligations that follows — each one sitting in plain sight, each one needing to be dealt with, none of them clearly anyone’s responsibility to resolve.

The sharpest observation in a Washington Post piece on the decision by Cardozo law professor Zalman Rothschild is historical. In 2000, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that treating parental rights as constitutionally fundamental would mean “ushering in a new regime of judicially prescribed, and federally prescribed, family law.” He was not making a policy argument — he was making a structural one. Keeping parental rights unclassified as fundamental preserved the layered institutional flexibility that allows states, school boards, and public health authorities to maintain their own calibrated junk drawers.

The junk drawer exists for a reason. Emptying it into the sink isn’t progress — it’s just a different kind of mess, and one that everybody can see.

With that, I leave you with this.

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