Supreme Court opens door to religious veto of public school lessons, starting with LGBTQ books

The disastrous ruling empowers religious zealots to object to lesson plans, sparking fears of censorship and chaos in the classroom

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In a disturbing ruling ripped right of the Christian Nationalist playbook, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative super-majority ruled yesterday in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents who don’t want their kids reading books in school with LGBTQ characters and themes could “opt out” due to their religious beliefs.

The implications of the decision are staggering.

Teacher reading to students (image via Adobe Spark)

The majority took the side of the religious zealots—a group of conservative parents including Muslims and Catholic—who didn’t want to expose their children to the reality that they live in a pluralistic society with people who may not believe what they believe, love as they love, or fit a particular gender mold. They claimed that the Montgomery County Board of Education (in Maryland) was “undermining” their faith by reading books in class that treated same-sex couples and trans people as—wait for it—normal.

The decision explains:

The books are unmistakably normative. They are designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated, and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected…

… The storybooks present same-sex weddings as occasions for great celebration and suggest that the only rubric for determining whether a marriage is acceptable is whether the individuals concerned “love each other.”

The horror.

No one, of course, was ever stopping religious bigots from treating LGBTQ people as inhuman or second-class citizens. (We have plenty of evidence of that despite the progress we’ve made regarding LGBTQ rights.) But, to quote Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, the decision says that being exposed to the very idea that “LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny.”

The irony is that even if certain books were approved by the Montgomery County Board of Education for use in the classroom, there’s no evidence of how those books were even being used, or how often they were read, or what conversations occurred because of them. The SCOTUS conservatives invented facts to fit the conclusion they wanted to achieve, refusing to wait for a legal record of those details to even be established.

The bottom line is that this decision allows parents to remove their kids from the classroom if something they’re going to be taught might offend their religious sensibilities.

How could that possibly be implemented? How can a school district know what religious beliefs everyone has? How can public education even occur if the curriculum can be micromanaged by every single parent?

The slippery slope here is obvious. There are religious zealots who might object to interracial marriage, and evolution, and historical records showing that slavery in America was enforced and perpetuated (and also opposed!) by Christians.

Justice Samuel Alito writes in his conclusion:

Specifically, until all appellate review in this case is completed, the Board should be ordered to notify them in advance 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.

Even that poses all kinds of administrative burdens, though. If a student can opt out of a lesson because of the family’s religion, either that student misses out on a valuable lesson or the book can’t be used at all. If enough students opt out, the teacher can’t teach.

Vox’s Ian Millhiser writes:

The upshot is that a school may also need to warn parents if a teacher wants to read from a Harry Potter book (because those books are about magic), or if they want to teach a lesson about a famous pacifist like Martin Luther King Jr. Schools may even need to warn parents if any of their children’s teachers are women, just in case a parent objects on religious grounds to women having achievements outside of the home.

There’s no telling which parts of an education could offend someone because religious conservatives are offended by damn near everything outside their bubble. That said, Millhiser adds, the way the decision is written, having LGBTQ characters alone may not be reason enough to object. It’s celebrating their identities that crosses the line. What if there’s a novel where that’s just one element but not the core theme? In theory, that book could escape the grasp of the bigots. But what counts as celebrating who they are? Is a character coming to terms with being gay or trans considered advocacy for those views? What if some characters in a book are happy about their friend’s same-sex marriage—as any decent friend would be—even if that’s not the focus of the book? (That’s literally what the conservatives cherry-picked as an example of a book that went too far!)

That’s the problem here. The ruling is so vague that the only way to avoid legal entanglement is to never use books with gay characters at all, effectively erasing them from the entire curriculum as if they don’t exist.

Still, schools will likely struggle to determine when they are required to warn parents of a particular lesson under Mahmoud. And schools that draw the line in the wrong place now risk being dragged into an expensive lawsuit.

