On Friday, June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor.
Far-right Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, stressing that religious parents should be allowed to have their kids opt out of pro-gay educational material if they choose. All five of the other GOP-appointed justices joined Alito in that view, while the three dissenters were all Democratic appointees: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
Many right-wing media pundits are hailing the decision as a triumph for religious freedom, but in an article published on July 1, The New Republic’s Matt Ford argues that the ruling is anti-freedom of religion.
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“Alito and his colleagues framed the decision as a victory for religious freedom and for the diversity of faiths in America,” Ford explains. “While the ruling will certainly benefit parents who do not wish to expose their children to certain ideas, I am skeptical that it will be a net positive for American religious pluralism. The decision is instead likely to create a two-tier approach in public schools that will benefit larger religious groups and ostracize smaller ones.”
Ford points out that Mahmoud v. Taylor “centered around a dispute over LGBTQ-related books in public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland.”
“In 2022, the elected Montgomery County School Board added five books featuring LGBTQ characters to its English curriculum that are designed for pre-K students through fifth graders,” Ford notes. “The board’s move was driven by its desire to ‘fully reflect the diversity of (Montgomery County Public Schools) families,’ among whom are both LGBTQ students and children raised by LGBTQ parents. At first, the school district allowed parents to opt out from lessons that included the books, but it changed course after a significant number of parents withdrew their students from class during the lessons, creating major administrative burdens for the schools and teachers.”
Ford continues, “After the district eliminated the opt-out policy during the 2022–2023 school year, a group of Christian and Muslim parents sued the school board to force the policy’s reinstatement on First Amendment religious freedom grounds.”
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Alito, Ford observes, “concluded” that because the pro-gay books “espouse a certain point of view,” the parents “had the constitutional right to opt out of any instruction involving them.”
“The surface-level implication of last week’s ruling is that parents have a constitutional right to opt out their children from any instructional material that might ‘substantially interfere’ with their child’s ‘religious development,’” Ford writes. “But it won’t work like that in practice. In a friend-of-the-court brief, the National Education Association warned that adopting the plaintiffs’ theory would ‘generate endless administrative confusion, impose burdensome unfunded mandates on schools, and mire federal courts in litigation over matters far outside their expertise.’”
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Read Matt Ford’s full article for The New Republic at this link.