Supreme Court To Consider If Religious Parents Can Opt Kids Out Of Sexually Explicit Storybook Readings

The Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday Maryland parents’ challenge to a ban on opting their young children out of storybook readings about pride parades, gender transitions and drag queens.

The predominantly Muslim and Christian parents behind the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, argue the Montgomery County Board of Education is infringing on their free exercise rights under the First Amendment.

“New government-imposed orthodoxy about what children are ‘supposed’ to think about gender and sexuality is not a constitutional basis to sideline a child’s own parents,” the parents, backed by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, wrote in their petition.

Books elementary school teachers read to students include “Pride Puppy,” which asks students to look for images of items like “underwear” and the name of a “controversial LGBTQ activist and sex worker,” and “Intersection Allies,” which asks students to consider questions like what it means to be transgender, according to court documents.

While the school board initially allowed parents with religious objections to opt their children out of the program, it later changed its decision and declined to even offer parental notice.

Opt-outs are available for sex ed classes mandated in high school, yet the district denies opt-outs for the “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks it required for elementary students in just 2022, according to parents’ petition. The parents sued in May 2023.

“Our nation has a long tradition of respecting parents’ right to decide when and how to introduce their children to such sensitive topics, and we are confident the Court will uphold that enduring freedom here,” Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said in a statement.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found 2-1 last year that the parents’ free exercise rights were not burdened because the school board had not compelled them to “change their religious beliefs or conduct.”

“[S]imply hearing about other views does not necessarily exert pressure to believe or act differently than one’s religious faith requires,” the court held.

The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case in January.

The district argues that there is “no evidence that any parent or child was penalized for his or her religious beliefs, asked to affirm any views contrary to his or her faith, or otherwise prohibited or deterred from engaging in religious practice.”

The Trump administration, in a brief backing the parents, wrote that the lower court “overlooks that the relevant religious practices are parents’ sincere beliefs.”

“The Board’s policy requires parents to ‘shed their religious beliefs,’ about how to raise their children within their faiths: They cannot subject their children to the schools’ instruction regarding the storybooks without violating those beliefs,” they wrote.

Mahmoud v. Taylor is one of several religious liberty cases at the Supreme Court this term. In March, the justices heard a case brought by Catholic Charities, which challenged Wisconsin’s decision to deny it an unemployment tax exemption for religious organizations.

The justices will also consider a challenge to the country’s first religious charter school — which the Oklahoma Supreme Court found violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause — on April 30.