WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up a culture wars dispute and decide whether parents have a religious liberty right to have their children “opt out” of using school textbooks and lesson plans with LGBTQ+ themes.
The court voted to hear an appeal from a group of Muslim, Jewish and Christian parents in Montgomery County, Md., who objected to new storybooks for elementary school children that they said “celebrate gender transitioning, pride parades, and pronoun preferences with kids as young as three and four.”
At first, the school board reacted to the complaints by saying parents could have their children excused from the class when the new textbooks were being used or discussed.
But after seeing a “growing number of opt out requests,” the school district reversed course in 2023 and said no opt-outs would be granted “for any reason.”
The parents then sued in federal court, citing the 1st Amendment’s protection for the free exercise of religion.
They were represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. After failing to win a court order in favor of the parents, they urged the Supreme Court to hear the case and to give parents an “opt out” right for books that they say offend their religious beliefs.
They argued many of the new “inclusivity” books for students from kindergarten to fifth grade champion a progressive ideology about gender and sexuality.
They cited one book that told 3- and 4-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “drag queen,” “underwear,” “leather.” Another book advocated a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, they said.
Eric Baxter, senior counsel at Becket, welcomed the court’s intervention.
“Cramming down controversial gender ideology on three-year-olds without their parents’ permission is an affront to our nation’s traditions, parental rights, and basic human decency,” he said in a statement. “The court must make clear: parents, not the state, should be the ones deciding how and when to introduce their children to sensitive issues about gender and sexuality.”
Last month, the school district’s lawyers said there was no reason for the justices to take up the case.
“Every court of appeals that has considered the question has held that mere exposure to controversial issues in a public-school curriculum does not burden the free religious exercise of parents or students,” they said. “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 curricular materials the parents find offensive.”
The justices are likely to schedule the case of Mahmoud vs. Taylor for arguments in late April.
