The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will enter a new battleground in the culture wars, agreeing to decide whether the Constitution guarantees parents of public school students the right to exclude their children from classroom discussion of storybooks featuring LGBTQ characters. and issues.
Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, adopted the new curriculum in 2022. It included, its lawyers told the judges, “a handful of stories with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters for use in the curriculum of language-arts studies, along with the many books already in the curriculum they present heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles’.
Among the storybooks was “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet about a family whose puppy is lost in a Pride parade. “My Rainbow,” about a mother who creates a colorful wig for her transgender daughter. and “Love, Violet,” a story about a girl who falls in love with her classmate. (Some of the books have been removed from the curriculum.)
In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has expanded the role of religion in public life, sometimes at the expense of other values, such as gay rights and access to contraception.
In recent years, the court has ruled in favor of a web designer who said she didn’t want to create websites 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 games, and a Catholic social service services in Philadelphia who said he could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who had applied to get foster children.
The school system in the new case, based in the liberal suburbs of Washington, D.C., initially notified parents when storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to excuse their children from those sessions. The school system soon changed that policy.
“The growing number of opt-out requests,” her lawyers wrote, “raised three related concerns: high student absenteeism, inability to manage opt-out in classrooms and schools, and the risk of exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families in social stigma and isolation”.
Several parents sued to challenge the new policy, saying it violates their religious rights. Lower courts refused to block the program while the lawsuit was pending.
Writing for the majority of a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Judge G. Steven Agee said: “There is no evidence at this time that the board’s decision not to allow exemptions compels parents or children to change their religious beliefs or behaviour, whether at school or elsewhere’.
Judge Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, added: “If the parents in this case or other plaintiffs in other challenges to the use of the storybooks present evidence that a teacher or school principal uses the books with fairy tales in a way that directly or indirectly forces children to change their religious views or practices, then the analysis will change in light of this record.’
In dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, said the parents, of various faiths, had made a modest request.
“They do not claim that the use of the books is per se unconstitutional,” he wrote. “And they’re not looking to ban them. Instead, they only want to exclude their children from instruction that includes such texts.”
The parents’ lawyer, Eric Baxter of the Beckett Fund for Religious Freedom, welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case.
“Forcing controversial gender ideology on 3-year-olds without their parents’ permission is an affront to our nation’s traditions, parental rights and basic human dignity,” he said in a statement.
The school board, in its brief for the Supreme Court in Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297, wrote that the parents “seek to disrupt a decades-old consensus that parents who choose to send their children to public school are not deprived of their right to freely exercise their religion simply because their children are exposed to educational materials that parents find offensive’.
