No more LGBTQ brainwashing — SCOTUS school smackdown revives parents’ rights
The Supreme Court on Friday handed down a sweeping victory for parental rights and religious freedom — and dealt a devastating blow to the progressive zealots bent on brainwashing America’s children.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, Montgomery County, Md., parents fought their local school board over a policy requiring young children to read books centered on LGBTQ+ identity.
The justices ruled 6-3 in favor of the parents, who sought the right to opt their kids out of lessons that undermine their religious beliefs.
In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito let the books speak for themselves via color reproductions of their pages.
There was no better way to demonstrate that these were not books promoting tolerance and acceptance, but radical attempts at indoctrination.
“Pride Puppy,” part of the district’s kindergarten curriculum, includes a word search listing topics detailed in the book’s illustrations: drag king, drag queen, high heels, lip ring, lace, leather.
Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Another book, “Born Ready,” features a very young child who identifies as transgender. In it, the character’s older brother protests, “This doesn’t make sense. You can’t become a boy. You have to be born one.”
Their mother scolds him: “Not everything needs to make sense. This is about love.”
The message is clear: If you want issues of sex and gender to make sense, you aren’t a loving person.
The school board, Alito wrote, “encourages the teachers to correct the children and accuse them of being ‘hurtful’ when they express a degree of religious confusion.”
They use the books to do it.
At the heart of the case was the claim that parents’ religious rights were being violated.
But the deeper reality remained unspoken: The school-district progressives weren’t simply undermining the beliefs of Muslim, Christian and Mormon parents.
They were trying to induct the children of these families into their own ideology — one that dismisses biological reality and enshrines “love,” as they define it, as the only acceptable truth.
The conflict also exposed a stark divide between the progressive activists who run the county school system and the religious, largely immigrant families the district serves.
Accustomed to lockstep minority support, leftist county officials were blindsided when the communities they claim to represent pushed back.
And when the minority parents protested, the progressives lashed out.
The curriculum dispute “puts some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots,” Montgomery County Council member Kristin Mink complained in one contentious public meeting.
School board member Lynne Harris disparaged a Muslim student who testified at another meeting, telling the press she felt “kind of sorry” for the girl and speculating she was “parroting dogma” she’d learned from her parents.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations demanded apologies from both officials.
When progressives rallied outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments, speaker after speaker insisted the district’s policy was about teaching tolerance to children of supposedly bigoted parents.
After the ruling came down, the district declared in an email to staff, “This decision complicates our work creating a welcoming, inclusive and equitable school system.”
But if tolerance and inclusivity were truly its goals, the county would have sought to respect the values of religious families.
No, the objective was ideological control over every child in the county’s schools.
The progressive activists’ message was brutally simple: Our way or the highway. This is what we do in public schools. If you don’t like it, you can pay to educate your kids privately, or homeschool them yourself.
Alito flatly rejected that argument.
“Public education is a public benefit,” he wrote, “and the government cannot ‘condition’ its ‘availability’ on parents’ willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise.”
In addition, he observed, “since education is compulsory, the parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit.”
This case laid bare the hypocrisy of progressive ideology — and the flimsiness of those convictions when challenged.
Progressives in Montgomery County had a choice: To respect the religious beliefs of minority families, or to force them to abandon those beliefs and cave to leftist views on gender and sexuality.
Or, of course, the district could have dropped its leftist indoctrination mission altogether.
Rather than offering an unbiased public education to these low-income, immigrant religious families, school officials told them to leave if they wouldn’t comply.
Mahmoud v. Taylor revealed the left’s true colors on tolerance and privilege.
But with its decision, the Supreme Court sent an unmistakable message: Parents’ rights are not subject to the whims of progressive activists — and they don’t evaporate at the schoolhouse door.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.