The Supreme Court announced Friday that it would enter a new battleground in the culture wars, agreeing to decide whether the Constitution guarantees parents of students in public schools the right to excuse their children from classroom discussion of storybooks featuring LGBTQ characters and themes.
Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, adopted the new curriculum in 2022. It included, His lawyers told the judges“Few storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer characters for use in language-arts curriculum, along with many books already in the curriculum that feature heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles.”
Among the storybooks were “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost in a Pride parade; “My Rainbow,” about a mother who creates a colorful wig for her transgender daughter; and “Love, Violet,” the story of a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate. (Some books It has since been dropped from the curriculum.)
In some recent cases, the Supreme Court has expanded the role of religion in public life, sometimes over other values such as gay rights and access to contraception.
In the last few years, the court Dr ruled in favor of A web designer who said he didn’t want to create a site for same-sex marriage, a high school football coach who said he had a Constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s game and a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia said it might Violating city rules and refused to work with same-sex couples who applied to adopt foster children.
In a new case based in a liberal suburb of Washington, the school system gives parents first notice when storybooks will be discussed, as well as the opportunity to excuse their children from those sessions. The school system soon changed that policy.
“The growing number of opt-out requests,” its lawyers wrote, “raised three related concerns: high student absenteeism, the impossibility of managing opt-outs across classrooms and schools, and the risk of exposing students to the storybook representation that exposes them and their families to social stigma and isolation.” Must be.”
Several parents sued to challenge the new policy, saying it violated their religious rights. Lower courts declined to block the program while the case proceeded.
Writing for the majority of a divided three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Judge G. Steven Agee said, “There is currently no evidence that the board’s decision not to allow opt-outs is coerced by or against parents. children change Their religious beliefs or behavior, either at school or elsewhere.”
Judge AG, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, added, “Should parents or other plaintiffs in other challenges to the use of storybooks in this case come forward with evidence that a teacher or school administrator is using the storybooks in a manner? which directly or indirectly causes children to change their religious views or practices, the analysis will change in light of that record.”
Dissenting, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., who is President Donald J. Appointed by Trump, said the parents, of various faiths, made a modest request
“They do not claim that the use of the books itself is unconstitutional,” he wrote. “And they don’t try to ban them. Instead, they simply want their children to opt out of such textual instruction.”
A lawyer for the parents, Eric Baxter of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case.
“Inflicting controversial gender ideologies on children as young as 3 without their parents’ permission is an affront to our country’s heritage, parental rights and basic human decency,” he said in a statement.
The school board in its Supreme Court brief in this case, Mahmud v. TaylorNo. 24-297, wrote that the parents were “attempting to destabilize the decades-old consensus that parents who choose to send their children to public schools should not be deprived of their right to freely practice their religion merely because their children’s curriculum is being exposed to content objectionable to parents.”
