The Supreme Court on Tuesday was sympathetic to a group of Maryland parents who want to be able to opt their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. The parents argued that the local school board’s refusal to give them that choice violates their religious beliefs and therefore their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion. During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral argument, a majority of the justices seemed to agree with them, with several justices questioning whether there would even be any harm to simply allowing the parents to excuse their children from the instruction.
The parents in the case have children in the public schools in Montgomery County, which is in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and is one of the most religiously diverse counties in the United States. The parents include Tamer Mahmoud and Enas Barakat, who are Muslim, Melissa and Chris Persak, who are Roman Catholic, and Svitlana and Jeff Roman, who are Ukrainian Orthodox and Roman Catholic.
In 2022, the county’s school board approved books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book describes the story of a girl attending her uncle’s same-sex wedding, for example, while another book, Pride Puppy, tells the story of a puppy that gets lost during a Pride parade.
The following year, the board announced that it would no longer allow parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. That prompted the parents in this case to go to federal court, where they argued that the board’s refusal to allow them to opt their children out violated their rights under the First Amendment to freely exercise their religion because it stripped them of their ability to instruct their children on issues of gender and sexuality according to their respective faiths and to control how and when their children are exposed to these issues.