At the center of the Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor is the question of whether parents’ religious rights are violated when they cannot opt their children out of public school lessons that include books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes. The court is expected to issue its decision on Friday, potentially opening a Pandora’s box of censorship for teachers and school districts nationwide.
The case involves Maryland’s Montgomery County School District, which serves more than 160,000 students and where students read and discuss a variety of age-appropriate books. A small handful of those children’s picture books include LGBTQ+ characters. Among the books at issue are titles like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, in which a young girl frets that her favorite uncle’s impending marriage to his partner means he won’t have time to spend with her anymore.
The parents who brought the suit claim that even the mere exposure to books in the classroom showing that LGBTQ+ people exist burdens their free exercise of religion in a way that is impermissibly coercive, compelling them to violate their religious beliefs. However, the books at the center of the case are about kindness and accepting differences, appropriate goals for a public school system preparing students to live in a pluralistic society.
At first blush, opt-outs might sound innocuous. But the result is not simply disruption in the classroom – it is the stigmatization of topics and identities that operates as a gateway to censorship.
For a time, the Montgomery County School District allowed families to opt out of lessons that included these books – meaning schools notified parents before the books were used and gave them the option to remove their children from the lesson. But eventually, that system became unworkable, the district said in court papers. According to the district, classrooms were disrupted by groups of students leaving when one of the books was in use, and their departures left the children from LGBTQ+ families to confront the implied stigma attached to their very existence.
PEN America filed an amicus brief stating that such an opt-out system would infringe on another First Amendment-protected right, the free-speech rights of students, teachers, and authors, and as a practical matter would worsen the wave of educational censorship that PEN America has documented across the country, particularly involving books with LGBTQ+ themes, persons, or characters.
Rather than grapple with the hassle of roping off certain kinds of content and creating multiple lesson plans, teachers and school districts are more likely to pass over anything that might require parental notification, and in doing so will deny students the chance to learn about diverse identities and for many, to see their own families and lives reflected.
Requiring opt-outs when any parents object to content on religious grounds could also create administrative chaos for school districts, placing them in the fraught position of trying to determine which books and other classroom materials might be religiously offensive to whom and therefore subject to opt-out requests. Undoubtedly, anything that acknowledges the existence of the LGBTQ+ community would be caught up. But what about a science textbook that includes lessons on evolution? Or a history lesson that references women working outside the home, something to which some religions object?
This isn’t fanciful thinking. During April’s oral arguments in the Mahmoud case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out real examples of parents who objected to lessons touching on topics like divorce, interfaith couples, and “immodest dress.”
How does a school determine which viewpoints might potentially infringe unconstitutionally on someone’s religious liberty, while at the same time remain true to the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment? What if a vocal minority of parents and non-parents who are pursuing a wider agenda to remove LGBTQ+ content from schools– as we have seen again and again in other cases seeking to restrict or remove LGBTQ+-themed books – spread misinformation about the content of particular books?
At its most basic level, a broad opt-out requirement applicable to sweeping areas of content (such as anything with LGBTQ+ characters) interferes with a school district’s careful decisions about what to teach and what materials to use–decisions made by professionals who use an array of standards in their choices, including educational value and age appropriateness.
An opt-out would also raise myriad other concerns across the entire curriculum. Imagine a scenario in which a student writes a story about going to the zoo with his two moms. Can he share that story with his class, without allowing other students to opt out of class when he is scheduled to read his story?
If not, then the creation of opt-outs is license to censor the very existence of the LBGTQ+ community and their families. It is not difficult to imagine that other groups might soon be added to the list of those who may not be named.
