Two critical education issues have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. One involves Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest school districts. A group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents is arguing that the Maryland school district violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom when it refused to allow them to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed lessons.
The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, illustrates the growing tension between sex-obsessed schools and the rights of religious parents, who are challenging the Montgomery County School Board’s decision in 2022 to approve more than 22 LGBTQ+ books for classroom use, including works like “Pride Puppy,” “Intersection Allies,” and “What Are Your Words.”
According to court documents, one of the books, Pride Puppy, is a “picture book directed to three and four-year-olds that describes a Pride parade and what a child might find there.” The book invites students to search for various images, including “underwear, leather, lip ring, drag king, and drag queen.”
Other books adopted by the Montgomery County School Board promote pride parades and gender transitioning while advocating for a “child-knows-best” approach to social transitioning. The books tell students that their decision to transition to another gender doesn’t have to “make sense,” and unbelievably, that physicians in the delivery room guess newborn babies’ sexual identity.
Montgomery County argues that if families choose to attend public schools, they “are not cognizably coerced by their children’s exposure there to religiously objectionable ideas.” If the First Amendment gives parents a right to pick and choose from the curriculum, the county says there’s “no discernible limit,” and it would work the same in science or history classes. Public schools “simply cannot accommodate” these exceptions.
Ultimately, the case is really about parental rights, as it also applies to nonreligious parents. As Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, writes, “When I told my father, who is secular and a staunch Democrat, about this case, he said that you don’t have to be religious to object to telling 3-year-olds that doctors only ‘guess’ a baby’s sex at birth or giving them a ‘Pride Puppy’ storybook instructing them to search for images of things they would find at a pride parade, such as a drag queen, leather and an intersex flag. He thinks that parents having the right to opt their children out of such indoctrination is just common sense.”
The Court heard the arguments on April 22, and it looks favorable for the plaintiffs.
“What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Alan Schoenfeld, who represents the school district. As an example of a “clear moral message,” Alito pointed to Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a picture book focusing on a girl’s feelings of jealousy when her favorite uncle gets married to another man. “It doesn’t just say ‘Look, Uncle Bobby and Jamie are getting married.’ It expresses the idea [that] this is a good thing.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a long-time resident of Montgomery County, was surprised that “this is the hill we’re going to die on” because the state of Maryland was “founded upon religious liberty and religious tolerance.”
Even liberal Justice Elena Kagan seems to be on the parents’ side, “I too was struck by—these are, you know, young kids’ picture books, and on matters concerning sexuality, I suspect there are a lot of nonreligious parents who weren’t all that thrilled about this, and then you, you know, add in religion, and — and that’s, you know, even more serious.”
The second case the Supreme Court will rule on is Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, which addresses whether the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School should be allowed in Oklahoma.
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