The right-wing justices, sensing an easy win in their grasp for parents seeking to opt their children out from LGBTQ-inclusive content at public school, couldn’t stop themselves from taking a victory lap before Tuesday’s arguments even concluded.
In 2022, the board of education in Montgomery County, Maryland, incorporated a few books with LGBTQ characters and themes into the curriculum. When the board ended its opt-out policy — saying that the policy had become unmanageable, in at least one case leading to widespread absenteeism — a handful of religious parents sued in federal court. On Tuesday, that case reached the eagerly waiting Supreme Court.
“Maryland was founded on religious liberty and religious tolerance — a haven for Catholics escaping persecution in England,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh waxed. “I guess I’m just surprised this is the hill we’re gonna die on in terms of not respecting religious liberty, given that history.”
He added to the Montgomery County Public Schools’ lawyer: “Thank you, this is a tough case to argue,” with the air of giving kudos to the 16-seed team that just got demolished by the one seed.
The conservative justices openly sided with the parents, despite their losses at the district and appellate courts. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the district court, finding that the parents could not show that the no opt-out policy rose to a First Amendment violation.
The school system argued Tuesday that overturning those rulings will open the floodgates for parents to opt their children out of all kinds of instruction; Justice Sonia Sotomayor came wielding cases where parents objected to teaching about women’s achievements outside the home, divorce, interfaith marriage and evolution.
The harder-right justices had a field day with the case. Justice Neil Gorsuch prodded the public schools’ lawyer, Alan Schoenfeld, to apologize for an out-of-context remark made by one of the school board members. Justice Samuel Alito accused Schoenfeld of “running away” from the schools’ mission to present same-sex marriage as a positive, huffing over what the “big deal” is to let students leave the room when that kind of content is presented.
“It’s nice that you say they respect the parents’ religious beliefs but basically your answer is it’s just too bad, you gotta send your children to school, you cant afford to send them anyplace except a public school — unlike most of the lawyers who argue cases here, they can send their children to private school and who may think that’s the way most of the world is, but it’s not,” Alito said to Schoenfeld.
Alito did not address the finances of the parents that appealed the case up to the Supreme Court, some of whom attested that they’d removed their children from the public school system to put them in private school.
The occasional crossover votes, too, appeared to be staying in their camp on this one. Chief Justice John Roberts said that what’s really “dangerous” is telling a very young student not to listen to their teacher, amid the argument that exposing children to different facets of a pluralistic society is not the same as advocating for them.
Tension crackled at points, with Alito snapping “can I finish, please?” when Sotomayor attempted to cut in.
The liberals tried to build the slippery slope argument. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson prodded at hypotheticals including a gay teacher having a photo from her wedding day on her desk — could parents opt their children out of being taught by her? Or what about a city bus with an ad on the side communicating that the clerk certifies same-sex marriages? Could parents demand that the ads be taken down, because they don’t want their children exposed to that messaging?
“This is not just about books,” Jackson said, summarizing the parents’ argument. “This is about exposure to people of different sexual orientations and the objection — the sincerely held objection — that children shouldn’t be exposed to this.”
The case comes at a time when the Trump administration has been fixated on rolling back cultural civil rights advancements, using the auspices of banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs to wipe history of military advancements made by non-white men, to shutter diversity offices within the government, to withhold funding from universities that don’t comply.
In that atmosphere, for many justices on the right-wing Supreme Court, letting parents erase LGBTQ people from their children’s experience of the world appeared to not even be a close call.
won’t Alito just sit down and keep his nose buried in fox daytime hate-fest while he helps Martha select whichever of her rotten flags she wants to fly today? god, what a miserable SOB.
Nothing quite captures for me American Weird like this Alito homophobia.
Alito is the worst person in America.
The question I would have like the right-wing justices to answer is: Why do parents get to opt out of LGBTAI+ books in Maryland when the Ten Commandments must be posted in every classroom in Louisiana? We all know the answer to that question, but I want them on the record.
The basis here is something the bible does not address: the fact that people do not choose to be gay or trans. And these religious people want to punish them for making a choice, but they didn’t choose. Shall we punish people for wearing cowboy hats? or pink shirts? or having brown hair? Shouldn’t books with married hetero couples in them be unacceptable because of the implication they are having sex behind closed doors? Do we know what kind of sex they are having? Maybe they are having threesomes! There is so much to this discussion that hasn’t been said, so many questions that haven’t been asked.