Religious freedom will be in the Supreme Court spotlight again on Tuesday as justices debate whether the First Amendment gives parents the right to opt their kids out of reading or listening to books on gender identity and sexuality in elementary school.
The Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland, which won in the lower courts, says the storybooks fit the school district’s educational mission and help students better understand the many types of people who make up their community.
But a group of Christian, Jewish and Muslim parents say the school board is violating their free exercise rights by not offering an opt out option, since the stories about sensitive topics like being nonbinary complicate the religious messages they’re sharing at home.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court will clarify the scope of religious freedom protections and parental rights against the backdrop of nationwide conflict over diversity education.
Dozens of faith groups, legal scholars and civil rights organizations have filed briefs in the case, making it one of the most closely watched battles of the current term.
Montgomery County’s storybooks
Mahmoud v. Taylor originated in May 2023, about six months after the Montgomery County Board of Education unveiled its inclusive storybook program.
Originally, the program, like sex education classes on similar topics, involved parental notifications and family opt outs. In other words, parents were notified before the books were used in language arts lessons and could ask for their kids to be given something else to do.
But then, district officials adopted a new approach: Starting in the 2023-24 school year, opting out of reading or listening to the books with LGBTQ characters would no longer be an option.
Families from multiple religious backgrounds raised concerns about the change, but school leaders held firm.
As a result, several parents filed a federal religious freedom lawsuit, arguing that forced instruction on gender identity and sexuality violates their free exercise rights.
“A coalition of religiously diverse parents came together and filed this lawsuit not to get the books removed from curriculum, but to restore the right to opt their children out of that instruction,” said Will Haun, senior counsel for Becket, the law firm representing the parents.
School district officials say the lawsuit relies on an overly broad interpretation of religious freedom and stems from a misunderstanding about how the stories are used in class.
While past rulings have said that schools can’t force students to change their faith-related beliefs or actions, there’s no law against helping students engage with new ideas, they say.
“From the beginning, MCPS’s goal has been for students to engage with these storybooks as they engage with any other book in the language-arts curriculum. The storybooks are not used in any lessons related to gender and sexuality. Nor is any student asked or expected to change his or her views about his or her own, or any other student’s, sexual orientation or gender identity,” officials argued in their original Supreme Court brief.
The Montgomery County Board of Education successfully defended its program at the district and circuit court levels, where judges denied the parents’ request for a preliminary injunction.
The parents asked the Supreme Court to take up the case this fall, and in January, the justices agreed.
Precedent on parental rights
Although Mahmoud v. Taylor feels like a natural outgrowth of contemporary debates over LGBTQ rights and diversity education, it actually centers on old questions about how much control parents should have over what happens in public school classrooms.
The Supreme Court’s three most famous rulings on parental rights are all more than 50 years old, and two of them are from the 1920s.
In the first two cases, the justices emphasized that parents have a right to direct their children’s education. In the third, Wisconsin v. Yoder from 1972, the justices unanimously sided with Amish families who claimed that a Wisconsin law mandating some high school education violated their religious freedom and parental rights.
“The case was decided primarily on free exercise grounds,” said Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, to the Deseret News in December, noting that the justices determined the state was unnecessarily interfering with families’ ability to live according to their beliefs.
The Yoder ruling comes up repeatedly in documents related to Mahmoud v. Taylor, including in the 4th U.S. Circuit’s ruling in favor of the school district.
School officials and their supporters say the Supreme Court’s key concern in the Yoder case was that the Amish families were being compelled to do something that violated their faith.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, there’s no such direct coercion, they say. Children — and their parents — are free to believe whatever they want to believe about gender identity and sexual orientation before and after they read the contested books.
The parents and their supporters, on the other hand, say that Yoder should also apply to more indirect forms of coercion, including books that will undermine the faith-based teachings on gender and sexuality that young students are hearing at home.
The storybook program “put a lot of pressure on religious families to choose between having to abandon public school or risk a violation of their child’s religious formation,” Haun said.
The stakes of Mahmoud v. Taylor
Around 60 briefs joined by hundreds of organizations have been filed with the Supreme Court in Mahmoud v. Taylor, numbers that signify high national interest in the case.
Depending on which side of the case they’re on, groups either think the future of religious freedom or of public education hangs in the balance.
Unsurprisingly, several of the briefs come from religious leaders or organizations, but not all people of faith view the battle through the same lens.
Some faith groups say reading storybooks about gender and sexuality is part of shaping thoughtful citizens, while others say the school district is encouraging hostility toward common religious teachings.
“Diverse religious denominations, Catholic and Protestant, The Church of Jesus Christ, Jewish and Muslim — all teach religious doctrines closely resembling those cherished by petitioners. They merely ask for the same opt-out rights long granted by Montgomery County for such sensitive matters," reads a brief joined by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and eight other faith groups.
Oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor will begin at 8 a.m. MDT on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in the case is expected by early July.