The Supreme Court will not issue a final ruling until this summer, but if oral arguments this week are any indication, the justices will restore parents’ right to prevent the indoctrination of their public school children into radical gender ideology. This will be welcome to anyone who wants to see schools succeed as foundational institutions of our society.
For decades, Maryland’s Montgomery County School Board maintained a religious diversity guidelines policy that respected the fact that it was “the most religiously diverse county in the nation.” Parents had the right to opt their children out of any classroom activity they thought “would impose a substantial burden on their religious beliefs.”
In 2019, Maryland adopted new regulations to promote “educational equity,” which included fostering students’ “gender identity and expression” and “sexual orientation.” In implementing these new regulations, the Montgomery County School Board introduced “LGBTQ-inclusive” into its English curriculum for students as young as kindergarten.
The board said the books it chose to include in this effort would be those that “disrupted” cisnormativity and power hierarchies.” One was Pride Puppy, a book for three- and four-year-olds that asks readers to search for images of underwear, leather, and a drag queen at a Pride Parade.
Another book for children in kindergarten through fifth grade, Intersectional Allies, asks children to think about what it means to be “transgender” or “nonbinary” and concludes that together, we will “rewrite the norms.” In another book, Born Ready, a young boy asks his mother how his biological sister can become a boy, and his mother instructs him that “not everything needs to make sense. This is about love.”
The guidance document with the books instructs teachers to “disrupt the either/or thinking” about biological sex and encourages them to teach that disagreement with gender ideology is “hurtful.”
At first, the board honored the old opt-out policy for parents. But in March 2023, it reversed its policy, saying too many parents were shielding their children from the new curriculum. The opt-out policy, not the gender ideology, had become too disruptive.
More than 1,000 parents petitioned the board to reinstate the opt-out policy, but it refused. One board member said the objectors, who were mostly Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox, were promoting “hate,” and were no different than “white supremacists” and “xenophobes.” The parents sued, and the case reached the Supreme Court for oral argument on Tuesday.
The board told justices that the books were not meant to indoctrinate children into gender ideology, but merely to expose them to it. Justice Amy Coney Barrett had none of it.
“Well, it’s not just exposure to the idea, right? It’s not just some people think. That’s — that’s exposure. Some people think X. Some people think Y. It’s saying: This is the right view of the world. This is how we think about things. This is how you should think about things. This is like 2 plus 2 is 4,” she said.
When the board’s lawyer said that was not so, Justice Neil Gorsuch jumped in.
“Let’s say that is in the record, OK? Let’s say it’s not just some people who think X; other people think Y; we live in a pluralistic society, period,” he said, “Let’s say some people think X, and X is wrong, hurtful, and negative. Is that more than exposure, under your theory?”
The board’s lawyer admitted that Gorduch’s comments would be coercion, not exposure, but said that is not what the books were intended to do. That is false. The record is clear. The board intended to use the books as tools for teachers to “disrupt” the way parents were raising their children to think about gender and sexuality. That is why they were introduced in the first place.
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said parents’ First Amendment rights were not being violated because they could pull their children out of public school and put them in private school. She left aside the fact that Montgomery County does not fund such parent choices, so the decision to switch to private school is financially impossible for many parents. One must ask whether we want a public school system that parents find toxic and choose to avoid. Should well-organized and well-funded radical activists be allowed to force their worldview on public school children to such an extent that those who disagree or object have no option but to flee?
The question answers itself. Of course, that is not the school system we want or the one parents and their children have the right to expect. The tide appears to have turned on gender nonsense, which is wholly welcome as a restoration of common sense and a blow against ideological repression. But it will take several years at least, and doubtless many court decisions, to rout the militants who have been trying to nationalize the nation’s children. One hopes the Supreme Court will restore parents’ right to reject indoctrination of their children and will, in this case and others, disrupt the Left’s propaganda effort as much as it wanted to disrupt our societal norms.
