Supreme Court Poised to Back Faith Opt-Out on LGBTQ Books (1)

A divided US Supreme Court signaled it will back public school parents seeking to opt out of classroom lessons that incorporate LGBTQ-friendly books, as the justices heard a case that could further expand religious rights.

In an argument that spanned 2 1/2 hours, the justices scrutinized a Montgomery County, Maryland, elementary school program that has included books about a puppy that gets lost at an LGBTQ-pride parade and a young child whose gender identity doesn’t match his birth-assigned sex.

The court’s conservatives suggested support for parents who say schoolchildren, including some as young as three, are being taught ideas that violate their families’ religious beliefs.

The parents “are not asking the school to change its curriculum,” Justice Samuel Alito said. “They’re just saying, ‘Look, we want out.’ Why isn’t that feasible? What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?”

The justices are considering three religion cases over the course of March and April, with the potential to significantly expand the role of faith in public life. The court has sided with religion in roughly a dozen cases during the past decade, alarming people who want to protect longstanding boundaries between government and faith.

Critics also say the rulings have infringed on reproductive rights and protections for racial minorities and the LGBTQ community.

Read More: LGBTQ Schoolbooks Among Supreme Court Religious Rights Cases

One of the court’s three liberals, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the suing parents were seeking to strip authority from democratically elected school boards that can be responsive to local concerns.

Under the parents’ approach, “you have federal judges flipping through the picture books and deciding whether these are appropriate for five-year-olds,” Jackson said.

But the court’s conservatives left little doubt they thought Montgomery County was being too rigid. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has lived in the county virtually his entire life, said it has been a “beacon” of religious freedom for centuries.

“I guess I’m surprised that this is the hill we’re going to die on, in terms of not respecting religious liberty,” he said.

The school district’s lawyer, Alan Schoenfeld, said the county “walks a tightrope” in trying to balance the interests of the most religiously diverse school community in the country.

“Montgomery County did its best under these circumstances, given their curricular goals,” Schoenfeld said. “But it is a fundamentally different question about whether there’s a constitutional right to opt your child out of curriculum” for religious reasons.

The lawyer for the parents, Eric Baxter of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said the school board’s arguments would mean “it could compel instruction using pornography and parents would have no rights.”

The Trump administration is backing the parents in the case. The Montgomery County policy “burdens parents of multiple faiths whose religious duty is to shield their young children from such content,” Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued.

In ruling against the parents, a federal appeals court said it wasn’t yet clear how the books would be used in the classroom. The panel said that, as the litigation moved forward, families would need to prove that they or their children were being coerced into changing their religious views or practices.

The Supreme Court will rule by July in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, 24-297.

(Updates with Kavanaugh, lawyers comments starting in ninth paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Elizabeth Wasserman at ewasserman2@bloomberg.net

Steve Stroth

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