Supreme Court will decide: Can schools mandate LGBT books?
- Joanne Jacobs
- Apr 22
- 3 min read
All children from preschool on up must be exposed to LGBT-themed books, such as Love, Violet (second-grade girl has a crush on a female classmate) or Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, Montgomery County, Maryland public schools have decided. Parents in the ethnically and religiously diverse district can't "opt out" their children on religious grounds.
In a quest to be inclusive for gay and transgender students and children from LGBT families, the district has made conservative, religious families feel excluded.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments today on whether parents have the right to opt out of lessons that conflict with their religious beliefs, reports Ann E. Marimow in the Washington Post.
"The parents behind the storybooks lawsuit say they are not trying to change the lesson plans or remove any books from classroom shelves," she writes. They just want participation to be voluntary. The coalition includes Muslim, Christian (many of them Ethiopian), Mormon, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox parents.
“Parents should have the right to decide when to introduce these topics to their kids," says Billy Moges, who pulled her three daughters from public school. "We’re not telling other parents how to raise their kids.”
"Elementary school principals and teachers separately expressed concerns about the appropriateness of some of the content for young readers and said they were not trained to lead related class discussions," Marimow notes. Two books initially approved were pulled.
Maryland parents have the right to opt their children out of sex education classes, but the district says the lessons are part of English Language Arts, for which there's no opt-out provision.
“If the court rules that religious parents can micromanage the education of their children in public school even where the effect is to undermine the school’s ability to do the job it needs to do for all of its students, that will seriously undermine the ability of public schools to do the work they need to do,” said Georgetown Law professor David Cole, who was the national legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union.
"They're trying to replace our values," an Ethiopian Christian mother told Bethany Mandel, who writes in The Free Press. "I feel like as a Christian, my kids are getting rebaptized in a another religion."
On X, Megan McArdle wonders "what 'job' requires every kid to read these books, unless that 'job' is overriding the religious values of the parents in favor of values selected by the school? Does the ACLU now believe that enforcing community values on dissenters is the 'job' of public school, and that dissenters from those values should leave if they don't like it?"
Washington Post columnist Megan K. Stack, a Montgomery County parent, resents "the public money wasted on expensive lawyers," and "can’t fathom that we squandered so much energy fighting over storybooks even as our kids’ test scores foundered, absenteeism soared and student mental health slumped in the wake of the pandemic."
"I can’t decide which conceit is more delusional: The school district grandstanding about social tolerance while forcing a minority of religious families to engage with books they consider immoral or the religious parents claiming that they can’t properly rear their children in faith if the kids get exposed to a few picture books," she writes.
The LGBT books were introduced in the elementary schools in 2022, Stack writes. A few months later, the district announced that families would no longer be allowed to opt out when the books were taught. "In its legal filings, the district explained that there were simply too many parents trying to opt out, causing complicated logistics, driving absenteeism, and creating a risk of 'exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation'.”
Giving parents a choice would have ended the controversy, she writes. No fuss, no lawsuits. But, no.
This is surely a terrible legal reason for blocking opt-out for these books:
"At first, teachers and principals sought to accommodate these requests by excusing students when the books were read in class. Pet.App.606a-607a. The growing number of opt-out requests, however, gave rise to three related concerns: high student absenteeism, the infeasibility of administering opt-outs across classrooms and schools, and the risk of exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation."
If so many families wanted to opt out, clearly there was a problem with the materials.
The Court is discussing the right of parents to opt out of this insane, immoral program. The best outcome is for this school board and all others like it to opt out of child-ruination. These boards' right to exist is now in question.
Unfortunately for the Court, children, parents, and taxpayers, the obvious solution, universal school choice, is out of reach to the Court. Universal school choice would reduce the stakes at issue in contests for control over school policy and so reduce the acrimony in public discussions.
They are our students, not our children. Too many in education forget that.