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The Supreme Court‘s decision on Friday supporting Maryland parents who fought to withdraw their children from LGBTQ storybook lessons in elementary school classrooms was hailed as a victory for parents’ rights and religious liberty.
“Today’s victory sent a resounding message to activist school board members and educators nationwide: parental rights are not optional, and our children are not sounding boards or political tools for your radical agendas,” Alleigh Marré, executive director of the parental rights group, American Parents Coalition, said in a statement following the ruling.
“This victory offered critical clarification to activist school board members in Montgomery County, Maryland, who displayed disdain for parental authority and opt-outs, making it clear that teaching 3-year-olds about radical gender ideology was a higher priority than student learning, much less parental rights,” she added.
In a 6-3 decision that fell along ideological lines, the court held that parents were entitled to opt their children out of school lessons that could violate their religious beliefs.
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“We have long recognized,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority, “the rights of parents to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children. And we have held that those rights are violated by government policies that substantially interfere with the religious development of children.”
“We reject this chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children,” Alito wrote.
The parents, from Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox faiths, sued Montgomery County Public Schools after the district refused to allow parents the choice to withdraw their school-age children from being introduced to LGBTQ pride storybooks in the classroom. According to Becket, the legal group representing the parents’ case, the books “champion pride parades, gender transition and pronoun preferences for children.”
While the school board initially allowed parents to opt their children out of this curriculum, the board quickly reversed course after too many parents requested opt-outs, believing it “undermined the schools’ educational obligations toward inclusion, equity, and respect,” according to the ACLU, who filed an amicus brief with the court in support of the school district.
The families alleged the forced participation in these lessons violated their parental rights and religious convictions protected under the First Amendment.
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In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that allowing children to be “insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs” was a threat to democracy and multicultural society.
“Today’s ruling ushers in that new reality. Casting aside longstanding precedent, the Court invents a constitutional right to avoid exposure to ‘subtle’ themes ‘contrary to the religious principles’ that parents wish to instill in their children,” she wrote.
“The result will be chaos for this nation’s public schools,” Sotomayor added.
A law professor who specializes in religious liberty cases and lives in Montgomery County told Fox News Digital that the court wasn’t threatening diversity, but actually protecting diversity of opinion.
“It’s really about protecting pluralism in a fundamental, principled way,” Professor Asma Uddin said. “If the concern is about inclusion and making space for diverse viewpoints, then that has to extend beyond a certain set of things that have to be presented to also give space for diverse viewpoints. We can do that through procedural flexibility – the ability to opt out from these readings.”
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Uddin, a fellow at the Faith and Media Initiative who will be teaching constitutional law at Michigan State University in the fall, called it troubling the way the school board dismissed the views of these parents, referencing how one member even compared their views to those of “White supremacists.”
“It has to be something where people have genuine rights to disagree even on things that are just really contentious, that are really core to who we are as people, to our identities. It’s got to be a space where we can have a diversity of views on that,” she added.
According to Becket, the Montgomery County School Board is one of the few school boards across the nation to ban notices and opt-outs for parents on sexuality and gender instruction.
Parents in this case were not trying to ban LGBTQ books from the classroom, but were asking that they be notified before they are used in classroom instruction and be given the option to withdraw their children from these lessons.
Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote, a conservative political advocacy group, reacted to the ruling in a statement, saying, “It should alarm every American that such a case needed the intervention of the nation’s highest court. It is worth stating clearly that the state cannot raise your child better than you. Parents, not politicians or activists, are the primary educators of their children.”
“The Court’s ruling sends a clear and powerful message: America still respects the rights of parents to raise their children in line with their faith and conscience. And school boards have no business putting ideology over families. Let this decision renew our courage. We must continue to stand firm against efforts to undermine the family, which is the first school of love, truth, and freedom,” she added.
Lawyer and president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network Carrie Severino said in a statement, “Public school children shouldn’t be hostages in the culture wars, and today’s Supreme Court case affirmed that by restoring the rights of parents to direct the education of their children, especially their religious education.”
“Ten years ago in Obergefell, Justice Kennedy promised that religious rights would continue to be respected, even in the face of an increasingly doctrinaire LGBTQ orthodoxy. Unfortunately, it has taken a decade of Court decisions to correct the many lower courts who have denegrated First Amendment rights, but today’s decision is a major victory in that effort,” she added.
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