SCOTUS rules that parents must be allowed to opt out of LGBTQ indoctrination in primary schools
Ace has a lengthy post on the ruling from the busy Supreme Court – including photos from some of the books in question – in which he quotes The New York Times. From the Times:
Public schools in Maryland must allow parents with religious objections to withdraw their children from classes in which storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal members in dissent.
The case extended a winning streak for claims of religious freedom at the court, gains that have often come at the expense of other values, notably gay rights.
This has nothing to do with gay rights, however. Not a single gay person is deprived of any rights by allowing some parents to opt out of this previously compulsory education for young children.
Religious freedom is the peg on which this decision is hung. The name of the case – Mahmoud v. Taylor – is interesting because it indicates that the lead plaintiffs are Muslims. They were joined by two Roman Catholic couples as well as a Ukrainian Orthodox couple; an interestingly diverse group.
The case sparks a number of reflections and questions for me. I’ll come right out and say that I don’t think books like that have any place in a grade school curriculum. We certainly did quite nicely in grade school without any mention of sexuality at all, with the sole exception of a pair of slide shows – one for girls, one for boys – that we were shown in fifth or sixth grades, focusing on the changes associated with puberty. So why are any kids subjected to this, which I believe should be the role of parents?
I don’t think opt-outs should be limited to religious claims, either, although I understand that if a local school district decides to have a curriculum like that, the only way to fight it in the courts might be on religious grounds. My guess is that many parents who don’t want their kids to be part of this will claim religious objections when they aren’t actually especially religious, but will they be required to prove their religiosity in order to have their children opt out?
Although this is a victory, it leaves a lot to be desired. If parents want to have a say in what their children are taught, they have to fight a court case all the way to the Supreme Court? With the government school using taxpayer money to fight them? The solution to this is obviously to have education money follow the child and not be given to the government school. The good news is that recently New Hampshire became the 17th state to implement education savings accounts.
https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/10/school-choice-now-universal-in-nh-after-governor-signs-bill-into-law/84128355007/
Educational Freedom Accounts now universal in New Hampshire in new law
The bad news is that in too many states it is Republicans that are taking the teachers’ union money and are fighting against their constituents. Recently Texas governor Greg Abbott had to go on the warpath against Republicans in the state legislature and primary many of them who had fought educational savings accounts.
Georgia only recently implemented a school voucher program after many years fight.
If you want to advocate for school choice, consider donating to. Edchoice.org
Suppose, for grits and shins, that a junior high curriculum, “social studies” perhaps, makes a firm assertion that the US was morally, strategically, militarily, and geopolitically one hundred percent in the right to use the atomic bomb on Japan. No caveats. No qualifiers. Just, absolutely perfect decision.
There are a number of folks I know who would object. Might even call it “indoctrination”. Do they have a right to opt their kids out of that part of the curriculum? Hard to make the case that the objection is based on religion. But, boy, you would hear the howls. It’s not as if the subject is without critics on all sides. It’s not Newton’s Three Laws. But to take just one side and disallow from the class materials and discussion the possibility that a different opinion should, at least, get some air time….. Personally, I agree. But I wouldn’t teach it without a nod to the objections. If somebody tried…opting out is….
Unlikely but as with the colorado bakers case there is a long road to follow
RA, you know the wrong Folks
Richard Aubrey:
History is one thing, a traditional subject for education. LGBTQ agendas for grade school kids is 180 degrees different in terms of an academic subject.
“I’ll come right out and say that I don’t think books like that have any place in a grade school curriculum. We certainly did quite nicely in grade school without any mention of sexuality at all, with the sole exception of a pair of slide shows – one for girls, one for boys – that we were shown in fifth or sixth grades, focusing on the changes associated with puberty.”
This is my recollection, too – mid/late 1960s for me. And I fully agree with your view. It just astounds (actually, appalls) me that these people think kids need to learn everything so explicitly so early.
I agree with Neo that religion ought not to be the only possible reason to object to LGBT+ ideology being taught in schools; nor should it be the only reason to object to unlimited abortion on demand. Objections to these teachings and policies can be justified on rational grounds based in biology, societal history, and common sense.
Richard Aubrey
You example is not even remotely resembling the circumstances of the supreme court case. Your example is a mere matter of opinion. The Supreme Court case is about rights enumerated in the Constitution and those issues go back considerably longer.
“So why are any kids subjected to this?”
Grooming the next generation. Desensitizing them away from traditional mores.
Neo and Richard Cook.
