National Review Online
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Parents should have the greatest possible choices and
control regarding how their children are educated. While the state has
legitimate interests in raising children to be good citizens, those interests
should nearly always be secondary to those of their parents. Deference to
parents should be especially pronounced at the ages when children are young and
impressionable, and especially on matters of cultural, social, and moral
education. Parental interests are never more urgent than when the government is
teaching children things that conflict with their faith.
All of those principles are at issue in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which was argued Tuesday before the
U.S. Supreme Court. The Montgomery County, Md., school board prepared a
curriculum of “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks to be taught to children as young as
prekindergarten — ostensibly as part of the English curriculum.
Religious parents, led by a Muslim family, objected that they should have the
right to opt their children out of those classes, in the same way that the
county allows them to opt out of many other things, including specifically
designated sex education classes for older children. The county refused,
ostensibly on the grounds that there were so many opt-out requests that it
couldn’t accommodate them all without massive disruption.
Sometimes, cases get to the Supreme Court because a
lawsuit should never have been brought. Sometimes, it’s because one should
never have been defended. Mahmoud is in the latter category. The county,
having embarked on this exercise in propagandizing young children about
same-sex marriage, transgenderism, and drag queens, should have been content
with the captive audience it had, and not tried to prevent conscientious
objectors from keeping their kids out of the lessons. Swept away by Biden-era
woke hubris, the school district made a federal case out of its power to embed
sex and gender indoctrination in reading lessons, precisely because it could.
Yet, when they got to the Supreme Court, the school board
and its defenders had to pretend that these storybook lessons were merely
presenting neutrally the fact that people have same-sex marriages or
consider themselves transgender — even as Justice Samuel Alito read aloud
passages about talking a little girl into why she should be happy for her gay
uncle’s wedding, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett read from curricular materials
on how to “disrupt” the “binary” thinking of skeptical grade-schoolers. Justice
Brett Kavanaugh, who noted that he is a lifelong resident of the county, asked
“how it came to this” from Maryland’s once-proud history of religious
tolerance. You could just homeschool your kids if you don’t like it, scoffed
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was reduced to insisting that the
instructional authority of a teacher-read book is no different than the burden
on religious people of seeing ads they dislike on a public bus.
If our public schools do no more teaching than what kids
can learn from reading the side of a bus, that’s not much of a defense of them.
In arguing that it is not coercive for woke schools to teach left-wing ideology
so long as parents have other options, Justice Jackson was implicitly conceding
the case for universal school choice. We’d love to see that day, but for now, Maryland has
only very limited school choice options. At least until that changes, the
traditional First Amendment rights of parents to direct the schooling of their
children must be respected by their neighborhood public schools.
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