When the State becomes the parent: On Massachusetts and the Kutzko case

In recent decades, the state has increasingly inserted itself into domains once reserved for parents, often overriding parental judgment and values. Schools, social-service agencies, and an elaborate therapeutic bureaucracy have weakened the ability of parents—especially Catholic parents—to raise their own children according to their faith.

The 2026 case of Joseph and Arlene Kutzko in Massachusetts illustrates this problem.

Their daughter Sophie was socially “transitioned” to a male gender at school without the parents’ knowledge. She was 15 years old when she was counseled secretly at school about her gender dysphoria—without her parents’ knowledge—by school counselors. Those counselors supported Sophie’s gender transition even though they knew that her Catholic parents opposed gender ideology on religious grounds. When Sophie told her school counselors that her parents were against her gender transitioning, school officials apparently redefined any such reluctance to allow gender transitioning as a form of abuse.

They contacted the state authorities, who then removed Sophie from the parents’ home and placed her in state custody.

Once Sophie was in state custody, her state placement encouraged gender transition, sought judicial approval to administer testosterone over the parents’ objection, and then placed Sophie, a biological female, in a boys’ dormitory. There, she was denied religious accommodations—even though Sophie had been, in her father’s words, “the devoutest of devout Catholics before they got ahold of her.”

The Kutzko case is not an isolated tragedy but a revealing example of a governing philosophy in which the state assumes the role once held by the family, imposing the state’s answers to the most important questions about personhood and meaning.

Over the past two years, the State of Massachusetts has been facilitating Sophie’s “gender transitioning” without her parents’ permission. Claiming that Sophie felt “unsafe in her home,” the Massachusetts Department of Children Youth Service in Massachusetts removed her from the home, claiming an abusive household. According to Vernadette Broyles, the parents’ attorney, the “state can retain custody pending a hearing on whether there’s unfitness, but they have long overshot the deadline for having a hearing; this case is going way over time.”

Broyles, the president and general counsel of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, told reporters, “DCF, for whatever reason, has taken the position that they have total authority over this child even while the parents’ rights have not been terminated,” Broyles said. “There has never been a finding of unfitness against these parents.”

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey attempted to deflect the state’s role in gender transitioning by telling reporters that Sophie was removed from the Kutzko home because of “criminal charges”—not for gender transitioning. Healey was referring to allegations that Sophie had told her school counselor she felt “unsafe” in her home. State custody has continued, and the gender transitioning has proceeded despite the fact that the parents were thoroughly investigated and have not been found to be unfit or given permission for their daughter to change her gender.

This kind of transfer of parental authority emerged from a deliberate ideological shift in how modern institutions understand their roles. Beginning in the late twentieth century, the state shifted to a more intrusive model of governance—one that assumed that educated bureaucrats, counselors, teachers, and social service providers understood children’s needs better than families. In fact, parents began to be viewed as potential obstacles to a child’s authentic selves, while public schools and social service agencies were viewed as neutral experts ready to intervene for a child’s best interests.

This new mindset eventually evolved into federal policy through the passage of the Mondale Act, formally called the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) in 1974, which transformed these assumptions into the governing framework of the child‑protection system. Sponsored by Senator Walter Mondale, the act created a federal grant-in-aid system that required states to adopt mandates about child abuse reporting and enforcement measures in order to receive federal funding.

Lawmakers may have had the best intentions in attempting to protect children from abuse and neglect, but they also embraced an emerging ideology that trusted state and federal institutions over families. This set the stage for systemic intrusion. The Act required mandatory reporting of suspected abuse and opened the door to anonymous reporting. There was complete immunity for those who reported abuse, regardless of error, strict confidentiality rules, and the appointment of guardians ad litem. Most importantly, CAPTA never defined “abuse” or “neglect” and left it up to the states to operate with vague and open-ended categories, so that having a messy house or too much junk food given to children could be defined as neglect, thus opening the door to investigation.

Stephen Krason, Franciscan University Political Science Professor Emeritus, has spent more than 30 years documenting the problems of the current CAPTA system. He estimates that because of the vagueness in the definition of abuse, combined with mandatory reporting and legal immunity for false or even vindictive reports, there has been an explosion of false or trivial reports, with 80% of all reports unfounded.

Krason, who is also an attorney, has documented dozens of instances of innocent families that have been harmed by what he has called a “runaway, abusive system” that routinely harms the innocent. He has written that the reporting system is a “structurally unsound and deeply unjust” institution, one that routinely harms the innocent under the guise of protecting children. Because anyone can file a report anonymously and without evidence, and because investigators face no meaningful accountability for overreach, the system incentivizes suspicion rather than discernment.

Krason argues that these dynamics have produced a massive number of false allegations, turning child protection into a mechanism that destabilizes families, undermines parental rights, and often traumatizes the children who the Mondale Act was meant to protect.

He also asserts that failure is inherent in the design of the Mondale Act. The cultural shift toward state-centered child-rearing, combined with bureaucratic incentives to expand caseloads to inflate child protection budgets, has created what he sees as a sociological crisis. He has documented a flawed system that presumes parental guilt and treats ordinary family life as suspect, especially family life in religious families.

Because the harms are systemic rather than episodic, Krason concludes that the child-protective apparatus cannot be reformed. Instead, he calls for its replacement with a model that uses clear and objective definitions of abuse, while limiting state intervention. He also argues for holding officials accountable for negligence or misconduct.

The Massachusetts Kutzko family’s ordeal reveals how easily a system shaped by suspicion can ensnare faithful Catholic families. Their Catholic faith and desire to live faithfully to the unchanging teachings of the Church about sex and the dignity of the human person were treated as a threat to the state’s preferred vision of the child. They were targeted because their religious commitment placed them outside the cultural orthodoxy that now governs Massachusetts child-protection agencies. While the Trump administration has attempted to end the practice of providing gender-transition treatment to children and has already been successful in closing adolescent gender-transition clinics at six major hospitals in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, Massachusetts appears to be continuing.

The suffering of the Kutzko family—again, they have not seen their daughter in two years—is a reminder to all Catholics that fidelity to the Church’s teachings increasingly invites hostility from institutions that no longer recognize religious conviction or parental authority.