Interfaith coalition continues fight against LGBTQ+ books in MD schools

As I have detailed in previous pieces, an ongoing battle rages over parental rights to direct the upbringing of their children. The latest skirmish in this fight is Mahmoud v. McKnight, a dispute from Montgomery County, Maryland.

In Mahmoud, an interfaith coalition of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Catholic parents unsuccessfully challenged their board’s refusal to allow them to opt their preschool and elementary school children out of instruction using storybooks discussing gay pride parades, gender transitions, and pronoun preferences or inform them about their perceived sexual orientations, as the federal trial court in Maryland and a divided Fourth Circuit rejected their claims.

The parents subsequently filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, asking it to restore their rights to direct the upbringing of their children in a manner consistent with their faiths.

Given the need to protect the fundamental right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children, this column briefly reviews the facts and litigation in Mahmoud and then reflects on how Mahmoud continues the judicial trend of allowing educators to usurp parental rights.

Background and context

Controversy arose at the start of the 2022-23 school year in Montgomery County, Maryland’s largest public school district, when the board added more than 22 storybooks with LGBTQ+ themes to its English language arts curriculum promoting transgender ideology and encouraging gender transitioning. Board officials initially told parents they would afford them advanced notice and allow opt-outs from instruction involving the storybook materials on family life and sexuality.

However, a day later, officials reversed course, refusing to allow parents to opt their children out of these classes.

Two months later, the parents, joined by an advocacy group, Kids First, represented by the Becket Fund, a non-profit, public-interest law firm that safeguards the free expression rights of all faiths, filed suit. They alleged that the board’s mandatory attendance policy denying their request for opt-outs violated their fundamental “substantive rights under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to ‘direct the care, custody, education, and control of their minor children.’”

In August 2023, the federal trial court rejected the parental claim that they had a fundamental right to be informed about what their children are taught at school. The judge maintained that officials did not have to notify parents and could “keep a student’s gender identity confidential…out of concern for the student’s well-being” if youngsters discussed their gender identities in classes.

On appeal in May 2024, in a two-to-one order, the Fourth Circuit focused primarily on the parents’ amended complaint alleging that the board violated their First Amendment rights and those of their children to the free exercise of religion and free speech along with their Fourteenth Amendment due process rights to direct the upbringing of their young. Because this motion focused on religion, the court limited its discussion to the question of free exercise.

The panel affirmed in favor of the board, observing that the Supreme Court never found that “exposure to views contrary to one’s own religious beliefs necessarily constitutes a cognizable burden” on the free exercise of religion. The court concluded that the board did not violate the parents’ rights in using the disputed storybooks, denying them the opportunity to opt their children out of the disputed classes, and/or refusing to inform them about the sexual orientations of their young.

A strident dissent reasoned that the board violated the parents’ rights to the free exercise of religion because the policy forces them “to make a choice—either adhere to their faith or receive a free public education for their children.” The dissent would have invalidated the policy for failing to meet the constitutional standard of being neutral and generally applicable because “other religious optout requests are still allowed; just not for those opposed to the content of the [disputed] texts.”

Reflections and considerations

Mahmoud is the latest in a series of cases standing the Supreme Court’s 1925 ruling in Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary on its ear. In Pierce, in upholding the rights of non-public schools to operate, the Court added that “

Since the 1990s, though, the judiciary has largely, and increasingly, ignored the parental rights enshrined in Pierce in disputes over sexuality instruction. For instance, courts have enabled educators to refuse to excuse the children from highly explicit sex education programs, to ask intrusive age-inappropriate and/or other invasive questions about their sex lives, and to subject kindergarten and first-graders to instruction about same-sex couples over parental objections.

At the same time, otherwise fit couples who refuse to allow their minor children who wish to attempt to transition sexes risk losing their custody, while those unwilling to affirm the sexual orientation of youngsters different from their birth sexes have been denied opportunities to adopt or foster children.

The actions of public school officials who unilaterally promote such ideological instruction while ignoring parental concerns are engaging in nothing less than “social experiments on other people’s children.” It is perplexing that courts refuse to protect parental rights to protect their children by raising them in a manner consistent with their beliefs.

In Mahmoud, for example, the parents objected to the use of the alphabet primer Pride Puppy!, the sole text expressly approved for pre-Kindergarten and Head Start classrooms. This storybook, which depicts a family whose puppy gets lost at an LGBTQ-pride parade, devotes each page to a letter of the alphabet. Additionally, related materials invite three- and four-year-olds to look for terms such as “intersex,” “[drag] king,” “leather,” “lip ring,” “[drag] queen,” and “underwear.”

In short, educational officials and the courts have largely run roughshod over parental rights to have input over the use of such explicit curricular materials involving sexuality to which their preschool and elementary school-aged children were exposed in Mahmod. Educators in Montgomery County appear intent on exposing youngsters to explicit, age-inappropriate materials such as gay pride parades, gender transitions, and pronoun preferences along with other aspects of human sexuality they cannot understand at their ages. And all this while ignoring parental concerns that such actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion.

Montgomery County’s approach is troublesome because it not only defies Maryland law but also is out of step with the rest of the nation as thirty-eight jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia, mandate that educators offer parental opt-outs, six have a combination of opt-outs and op-ins, and four require parents affirmatively to opt-in to allowing their children to receive such sexuality instruction. Three states are silent on opt-outs but do not ban such policies.

Whether grounded in freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or due process, hopefully the Supreme Court will intervene in Mahmoud and restore balance in Montgomery County by upholding the rights of parents, “coupled with the high duty, to…prepare [their children] for additional obligations.”

Catholic World Report