A federal appeals court has ruled that parents must first subject their children to gender indoctrination in schools before they can have grounds to opt out of it.
Some judicial decisions cry out for reversal, and this one is high on the list. Last Wednesday, a divided Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that disturbingly graphic and dogmatic “LGBTQ-inclusive” books can be forced on very young school children in Montgomery County, Maryland’s largest public-school system, even when their parents object on religious grounds.
In the fall of 2022, the Montgomery County School Board announced it would use “Pride Storybooks,” a collection of around 20 books for pre-K through eighth-grade classrooms. The collection promotes Pride parades, gender-transitioning, and pronoun preferences to students ranging in age from three to 14. Yes, you read that right: as young as three years old.
Older kids will be offered books such as IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All, which offers brazenly ideological definitions for “sex,” “gender,” and “transgender” and asks the students readers which pronouns “fit them best”, and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope. In the latter, written for fifth-graders, Penelope’s brother protests: “You can’t become a boy. You have to be born one.” He’s later told that “not everything needs to make sense. This is about love.”
What about the little ones?
Pride Puppy, a story of a “queer family” that attends a Pride Parade, directs three- to four-year-olds to find images from a word list that includes “[drag] queen,” “underwear,” and “leather.”
The training materials accompanying the collection grievously undermine the parent–child relationship when it comes to a child’s understanding of human sexuality. If a student asks what it means to be transgender, for example, teachers can explain, “When we’re 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 “people making a guess,” of course, include mom and dad.
A number of parents from faith traditions including Islam, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity believe their religious views conflict with those promoted in the collection and don’t want their children exposed to what they consider, quite correctly, to be ideological indoctrination. Unable to opt out, they had no other recourse but to file a lawsuit last year in federal court.
Represented by a religious-freedom powerhouse, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, they claim that the school board violated Maryland’s law requiring the option for parents to opt out as well as key constitutional guarantees including the free exercise of religion. The parents did not challenge — and this is a point worth underscoring — the board’s adoption of the storybooks; nor did they ask to ban their use.
Shortly after filing their complaint, the parents asked for a preliminary injunction prohibiting forced exposure of their children to the books and requiring notice and opportunity to opt their children out. After briefing and oral argument, federal district-court judge Deborah Boardman denied the request, and last Wednesday, two judges on a three-judge panel affirmed her decision.
Despite declarations attached to the parents’ complaint, briefing to the appellate court and extensive oral argument, the panel was unable to reach the obvious conclusion that the parents have shown “a cognizable burden to support their free exercise claim.” The record is “threadbare,” the majority claimed, adding that there was no information “about how any teacher or school employee has actually used any of the Storybooks in the Parents’ children’s classrooms, how often the Storybooks are actually being used, what any child has been taught in conjunction with their use, or what conversations have ensured about their themes.”
In a word, the majority demanded that parents first expose their children to what they believe will seriously undermine their religious formation before they can get help from the court.
Their colleague, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum, saw things differently. “The parents have shown the board’s decision to deny religious opt-outs burden these parents’ right to exercise their religion and direct the upbringing of their children by putting them to the choice of either compromising their religious beliefs or foregoing a public education for their children,” he wrote in dissent.
Quattlebaum is right. Teaching on the nature of human sexuality, identity, and marriage is, and always has been, a primary responsibility of parents. Interfering with it necessarily interferes with parents’ liberty and free-exercise rights. Nothing more in the “record” needs to be developed to establish the injury to parental rights and religious freedom.
Undoubtedly there are parents in Montgomery County who are over the moon that the Pride storybooks are now part of their child’s schooling. For those who are not, however, review by the Fourth Circuit en banc or the Supreme Court is urgently needed.