A Supreme Court Victory for Parental Rights in the Woke Wars

National Review Online

Saturday, June 28, 2025

 

For the last three years, Montgomery County Public Schools administrators, officials, and lawyers have defended the district’s supposed obligation to teach pre-K through eighth-grade students a catalog of “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks.

 

When the district first introduced the curriculum, it allowed parents to opt their children out of the lessons, in the same way Maryland law requires parents be allowed to opt their children out of sex education.

 

MCPS stripped that choice from parents in 2023.

 

An interfaith coalition of Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox parents filed a lawsuit against the district, on the grounds that MCPS violated their First Amendment rights by compelling their children to participate in lessons contrary to their family’s religious convictions; and thankfully, the Supreme Court sided with the parents on Friday, granting them a preliminary injunction to opt their children out while the case continues to be litigated.

 

The 6–3 opinion by Justice Samuel Alito is yet another of the fruits of the Court’s conservative majority, its fidelity to the Constitution, and its fundamental common sense.

 

Mahmoud v. Taylor is a standout case for parental rights, especially as lower courts and parents nationwide try to stop public schools from effectively proselytizing on issues related to gender identity, sexuality, and more. The parents, and their Becket Fund for Religious Liberty representation, deserve widespread applause for standing up to the woke, incredibly well-funded behemoth that is Montgomery County Public Schools.

 

It is particularly valuable that the Court explicitly acknowledged, a decade after Obergefell v. Hodges, that its 5–4 decision in that case does not constitute an official public orthodoxy that the government is entitled to impress upon young children. The Court noted one storybook that “clearly conveys the message that same-sex marriage should be accepted by all as a cause for celebration.” That is obviously the message Montgomery County aimed to teach children over the objections of their parents. But Americans are still entitled to object to same-sex marriage without being cast out of social institutions. Storybooks “designed to present the opposite viewpoint to young, impressionable children who are likely to accept without question any moral messages conveyed by their teachers’ instruction” may not be mandated without exemption. “High school students may understand that widespread approval of a practice does not necessarily mean that everyone should accept it,” Alito wrote, “but very young children are most unlikely to appreciate that fine point.” Thanks to the justices, the law still recognizes the leading role of parents in such situations.

 

To their shame, the county’s public-school officials maintained that forcing children to learn material that asserted, for instance, that doctors “guess” when determining a baby’s sex was acceptable. Montgomery County resident Justice Brett Kavanaugh said it best in oral arguments, when he admitted he was “a bit mystified” that MCPS had chosen that “this is the hill we’re going to die on.”

 

Throughout the course of its legal battle, MCPS showed just how dedicated it was to dogmatic, left-wing ideology. MCPS took up this case as a culture-war battle. Parents, notably, didn’t object in court to the district’s stated goals of diversity and tolerance; they simply asked for the right to remove their children from lessons that contradict their religious beliefs.

 

District lawyers defended the books in court as beacons of “representative” instruction that presented children with different viewpoints from typical “heteronormative” children’s stories like Sleeping Beauty. The district’s broader goal to create culturally diverse classrooms “didn’t work,” according to their argument, if some students didn’t participate. A Montgomery County council member even likened Muslim families who objected to the LGBTQ lessons to white supremacists.

 

The most culturally diverse group represented in Mahmoud was the coalition of unlikely friends of all faiths formed to fight against woke excess in the deep-blue Washington suburb. By joining together, they vindicated their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children and established that it is grounded in the Constitution.