On Friday, the Supreme Court was forced to rule on a situation that sane school boards in the not too distant past would have rejected out of hand. It ruled in Mahmoud v Taylor that Maryland parents have a right to opt their elementary-school-aged children (ages 5 to 12) out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ indoctrination. By a vote of 6-3, the justices agreed with the parents, who are Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox,^ that the Montgomery County school board’s refusal to provide them with that option violates their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged that “courts are not school boards or legislatures, and are ill-equipped to determine the ‘necessity’ of discrete aspects of a State’s program of compulsory education.” But he emphasized that “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children” under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
NOTE: The schools in Montgomery County, MD and throughout the United States are still allowed to teach sexual perversions to little kids. This ruling does not restrain them in the slightest. Had this school board not been so arrogant as to NOT inform parents and NOT allow an opt-out, this issue would never have come before the highest court in our land.
SECOND NOTE: It is uncertain whether this ruling allows non-religious parents who just don’t want their children sexualized in kindergarten, to opt out of this type of propaganda. They know that it is unhealthy for their sons & daughters, period! This was a case dealing with the very narrow issue of religious freedom contained in the Bill of Rights. It did not deal directly with the over sexualization of little kids (called sex education) by perverts who now pass as teachers and administrators in public schools.
THIRD NOTE: Is the school board allowed to give the parents a “religious test” to ascertain whether that parent is truly religious and whether that parent’s religion does indeed object to sexualizing little kids? Or, is it enough that the parent merely states he/she want the child opted out for religious reasons? Just wait. School districts in Blue States will find a sneaky way around this ruling. Washington State has been pushing transgendering of grade school students for almost a decade.
SCHOOL BOARD GAVE PARENTS THE MIDDLE FINGER
Mahmoud v Taylor came to the court from Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington, DC suburb. With nearly 160,000 students enrolled during the 2024-25 school year, it is one of the nation’s largest school systems, and it’s in one of the most religiously diverse counties in the United States.
The dispute stems from the county school board’s 2022 approval of disgusting books with sexual themes promoted by the LGBTQ+ lobby for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, tells the story of a little girl’s reaction to her uncle’s same-sex wedding. Another book, Pride Puppy, describes a puppy that becomes lost during a Pride parade.
The county initially allowed parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. The school board removed that option the following year because way too many parents were opting out. Instead of throwing those books away, they gave the middle finger to every parent in the school district. The board told parents that it will not give them notice when the books are going to be used and that their children’s attendance during those periods is mandatory.
Several parents then went to federal court. They contended that the school board’s refusal to let them excuse their children from this sexual instruction violated their First Amendment rights in two ways: It robbed them of their ability to instruct their children on issues of gender and sexuality according to their faiths and burdened their right to control how and when their children are exposed to these issues.
An activist district court judge rejected the parents’ request for a temporary order that would require the school board, while the litigation continued, to notify the parents when these perverted storybooks would be used and allow them to excuse their children from such instruction. The Liberal US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that on the “threadbare” facts before it, the parents had not shown that exposing the children to the storybooks compelled the parents to violate their religion. Say what?
SCOTUS ENDS ONE FORM OF CHILD ABUSE
The Supreme Court reversed. In a 41-page opinion that was accompanied by color reproductions of pages from the storybooks, Alito explained that the school board’s use of these sex-ladened storybooks, along with “its decision to withhold notice to parents and to forbid opt outs, substantially interferes with the religious development of their children and imposes the kind of burden on religious exercise that” the Supreme Court found unacceptable more than 50 years ago, in a decision, Wisconsin v. Yoder, that ruled for Amish parents challenging a Wisconsin law that required children to attend school until the age of 16.
The school board, Alito wrote, “requires teachers to instruct young children using storybooks that explicitly contradict their parents’ religious views, and it encourages the teachers to correct the children and accuse them of being ‘hurtful’ when they express a degree of religious confusion.”
When a policy imposes a burden like this, Alito continued, it is subject to the most stringent form of review, known as strict scrutiny, which asks whether the policy “advances ‘interests of the highest order’ and is narrowly tailored to achieve those interests.”
Although the school board may generally have a compelling interest, as it argues, in maintaining a safe and non-disruptive learning environment, Alito acknowledged, the board’s argument is weakened by the opt-outs that it allows in other scenarios, for example, from sex education. “This robust ‘system of exceptions’” also “undermines the Board’s contention that the provision of opt outs to religious parents would be infeasible or unworkable,” Alito wrote.
Alito indicated that going forward and until the litigation in this case is finally resolved, “the Board should be ordered to notify” the parents “whenever one of the books in question or any other similar book is to be used in any way and to allow them to have their children excused from that instruction.”
THE BRILLIANT JUSTICE THOMAS
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion in which he outlined “additional reasons why the Board’s policy cannot survive constitutional scrutiny.” First, he contended, the board’s efforts to promote equity and inclusion and reduce disruption in the classroom are not the kind of very important interests “sufficient to justify the policy’s interference with parents’ First Amendment rights.” To the contrary, he suggested, the inclusion of the storybooks and the “exclusion of traditional religious views . . . constitute an impermissible attempt to ‘standardize’ the views of students.”
Second, Thomas continued, the board’s contention that it wants to avoid disruption in the classroom by barring the opt-outs is simply “a product of its own design” insofar as the board has tried to include the storybooks as part of its everyday curriculum, rather than using them as part of separate and discrete units. “If the Court were to accept the Board’s argument,” Thomas wrote, “we would effectively give schools a playbook for evading the First Amendment.”
The Left has been chipping away at our precious First Amendment for decades. Finally, the Supreme Court reinstates a small part of it.
Gallup Poll Reveals: Transgender Movement Has Damaged A Whole Generation
Daryl texted his cousin, asking her if “his daughter” could stay a her house when she and her boyfriend were visiting Portland. Daryl has two sons and no daughters, so his cousin, Petra, was confused. Since Daryl was divorced, Pet…
^This writer was acquainted with the large Ukrainian community in Oregon when I practiced law there. Until Oregon schools started transgendering students (2016) few Ukrainian-Americans were registered to vote. THIS issue and several others changed that. BTW, most are Trump supporters.
The author, Diane L. Gruber, is a First Amendment advocate who writes for Substack. She calls her Substack newsletter America First Re-Ignited.
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