By: Dan McLaughlin – nationalreview.com – April 22, 2025

Parents in deep-blue Montgomery County, Md., want the right to opt their kids out of lessons, beginning in pre-K, involving ‘LGBTQ-inclusive’ storybooks.

The Supreme Court’s argument this morning in Mahmoud v. Taylor dramatically illustrated the extremism of the defenders of woke education in general and of the school board in deep-blue Montgomery County, Md., in particular. Mahmoud involved “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks Dato be presented and read to children as young as three years old in pre-K. Moreover, the lessons were incorporated in the English curriculum in order to smuggle them into reading lessons. All of that is common enough, and mischievous enough. But where Montgomery County stands out is that, uniquely for this curriculum, and unlike nearly any school board in the country, it decided in 2022 to eliminate the rights of parents to opt their children out of these and only these lessons, which included a book a day for an entire month.

Religious parents sued, arguing that they had a First Amendment right to opt their kids out. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, representing them, shrewdly made a Muslim family the lead plaintiffs in the case, putting Montgomery County in the uncomfortable position of conceding that they’d have to let Muslim parents opt out if the lesson showed kids pictures of Mohammed. The parents’ constitutional argument draws on a long line of cases about the rights of parents to direct the education of their children, with particular attention to the burden of educational coercion on the right to raise children in one’s own faith. At the level of doctrine, a key question was what standard applies. For example, the plaintiffs cited three different standards for First Amendment violations (substantial interference with parental rights, pressure on parents who seek to access a public benefit, or discrimination against religious objectors), and Justice Neil Gorsuch pressed both sides on whether it’s necessary to show that the government’s actions were coercive if they can show discrimination.

It’s a good sign that your position is indefensible when it requires you to make arguments that defy plausibility, present ludicrous analogies, reverse your usual posture on procedural questions, or require unrealistic burdens of proof on the other side. The liberal justices and Alan Schoenfeld, the lawyer for Montgomery County, felt compelled to do all of those things. They got no help from the Court’s six conservatives, who at most showed some concern for where precisely they were being asked to draw lines.

The biggest fiction was the insistence by the county and the liberal justices that this was just the presentation of blandly factual information about same-sex couples, transgender people, and drag queens (there always have to be drag queens) in order to show that these people and behaviors exist. Never fear coercion, they argued: the curriculum says that kids can be told that they don’t have to agree with what a teacher tells them. Chief Justice John Roberts asked how realistic it was to tell a five-year-old not to believe the teacher, and what other mischief that might introduce. Justice Samuel Alito read aloud from a book in which a little girl is told not to object to her uncle’s gay wedding; the county and Justice Sonia Sotomayor insisted this was fine because the girl’s objection was just that she wouldn’t see him as much — never mind that this is exactly how moral lessons get taught in children’s books. Of course it’s intended to teach a lesson, Justice Amy Coney Barrett observed, noting that “it presents a worldview” and tells kids that “this is how you should think about things.”

There were two further efforts to deny what the school district was up to, neither of them plausible. One was the claim that the opt-outs had been eliminated merely for practical reasons: too many people opted out, and where could the school put them all? It was too burdensome because this wasn’t a specially scheduled curriculum the way sex-education classes are. But then, the volume of opt-outs should have told them something — and embedding this in the regular school day was the point. The school board wanted to ensure that kids couldn’t escape. Kavanaugh remarked, “I am a bit mystified, as a lifelong resident of the county, how it came to this. . . . This is the hill we’re gonna die on?” If he’s lived in Montgomery County that long, I doubt that he is actually mystified. But it is doubtless bad news for the district that so many of the justices know the area and see it as the Court’s own backyard.

The other deception, pushed by Schoenfeld and especially by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was that there was inadequate evidence for the courts to enter a preliminary injunction without knowing exactly how these books were taught in particular classes. Now, along with Justice Sonia Sotomayor complaining that a prospective injunction must be highly specific about what it prevents the government from doing to evade its prohibitions, this was more than a little inconsistent with the standards the liberal justices have been applying lately in Trump-related cases coming up through the emergency docket.

But it was absurd for Jackson to yell “Were the clients in the classroom?” at Eric Baxter of Becket (the lawyer for the parents) — especially when combined with her insistence that it would be too burdensome to give parents advance notice of what the lessons would be. Parents realizing during Covid that they’d had no idea what their kids were being taught was a Road to Damascus moment for a lot of people, and that bell cannot be unrung. Do you really need affidavits from pre-K students after they’ve been propagandized in order to prove that a curricular document was used in a classroom outside the view of their parents? Barrett didn’t buy it, asking why we can’t read the board-level curricular instructions to teachers as evidence of what the school board wanted taught. Schoenfeld admitted that the instructions in question were given to over 100 teachers.

Jackson leaned very hard on the notion that public education isn’t coercive because parents could always just homeschool their kids or send them to private schools. Imagine her making that argument about, say, segregated public schools. Yet she returned to the point again and again. Barrett rejoined that public school is more compulsory than public benefits that have been found in the past to unduly discriminate against the religious, such as money for paving school playgrounds.

Jackson’s analogies were maybe the most laughable part of the argument. She asked whether it was coercive for a gay teacher to have a wedding photo on his or her desk, completely missing the point that this case is about the school’s mandatory curriculum, not about some offhand remark by a teacher. She asked about what happens if there’s a part of the school where student groups put up “Love Is Love” posters, ignoring not only the distinction between student speech and a teacher-led classroom curriculum but also the difference between opting out of a particular lesson and trying to opt out of a hallway. She asked about what happens if there’s a transgender student in the class, as if telling kids to hear how that student is addressed and respect a fellow student is indistinguishable from a lecture. (In any event, as noted by Sarah Harris, as acting solicitor general, in a sharply presented argument siding with the parents, requiring students to use particular pronouns in addressing a classmate presents a separate issue of compelled speech that is currently working its way through the lower courts.) Jackson even spent an extended colloquy comparing classroom curricular instruction to the burden on religious parents of seeing objectionable ads on a public bus — as if buses have the same degree of authority in the eyes of small schoolchildren as do their teachers.

Jackson argued that it would be ruinous to let courts get involved in reviewing the work of democratically elected school boards, whose members are supposed to decide which books should and shouldn’t be taught. Again, this is rather off message for the typical progressive case that it’s a terrible First Amendment violation to let democratically elected legislatures and school boards decide what can and cannot be taught in schools and what books should be on their shelves. If anything, Sotomayor’s laundry list of objections coming from the right to the teaching of various things should illustrate the one-sided power of school boards in many parts of the country. The real objection here is to letting anyone escape that power.

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Source: Supreme Court Hears Montgomery Co. Case: Mandatory Woke Education & Religious Liberty | National Review