When this case was being considered, a number of church/state separation groups chimed in with amicus briefs urging the Court not to do what the conservatives eventually did.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for example, argued that letting parents “opt out” of these lessons would be devastating for public education in general.

First, it would undermine public schools’ ability to foster tolerance, ultimately leading to a less tolerant citizenry. Second, it would stigmatize the children who are not opted out and serve to divide students along religious lines. Third, it would force many schools to tailor their curricula to the religious views of some parents.

…

In the real world, of course, there is no “opting out.” Exposure to contrary ideas, even ones we vehemently disagree with, is simply a fact of life in a pluralistic society. But, if Petitioners succeed, publicschool students would never be exposed to ideas they disagree with—instead, they could simply be pulled out of classrooms anytime a conflict arose.

They pointed out that a history lesson covering Islam “in an objective and non-proselytizing way” could still be considered offensive to some conservative Christians. (Hell, the latter group has previously complained about their kids learning yoga because they claimed it was endorsing a non-Christian religion.)

In response to the Court’s ruling, AU wondered what the next hammer to drop would be:

What’s next? Objecting to books featuring single moms? Demanding opt-outs from students learning about evolution? Objecting to LGBTQ+ teachers present in the classroom? LGBTQ+ students? We need a national recommitment to church-state separation; our public schools and our democracy depend on it.

American Atheists, the Secular Student Alliance, and the Secular Coalition for America filed their own amicus brief arguing that all kinds of subjects—not just English—would suffer if the Plaintiffs got their way.

A parent could veto any storybook that features an interracial couple… A “young Earth” creationist parent may object to world history lessons that examine (or even acknowledge) any events occurring more than approximately 6,000 years ago, or object to their child taking high school physics because it would introduce them to the principles that undergird radio-carbon dating, which again show that the world existed more than 6,000 years ago… A Christian Scientist parent may object to instruction concerning the germ theory of disease… A Catholic parent might object to lessons on capitalism and economics as a promotion of greed, one of the seven deadly sins… A Mormon parent may wish to opt their child out of significant portions of American History courses—such as those describing the migration of humans from Asia to North America across the Bering Strait—which contradict the Book of Mormon... Such a situation would make planning for instruction and testing a practical impossibility.

In response to the Court’s ruling, American Atheists said it was “gravely concerned about the implications.”

At a time when classroom censorship and book bans are increasingly prevalent, American Atheists warns today’s ruling will serve as fodder for the far-religious-right’s nationwide campaign to restrict students’ access to inclusive and informative materials. Approximately 90% of kids and teens in the United States attend public schools, and an abundance of research has demonstrated the benefits of multicultural education and culturally responsive practices.

…

“A dangerous precedent has been established today, one that will censor free thought, chill free speech, and fuel the rise of authoritarian policies seeking not just to shelter kids from diverse perspectives but to impose a specific and narrow perspective on us all,” said Nick Fish, President of American Atheists. “But true religious freedom is about tolerance, not erasure. True freedom of thought is about a pluralistic marketplace of ideas, not a monopoly on indoctrination.”

And the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in their amicus brief, wrote that there was no legal precedent to invalidate a neutral, secular curriculum solely because of someone’s religious beliefs. Yet a ruling for the Plaintiffs would create chaos:

Under Petitioners’ rule, students would be deprived of countless classic literary works and movies. To Kill a Mockingbird portrays Southern Baptists in a less-thanfavorable light, which may draw objections from some parents; others may find the biblical themes in Lord of the Flies or The Grapes of Wrath objectionable. Content in Catcher in the Rye or Les Miserables could offend religious sensitivities, but then again, so could the subject matter in more or less any of Shakespeare’s classics. Macbeth, for example, mentions witches and Caeserian section birth, both of which contradict certain religious ideals, while parents who object to miscegenation could seek exemptions from their children reading Othello. Finally, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and numerous other works written before Christianity portray ancient Greek deities that contradict monotheistic sentiments.

