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Schools should not be teaching gender identity, sexuality. A sharply divided Supreme Court appeared likely to require a Maryland school board provide parents with the ability to opt their elementary school-age children out of instruction featuring storybooks that address gender identity and sexual orientation.
At issue in the court fight between a group of families and the Montgomery County Board of Education is whether public schools unconstitutionally burden parents' First Amendment right to exercise their religion freely when they require children to participate in instruction on gender and sexuality that violate the families' religious beliefs. After more than two hours of arguments, the court's conservative majority seemed ready to side with the families.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, invoked the state's founding and said the county in particular has been a "beacon" of religious liberty and tolerance. He told Alan Schoenfeld, who argued for the school board, he was "surprised" given that history that "this is the hill we're going to die on in terms of not respecting religious liberty." "What is the big deal about allowing them to opt-out of this?" Justice Samuel Alito asked, noting that the county allows parents to request their children be excused from other areas of instruction, such as sexual education or Halloween or Valentine's Day celebrations. "What is infeasible about doing that?"
Kavanaugh echoed Alito, saying, "I'm not understanding why it's not feasible" for schools to excuse children from instruction that violate their families' religious beliefs. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia allow for parental opt-outs or require opt-ins before students participate in sex education. Montgomery County, home to Maryland's largest public school system with more than 160,000 students, also had an opt-out policy for parents with religious objections to classroom instruction or activities so long as the requests did not become "too frequent or burdensome," according to court papers.
After Maryland enacted rules seeking to promote "educational equity," the Montgomery County Education Board introduced "LGBTQ-inclusive" storybooks for elementary school students into its English Language Arts curriculum. The district said it supplemented its language arts books with a handful of stories "in order to better represent all Montgomery County families." Among the five books incorporated, which are at issue in the case, were "Born Ready," about a transgender elementary-aged child, and "Prince & Knight," about a prince who falls in with and marries a knight.
Several of the justices acknowledged that they had read the picture books that were included in the curriculum, and Alito at one point even read from one, "Uncle Bobby's Wedding," which discusses gay marriage.