I know. That’s my point. What else can be subject to opting out if religion is the key in this case? Can there be other grounds and how serious do they have to be. I used the atomic bomb example. There are people who are dead certain we were right in every way. I’m one of them. Among other things, like millions of others my age, it’s why we grew up with fathers and uncles.
But there are many others who disagree seriously. Do they get to opt out? On what grounds? Can they haul religion in to the argument? If not, is there anything else?
That Stalin was a great guy? Socialism never fails and you’d better not argue that point in your essay? CRT is true in every sense? Israel is a fascist genocidal
state?
Some years back, helping some Nepali arrivals through their sophomore year, I got the history teacher’s fifty bullet points on WW II. Seven were about the war and forty-three about racist America.
On what grounds could I pull my kid from at least that week? Request different material?
IOW, this was a great win but it doesn’t seem to allow for any other reason to opt out of indoctrination.
Or are we restricted to family dinner; “The teacher said WHAT?”, if opting out is only allowed if we can make a case about religion?
Richard Aubrey:
I wrote in the post:
So yes, it has to be on religious grounds. The only other recourse is home schooling, private school, or moving to a different school district with a different curriculum.
@Richard Aubrey:It’s not as if the subject is without critics on all sides. It’s not Newton’s Three Laws.
You think Newton’s Three Laws lack criticism? Both scientifically and politically they are frequently criticized–one feminist scholar, Sandra Harding, described them as a “rape manual”.
But you seem to desire a state where kids go to government schools but parents have a lot more control over what they’re taught? Or is it that you want government schools to teach only objective facts with no opinions? I’m not sure, but neither of those things is really possible.
Law is not about fairness or justice or arguments or principles, it is about checking boxes. Religious objections are boxes our laws allow us to check. Political objections are not.
Just in the selection of what is to be taught, schools can introduce a bias, just like the NYT does when they present a selection of facts and leave out others, and if they are government schools it will be the government’s bias.
The best way would be if we could all opt out for any reason or none, send our kids to whatever school we want that’s within our budget, maybe with vouchers so we can all something basic, and get the government out of the schooling business altogether. But apparently that’s crazy talk and is the same thing as not wanting people to be educated at all. After all we couldn’t get our food without government-owned farms and grocery stores, and we’d have no roofs over our head if we didn’t rent government-owned houses, and we couldn’t drive without the cars the government gives to us.
I hate this stuff. I don’t believe schools should be meddling in sex anymore than religion.
School are failing the readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic standards of not long ago. Let them fix that before we even have a discussion about the NEA’s plans for social engineering.
School choice seems like the fair and democratic approach. Whether the teacher’s unions and public school districts like it or not.
The good news IMO is that AI and the culture wars are going to gut the current education system from top to bottom.
It’s about time.
— Occasional Commentator
Yes. Precisely that.
Interestingly, Andrew Sullivan has been writing in the NYT that the LGBTXYGQSKJEIKJFEIKj83983290&&^ movement has more or less lost touch with its supposed purpose, the more they push the ‘get to the kids’ agenda, the more the public turns against the things they’ve already accomplished, like gay ‘marriage’. Sullivan is right about that effect, though naive to imagine that it was ever possible that gay ‘marriage’ would be the self-contained, no larger implications matter that he appears to have believed it was going to be.
In practice, of course, gay ‘marriage’ was always a trojan horse for the radical left, even if Sullivan himself might not have grasped that. It’s likely to get worse for him and his before it gets better, the say Left that demanded America embrace the ‘gay agenda’ will quickly command them back into the closet in the face of Muslim disapproval.
— Huxley
Yes. This^^^. Cubed.
I don’t share your optimism on this point. IMHO, the hype/reality ratio in the ‘AI’ revolution is far too great to be confident of much of anything about it. I have no doubt it’ll end up as a useful tool for some things, but I think the predictions about revolutionizing the educational system are probably not so different from similar predictions made about the Internet. And PCs. And television. And radio. Etc.
IMHO, fixing the 3R problem needs not new tech, but old. More plain, old, boring rote repetition, outlining, study drills, etc. We had the 3R problem more or less solved over 100 years ago. It’s just that the solution isn’t fun, exciting, glamorous, or trendy. It’s boring old hard work and practice and disciplined effort.
The problem is not that we don’t know how, it’s that the educational system apparat and their political masters don’t want to do it.
When my kids were in grade school (1983-1998, to cover all 5), I sometimes volunteered to read to their classes. The teachers loved having a break, and the kids enjoyed the (sometimes) dramatic flourishes with props and costumes.
During the Christmas season, there were always a few kids whose parents asked that they not attend when I read “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and handed out candy canes.
