Predictions are that SCOTUS will require that parents be allowed to opt out of gay content in public grade schools on grounds of religious freedom
The issues are as follows:
This case concerns the Montgomery County School District, the largest in Maryland, and whether they should be able to prevent parents from opting their kids, as young as 3-4 years old, out of school curriculum describing, among other things, drag queens, gay sex, and other topics including transgenderism. After a group of parents sued, the case made its way to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and the Carolinas. That court said no. No opt-outs. …
Anyway, the “Question Presented” in the case, or, in other words, the exact legal question the Supreme Court has to decide is:
Do public schools burden parents’ religious exercise when they compel elementary school children to participate in instruction on gender and sexuality against their parents’ religious convictions and without notice or opportunity to opt out?
This isn’t about the teaching of math or science or other subjects in a traditional curriculum. These are young children, and these are matters that until very recently were considered to be a family’s private business and matters on which religions often have had strong moral differences and objections. When I was growing up, and even when my son was growing up, I don’t recall public schools mentioning these topics one way or the other. They were not considered matters for public school instruction, either approving or disapproving, and were not considered suitable matters to discuss with pre-pubescent children.
In the present legal case, the school originally had an opt-out but – get this – so many parents requested it that the school had trouble dealing with that and therefore refused to allow any opt-outs. That’s quite a solution.
The only idea I ever had of my teachers’ private lives was, in the case of female teachers, “Miss” was unmarried and “Mrs.” was married. Beyond that, nothing. The biology of sex was presented separately to boys and girls in, I think, fifth grade. Marriage and any alternate sexual practices were discussed with parents and not at school.
I caught that, too, Neo — they wanted no opt-outs because they had so many they didn’t know where to put the kids! That should have been their first clue.
@neo:This isn’t about the teaching of math or science or other subjects in a traditional curriculum.
I think it actually is.
As I understand it, these LGBTQ books were being assigned in English class for the study of English, and the district was arguing that there shouldn’t be an opt-out for English class.
English class isn’t pushing anything, oh no, they just want kids to learn to read. About Uncle Bobby’s wedding.
And this is why it’s good there are some Muslims in the US because the Left is intimidated to paint them as bigots:
If there aren’t equivalent math or science books, there soon will be. Math texts have been used to push social justice content for some time now.
My experience mirrors that of Kate’s, except that sexual practices were talked about-just not in any classroom.
Are these schools giving equal time to heterosexual practices? Why are these schools trying to sexualize children anyway?
Whaddaya say we talk about opting in to such material instead of opting out?
Y’know??
Why should the default be that it’ll there for everyone, except for these few weirdos?
Y’know??
That it was in the curriculum to begin with is an indicator of what a claque of creepy people are in our time employed in public education. (I doubt it’s much different in secular private schools). The teacher’s colleges are progenitors and the unions and the Democratic Party protectors.
==
Note, ‘religious freedom’ is the stated reason here, but in truth everyone should be able to opt out of what the creepazoid teachers and administrators want to do.
==
In red states, if Republican legislators will get off their asses, you can do the following:
==
(1) prescribe that the state board of regents compose and administer only such examinations which appear in a state glossary which names the subjects and prescribes capsule descriptions.
==
(2) grant by law plenary discretion to parents to remove their children from classes which do not comport with the state glossary.
==
(3) grant all parents the right to a voucher issued by the local school board with a redemption value equal to the variable costs in the board’s budget divided by the population of school-age youth in the district. A parent could use the voucher to finance their child’s enrollment in a private (tuition free) school or to finance the enrollment of their child in another public district. The public district if it took students from other districts would have a franchise to balance bill the parent for the difference between the redemption value of the voucher and the per-pupil cost in the district. The private school accepting the voucher would be debarred from imposing further charges on the parent, but would be due from a dedicated state fund a capitation of a value equal to this year’s collections of a special value added tax divided by the number of such vouchers issued by all boards in the state which maintain brick-and-mortar schools. (The VAT in question would not be collected in those districts which issued vouchers in lieu of maintaining brick-and-mortar schools).