FFRF responded to the decision with fear about what it would mean moving forward:

“This ruling threatens to give any religious parent veto power over public school curricula,” warns [FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie] Gaylor. “If this dangerous logic is carried forward, it could unravel decades of progress toward inclusive education and equal rights. It has grave ramifications for the teaching of evolution, for example. Public schools must be grounded in facts and reality and not subject to religious censors.”

Justice Sotomayor echoed all of their concerns in her dissent:

The result will be chaos for this Nation’s public schools. Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools. The harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too. Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students’ learning and development.

… The Court’s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards. Because I cannot countenance the Court’s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.

Sotomayor also laid out the slippery slope that extends from this decision:

Books expressing implicit support for patriotism, women’s rights, interfaith marriage, consumption of meat, immodest dress, and countless other topics may conflict with sincerely held religious beliefs and thus trigger stringent judicial review under the majority’s test. Imagine a children’s picture book that celebrates the achievements of women in history, including female scientists, politicians, astronauts, and authors. Perhaps the book even features a page that states, “Girls can do it all!” That message may be “directly contrary to the religious principles that” a parent “wish[es] to instill in their chil[d]”… In the majority’s view, it appears, that is sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny of any school policy not providing notice and opt out to objecting parents.

She added that it’s not just books at issue here. If a teacher has, on her desk, a picture of her and her wife, is that advocacy and celebration? Can a religious parent demand to remove their child from that classroom? “The majority offers no principled basis easily to distinguish those cases from this one,” she wrote.

She said the ruling “threatens the very essence of public education”—and that is why conservatives are so excited. One of their long-terms goals is eradicating public education entirely.

This case is ultimately a win for conservative bigots, a loss for public education, and another blow to church/state separation. If we allow religious parents to dictate what their kids can and can’t learn in public school, it harms everybody. LGBTQ-themed books may be first on the chopping block but there are others that could easily follow:

Next to go could be teaching on evolution, the work of female scientist Marie Curie, or the history of vaccines.

Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, naturally celebrated the decision by saying in a statement, “Schools are for education—not indoctrination.” But that’s the problem here. The district in question was educating students, not telling them what to believe. It’s the indoctrination of the religious zealots that’s now preventing public schools from teaching kids about how they should respect LGBTQ people, even if they might disagree with their choices or who they are.

It’s a perfect encapsulation of how Christian Nationalists are now dictating public policy.

I’ve said this before, but they treat neutrality as oppression. The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has now made clear that neutrality is no longer acceptable if it clashes with the religious whims of conservative bigots.

By the way, just as Sotomayor, in dissent, ripped apart the false narrative spun by Justice Neil Gorsuch in the Kennedy case, she included the full text of one of the children’s books in question, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, because she rightly accuses Alito of cherry-picking certain elements of it while ignoring the larger context.

Because the majority selectively excerpts the book in order to rewrite its story, readers are encouraged to go directly to the source, reproduced below.

It’s another reminder of how the conservatives on the Court don’t care about the facts of the cases in front of them—they’re always willing to rewrite the case to justify the outcome they were always going to support.

There’s one more interesting hypothetical here: Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana have all passed laws requiring TenCommandments posters in the classroom. (Louisiana’s law has been deemed unconstitutional, most recently by an appellate court. Lawsuits have been filed in the other two states.)

But what’s stopping parents from suing school districts in those states using the now-valid argument that the first few Commandments violate their religious beliefs, and their kids shouldn’t be subject to that kind of proselytizing?

@revjo.uuSupreme Court Gives UU Parents Legal Justification to Sue against 10 Commandments Law. Mahmoud v. Taylor isn’t just for anti-LGBT parents. It applies to all faiths. Let the lawsuits begin. #scotus #mahmoudvtaylor #religiousfreedom #lgbtqiaplus #pluralism #txliberal #txlege #10commandments #texas #UnitarianUniversalist #UnitarianUniversalism #unitarian #UU #progressivereligion

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