There were opt-outs from Halloween stories also (usually the same kids).
Seems a little tame by comparison to the cases these days.
@HC68: IMHO, the hype/reality ratio in the ‘AI’ revolution is far too great to be confident of much of anything about it.
You’re right to be skeptical. There have already been two major “AI winters” in which the hype outran the delivery — ~1974–1980 and ~1987–1993.. As the current LLMs took off I had the same feeling.
However, I’ve been watching today’s AI and interacting with it. If AI stopped right now with ChatGPT 4 and other corresponding AIs, it has already changed the world.
With respect to education consider this:
____________________________________
The class of 2026 will have spent their entire undergraduate career in an academic setting in which the use of AI is so ubiquitous that it is simply assumed that every student has outsourced every assignment they were given to the context window. Students assume this, professors assume this, and naturally, employers assume this.That last factor is going to be decisive. Since employers will assume that every graduate of the class of 2026 ChatGPCheated their way through school, the value of their degrees will be exactly nothing. Bachelor’s degrees – or Master’s degrees, or Doctorates of Philosophy – will be assumed to demonstrate nothing more than the ability to write prompts, which is not a complicated skill. University credentials will therefore be completely worthless on the job market. Thus, the class of 2026 will find that, while they may perhaps have enjoyed themselves, they are now in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, in exchange for which they got to have fun for a few years (albeit not as much as they might have had before the administrative war on social life that marks the modern campus), enjoy access to some nice campus facilities, and nothing much else. It certainly won’t help them get a job.
Tens of thousands of dollars of debt for a useless scrap of paper is a very bad deal.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-class-of-2026
____________________________________
Of course AI is not stopping with ChatGPT 4 et al.
If we had a culture there are things that educators might not want to do but are expected to do. Not teaching ANYTHING about sex before it’s appropriate is one of them and I’m down with that.
Neo wrote “I don’t think books like that have any place in a grade school curriculum.”
Amen!
Also “…a pair of slide shows – one for girls, one for boys – that we were shown in fifth or sixth grades, focusing on the changes associated with puberty.”
We didn’t have any “sex education” in my private school, but somehow we figured it out on our own.
Here’s the thing: no elementary school teacher with a proper sense of her vocation would want to address these subjects in class and no administrator supervising elementary school teachers would wish to do so either. If you have a proper sense of your vocation, you know several things: (1) that you are hired help whose position derives from considerations of productive efficiency and have the task of providing only one aspect of the education of the young; (2) that as an employee of an agency which (in part due to legal compulsion) encompasses > 85% of the children in a population, you have to work toward ends which are consensual in that constituency; (3) that what pre-adolescent children lack is basic skills and knowledge. Every minute of class time devoted to a teacher’s social ideology is taken away from discussion of subjects in which the young are actually deficient. (In point of fact, sex talk is gratuitous for high school students as well).
==
NB, due to inertia and vested interests, the task of screening the teacher corps is monopolized by what are now called ‘schools of education’. The Democratic Party’s most recent VP candidate was a high school ‘social studies’ teacher who had no academic degrees. He had scads of tertiary schooling, all of it spent in one or another ‘school of education’ (all of which had weak admission standards in his case). The rap on schools of education a generation ago is that they produced a teacher corps composed of people willing to spend years of their life taking nonsense courses which imparted neither knowledge or skills. Nowadays, they quite openly promote contentious social ideologies. See KC Johnson’s cutting assessments of the schemes of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education to institute accreditation standards which would explicitly exclude from the teaching profession people not on board with the wokery. The issue of this malign network encounter in Montgomery County, Md. a critical mass of parents addled by luxury beliefs supplemented with the usual crew who roll over for officialdom every time.
Those of us of a certain age were given blue books to take our exams. That is the perfect solution to test today’s kids who will not be able to resort to the technological wonders to respond in writing.
The religion key would allow for opting out of biology classes referring to evolution. But evolution v. creationism doesn’t ruin our culture.
The issue of opting out has arisen twice in our area recently. Both times, it’s been met with “highly trained librarians” putatively at the top of the academic info charts. Their highly trained influence percolates down to the schools through their teaching of other librarians and teachers and we parents should just shut up in the face of superior knowledge.
Then Pete Butigieg’s (sp?) partner was a guest teacher someplace. Led the kids in a pledge of allegiance to the gay pride flag. Got some pushback. His response started with “highly trained librarians” .
Is there a theologian who can come up with a religious reason to opt out of CRT training? That socialism is heaven on earth?