==
(4) grant parents the right to a partial rebate of their school property taxes. The rebate would be equal to the parents’ contribution through such taxes to the variable costs of educating the districts youth divided by the number of school age children they have (with the proviso that the refund to the parents not exceed in value the variable costs in the school budget divided by the number of school age youth in the district). The cash refund can assist the parents in financing enrollment of their child in a tuition-funded private school or in financing home schooling.
==
(5) debar state colleges and universities from offering teaching certificates which in their course content differ from prescriptions in a state glossary. The glossary description would incorporate teaching methods courses and courses on testing and the psychology of learning. Full stop. As a transitional measure, the extant teachers’ colleges could be dissolved by law and their faculty discharged.
==
(6) prescribe that schools of public administration in the state system offer a menu of specializations: general public administration, general philanthropy, education, hospitals and clinics, police departments, and courts. End ‘educational leadership’ degrees.
==
(7) End collective bargaining for public employees.
If “religious freedom” is the only ‘out’ you’ve solved nothing. There should be options available for every parent from which to choose…and yet another argument for home and private schooling.
We had two one time classes on sex. One in fifth grade, which focused solely on girl parts and boy parts. Which made sense as that was right about when puberty started. The other was in seventh grade, which also talked about birth control. There were opt outs. This was during the time of the Renee Richards controversy. Not talked about in school.
I read the oral argument in Mahmoud. The liberal judges — Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson — kept bringing up parades of horribles, imagining extreme examples, what if this, what if that. They couldn’t seem to address what’s really happening at all and interrupted petitioners’ counsel whenever he tried to return the subject to the actual facts. You’d almost think they couldn’t come up with any real-world reasons to object to his position.
I attended Montgomery County schools as a child, including a particular elementary school repeatedly mentioned during the argument for its decision to read one of the controversial books from the curriculum to young students every day during Pride Month. Nothing remotely like this was ever mentioned in those days by anybody to anybody, of course. Back then, the County was trying to recover from segregation after Brown v. Bd of Education, which integrated its schools for the first time in history in about 1960. That was a worthy struggle for the schools. But this? It’s hard for me to believe that this is really where we are now, with books mandated for kids in kindergarten about subjects like a little boy who becomes a girl named Penelope.
Hundreds of parents, many of them Muslims, pleaded to be allowed to excuse their children as young as three or four from this kind of forced indoctrination about transsexuality (if that’s a word!) School Board members accused the parents of bigotry and (horrors!) Trump support, and one young Muslim girl was shamed at a public meeting for “following the dogma of her parents.” The families were left with no option but litigation. One family had to move in with grandparents so they could afford private school.
How did this happen? Really, how did it? Sometimes lately I feel so old.
The line of questions Amy Coney Barrett is following indicate an attempt to weasel out of getting to the heart of the issue. This isn’t only about religious beliefs. It’s also about the left’s attempts to sexualize children at inappropriate ages and indoctrinate them into the view that perversion can only exist if its imposed without consent. And even ‘consent’ is circumstantial.
Mind you these are not sex-ed classes we’re talking about. These are regular classes, supposed to be concerned with the three Rs and not L, G, B, T and Q. Kids nowadays are getting SJW-aligned material in math, in science, in reading classes.
John Guilfoyle:
The problem with allowing parents to opt out for ANY reason is that it would mean that public schooling in general would lack uniformity because they might have to allow parents to opt out of any course for any reason. My guess is that many of the parents who originally opted out here for religious reasons weren’t necessarily all that religious; they just didn’t want their kids taking the course and I doubt their degrees of religiosity were checked up on. On the other hand, I would guess that the parents who sued were indeed religious.
Art Deco: “That it was in the curriculum to begin with is an indicator of what a claque of creepy people are in our time employed in public education.”
Yes. It’s sick that we are even at this point. Though once marriage was officially redefined as having no intrinsic connection to biological sex, it’s hard to see how objections of the sort raised by these parents could hold up for long. If you object to “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” you’re implying that you don’t accept the decision of the Supreme Court and are engaging in something morally equivalent to an objection to black and white children going to the same schools.
it’s hard to see how objections of the sort raised by these parents could hold up for long.
==
It’s not hard at all.