Supreme Court to Hear Case on Religious Objections to L.G.B.T.Q. Storybooks

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would wade into a new cultural debate, agreeing to review whether the Constitution guarantees parents of public school students the right to exempt their children from classroom discussions that include storybooks with LGBTQ characters and themes.https://svtoday.org/

Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest school district in Maryland, implemented a new curriculum in 2022, which, according to the district’s legal team, included “a select number of storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer characters” as part of its language-arts program, alongside numerous books that already featured heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles.

Some of the featured books were Pride Puppy, an alphabet book about a puppy lost at 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 develops feelings for a female classmate. (Some of these books have since been removed from the curriculum.)

Recently, the Supreme Court has broadened the role of religion in public life, often at the expense of other rights, such as gay rights and access to contraception. In recent rulings, the Court has sided with a web designer who objected to creating websites for same-sex weddings, a high school football coach who claimed a constitutional right to pray at midfield after games, and a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia that argued it could defy city policies and refuse to work with same-sex couples seeking to foster children.

In this case, the school system, located in the liberal suburbs of Washington, initially gave parents advance notice when these storybooks would be taught, offering the option to excuse their children from those lessons. However, the district eventually reversed this policy.

The school district’s lawyers explained that the growing number of opt-out requests raised three primary concerns: high absenteeism, the difficulty of managing opt-outs across multiple schools and classrooms, and the potential social stigma and isolation faced by students who saw the books as affirming their identities and families.

Several parents then sued, claiming the new policy infringed on their religious rights. Lower courts refused to block the program while the lawsuit proceeded.

In a ruling for the majority of a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Judge G. Steven Agee, appointed by President George W. Bush, stated, “There is no evidence at this point that the school board’s decision to disallow opt-outs forces the parents or their children to alter their religious beliefs or practices, either at school or elsewhere.”

Judge Agee added that if parents or other plaintiffs presented evidence that teachers or school officials were using these books to coerce students into changing their religious beliefs or practices, the legal analysis would shift.

In a dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., appointed by President Donald Trump, argued that the parents, from various religious backgrounds, had made a reasonable request. “They don’t claim the books themselves are unconstitutional,” he wrote, “and they aren’t seeking to ban them. They simply want to excuse their children from lessons involving these materials.”

Eric Baxter, a lawyer representing the parents from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case. “Forcing controversial gender ideology on young children without parental consent is an affront to our nation’s values, parental rights, and basic human decency,” he said in a statement.

In its brief to the Supreme Court, the school board in Mahmoud v. Taylor (No. 24-297) argued that the parents’ actions “seek to disrupt a longstanding 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 encounter curriculum materials that they find objectionable.”