As noted when Supreme Jackson said private schools are available to those who don’t like the public offerings, cost is a factor. That’s why “voucher” programs and such like are so necessary and why the dems fight them.
While the recent SCOTUS case is a big win, it’s narrow.
So it’s “The teacher said WHAT?” at dinner.
sullivan is pitifully naive, why has it happened exactly that way around the world, sadly the paradigm of Sodom, seems to be the model, why the contempt for ‘breeders’ why do they want to replace biological women, it is the creed of the Old Ones, that slithered into the public square while the Word was driven out,
The issue of opting out has arisen twice in our area recently. Both times, it’s been met with “highly trained librarians” putatively at the top of the academic info charts.
==
Librarians-qua-librarians are not ‘highly trained’. You can find a librarian with extensive academic or professional schooling, but that’s not what got them past the standard screens to be considered for their position. “Library science” degrees are 42 credit courses of study for which actual vocational training has been increasingly slighted. Some librarians operate under the fiction that their single course in ‘collection development’ (if such courses are still offered) allows them to ‘learn any literature’.
==
Chasten Glezman, Pete Buttigieg’s butt-buddy, is the issue of a ‘school of education’, btw. He was a 2d grade teacher when the two met on a dating site called ‘Hinge’.
Art. There was more detail. The folks initially referred to were, in fact, highly trained at universities and government institutions. Their prestige is supposed to trickle down and overpower the parents’ objections. This would be in school curricula, school or other libraries.
M. Cervantes has it right. Mankind does not exist in a vacuum; there are always societal values and the only question is what values we want to advance and, just as important, to inculcate in our children (as best we can). We decided, about a hundred years ago that we no longer wanted or needed Biblical values to undergird our society, so we kicked Him out. At first, it was thought that things would be fine and so they were, as we continued to coast on the momentum that our first two hundred years of Biblical belief and Biblical values had built up. But just like a boat without power, America soon started to drift off course, blown hither and yon by all the competing “values” that had sprung up in place of the Biblical ones. And now here we are, filing lawsuits to prevent the government from inculcating abhorrent, pathological, deviant and degenerate views about sexual behavior in our innocent children. But (as has been pointed out by others) what do we do about other, equally destructive pedagogical activities? Are we to be required to allow teachers to indoctrinate our children in the glories of communism, to disparage our Founders as “racist, bigoted, slave-owning homophobes” and by extension, to cast those same aspersions on the parents who might share the Founders’ opinions? To tell the students in their charge that everything their parents have espoused is wrong, wrong, wrong and encourage the children to rebel against parental authority? There is no fixing the current educational system; it should be dismantled and the responsibility to educate children should be put back in the hands of parents. Of course, I know I speak as a Pollyanna; the toothpaste, once squeezed out can never be returned to the tube.
As Neo & others have noted, the SCOTUS ruling gives some power to parents who can prove a religious basis.
I assume we all know non-religious people who share many morals with religious people. Maybe that’s called cultural values. Or … a subculture?
What to accept as grounds to “opt out” shouldn’t be limited to classic religions.
“Spiritual values”, maybe?
“Conscientious objections”??
It will be interesting to see how that all plays out. Or battles out.
The folks initially referred to were, in fact, highly trained at universities and government institutions.
==
You mean they attended a fancy-pants library school like SILS at Chapel Hill? No. that’s not going to help you answer normative questions.
@ Marlene > “What to accept as grounds to “opt out” shouldn’t be limited to classic religions.”
I don’t think it’s very hard to incorporate as a church – all you need is a group of like-minded people who are willing to follow the laws for non-profit organization, not necessarily a sponsoring deity.
https://www.9marks.org/article/5-questions-on-church-incorporation/
Art. I’m not the one giving these folks near-holy wisdom when I say “highly trained”. These are people who have achieved some kind of status and elevation in the business and can be sold as Authority. And thus what they say is Gold. And so is that which is said by those who follow them.
Point is, it’s a shared script, so to speak. Not something one person just dreamed up and is using locally.
@Art Deco:Chasten Glezman
A little off-topic but one of the most revolting things I ever saw was that photo of Glezman and Buttigieg posing with their adopted baby, from a HOSPITAL BED as though one of them had recently been through labor and delivery.
The woman who actually gave birth to the child might as well never have existed, this was THEIR moment and they were given implicit credit for the work and pain associated with carrying a child to term and giving birth to it.
The kind of cynicism that set up that photo and publicized it, the kind of stupidity that responded positively to it: I just don’t have words. I should learn some new words.
Shouldn’t be surprised our schools are all messed up.