SCOTUS To Decide If Parents Can Reject LGBT Brainwashing For Their Children
By HatetheSwamp January 29, 2025 6:51 am Category: Gay & Lesbian (0.0 from 0 votes)
Rules of the Post
Mahmoud v. Taylor, the case of three families against the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland: a Muslim family, a Roman Catholic family, and a mixed Roman Catholic–Ukrainian Orthodox family. This isn’t the start of a bad joke, but parents fighting to teach their children according to their sincerely held religious beliefs.
It all started in 2022 when Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) — the largest public school district in the state — approved a slate of queer-affirming storybooks for use in grades as low as kindergarten. The district promised parents the opportunity to review the books and the ability to opt their children out of those classes. Later in the school year, without explanation, MCPS reversed its policy, in spite of parental objections. The families filed suit, seeking a temporary injunction against the policy.
Pride Puppy! is billed by corporate media as “An alphabet primer about children chasing their dog through a pride parade.” And yet, this book “encourages children to search for images of, among other things, the ‘intersex [flag],’ a ‘[drag] king,’ ‘leather,’ a ‘lip ring,’ a ‘[drag] queen,’ ‘underwear,’ and a celebrated sex worker.” MCPS pulled Pride Puppy! from the list last December, but most of the other books remained...
MCPS also directed teachers on how to use the books. If a child were to ask, “He can’t be a boy if he was born a girl,” the teacher should say that “when we are born, people make a guess about our gender and label us ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ based on our body parts. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong.” (The guidance has since been updated.)
The same guidance says that any child pointing out biblical teaching regarding marriage should have his “either/or” thinking “disrupted” while the teacher points to a female best friend who “is married to another woman.” It’s hard to see how this is not coercion of a kindergartener of the most egregious kind: pitting children against their parents.
The plaintiffs do not want to ban the books from the school system, but they do want to direct their children’s education. This is not a new or radical idea. A number of states across the nation are contemplating or passing a parents’ bill of rights.
Generally, Americans favor keeping parents in charge. The 2024 Religious Freedom Index from the Becket Fund — which represents the plaintiffs — reported that “77% [of respondents agreed] that parents should be able to opt-out their children from curriculum on gender and sexuality … if it violates their religious beliefs.” And, “only 3% [of respondents] believe that such instruction is appropriate for pre-K or kindergarten-aged children.”
Maryland does have an opt-out policy for sex ed classes. But the education board placed these books into the English language arts curriculum. Evidently, for MCPS and the lower courts, the right of parents to direct the religious instruction of their children extends only to the “family life and human sexuality unit of instruction,” and nowhere else.
Tamer Mahmoud and Enas Barakat, a Muslim family, contended that “‘gender’ cannot be unwoven from biological ‘sex’ — to the extent that the two are even distinct—without rejecting the dignity and direction God bestowed on humanity from the start.”
As Christians, the Roman (Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox) and Persak (Roman Catholic) families confessed that “what God has created by His design cannot be redefined or recreated by man” and that the correct expression of sexuality exists within marriage.
The Becket Fund For Religious Liberty believes parents should be in charge. “Cramming down controversial gender ideology on three-year-olds without their parents’ permission is an affront to our nation’s traditions, parental rights, and basic human decency,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket. “The Court must make clear: parents, not the state, should be the ones deciding how and when to introduce their children to sensitive issues about gender and sexuality.”
"(Big Brother) shall make no law respecting and establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out, but this Court has, generally, embraced the liberties guaranteed to citizens by the Bill of Rights.
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Comments on "SCOTUS To Decide If Parents Can Reject LGBT Brainwashing For Their Children ":
Mahmoud v. Taylor, the case of three families against the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland: a Muslim family, a Roman Catholic family, and a mixed Roman Catholic–Ukrainian Orthodox family. This isn’t the start of a bad joke, but parents fighting to teach their children according to their sincerely held religious beliefs.