SCOTUS Reviews Parents’ Right To Opt Kids Out Of LGBT Books

The Supreme Court will soon hear a decisive case for parents’ rights to opt their children out of explicit sexual content at school.

Justices are set to hear arguments on April 22 in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case in which Maryland parents are challenging their school district’s removal of parental notice and opt-outs for explicit LGBT content. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is representing Muslim, Christian, and Jewish parents from Montgomery County, Maryland, in court. 

“Despite faith differences, these parents believe the new storybooks are age-inappropriate, spiritually and emotionally damaging for their kids, and inconsistent with their beliefs,” reads a press release from Becket.

The Montgomery County Board of Education introduced “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks for young children in November 2022, with the radical aim of filtering books by whether they “‘reinforced or disrupted’ ‘stereotypes,’ ‘cisnormativity,’ and power hierarchies,’” according to a brief from plaintiffs. In March 2023, the district announced “it would no longer notify parents” of the content or allow them to exempt their children. Many of the books were for students from pre-K to fifth grade and included the following: 

• Pride Puppy, which tells children as young as 3 or 4 to look for “underwear,” “leather,” “[drag] king,” and “[drag] queen” in a “pride” parade.
• My Rainbow, which is about a boy with autism who thinks he is a “transgender girl.” 
• Intersection Allies, which discusses the meaning of “transgender” and “non-binary” and asks children, “What pronouns fit you?”
• What Are Your Words?, which portrays a child who struggles to find the right pronouns and chooses “they/them.” 
• Love, Violet, which describes a lesbian “playground romance” between two young girls.
• Born Ready, which tells the story of a girl who thinks she is a boy.
• Jacob’s Room to Choose, which is about trans-identifying children who make the bathrooms gender-neutral.

“The School Board has pushed inappropriate gender indoctrination on our children instead of focusing on the fundamental areas of education that they need to thrive,” said Grace Morrison, board member of Montgomery County opt-out group Kids First, in the Becket release. 

Plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in May 2023, and the district court ruled against the parents, according to Becket. They appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled against parental notice and opt-outs in May 2024. So Becket appealed to the Supreme Court in September. In January, the court decided to hear the case, which plaintiffs argue is a matter of raising their children according to their beliefs under the First Amendment.

Leftist activists and media have attacked these parents for standing up for their children. Vox mischaracterized their position as “Don’t Say Gay” — the left’s favorite slogan for policies that uphold parental rights and protect children from radical sexually themed materials. Radical LGBT group GLAAD claims, inaccurately, that the parents are intent on “banning LGBTQ-inclusive books.” But in reality, these religious parents simply hope to exempt their children from explicit sexual content at school. 

“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,” said Becket Vice President Eric Baxter in the release. “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.”