Charles Cox, et al. v. Dr. Erica Renfree, et al.

San Diego Unified School District's Serra High School Principal, Erica Renfree, led a renaming campaign for her school with a presentation to the school board that included bigoted and slanted information that targeted the Catholic faith and St. Junípero Serra. Her efforts to remove St. Serra's name from the highschool was an illegal and defamatory campaign. The Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, July 14, 2021, in Superior Court of the State of California.

The lawsuit argues that the March 9, 2021, vote by the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education was in violation of California state law. The renaming effort subjects the Catholic faith to a “lynch mob of erasure and anti-Catholic bigotry.”

The San Diego school board was given an information packet to assist in their March vote which lacked any legitimate sources for their slanderous claims that Fr. Serra oppressed the native people in his care. The packet claimed the missions were “inhumane and cruel to the indigenous population” and therefore, “Serra is a symbol of that suffering.”