Don’t Force Sex and Gender Ideology on Little Kids
Don’t Force Sex and Gender Ideology on Little Kids
Parents should have the greatest possible choices and control regarding how their children are educated. While the state has legitimate interests in raising children to be good citizens, those interests should nearly always be secondary to those of their parents. Deference to parents should be especially pronounced at the ages when children are young and impressionable, and especially on matters of cultural, social, and moral education. Parental interests are never more urgent than when the government is teaching children things that conflict with their faith.
All of those principles are at issue in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which was argued Tuesday before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Montgomery County, Md., school board prepared a curriculum of “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks to be taught to children as young as prekindergarten — ostensibly as part of the English curriculum. Religious parents, led by a Muslim family, objected that they should have the right to opt their children out of those classes, in the same way that the county allows them to opt out of many other things, including specifically designated sex education classes for older children. The county refused, ostensibly on the grounds that there were so many opt-out requests that it couldn’t accommodate them all without massive disruption.
Sometimes, cases get to the Supreme Court because a lawsuit should never have been brought. Sometimes, it’s because one should never have been defended. Mahmoud is in the latter category. The county, having embarked on this exercise in propagandizing young children about same-sex marriage, transgenderism, and drag queens, should have been content with the captive audience it had, and not tried to prevent conscientious objectors from keeping their kids out of the lessons. Swept away by Biden-era woke hubris, the school district made a federal case out of its power to embed sex and gender indoctrination in reading lessons, precisely because it could.
Yet, when they got to the Supreme Court, the school board and its defenders had to pretend that these storybook lessons were merely presenting neutrally the fact that people have same-sex marriages or consider themselves transgender — even as Justice Samuel Alito read aloud passages about talking a little girl into why she should be happy for her gay uncle’s wedding, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett read from curricular materials on how to “disrupt” the “binary” thinking of skeptical grade-schoolers. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who noted that he is a lifelong resident of the county, asked “how it came to this” from Maryland’s once-proud history of religious tolerance. You could just homeschool your kids if you don’t like it, scoffed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was reduced to insisting that the instructional authority of a teacher-read book is no different than the burden on religious people of seeing ads they dislike on a public bus.
If our public schools do no more teaching than what kids can learn from reading the side of a bus, that’s not much of a defense of them. In arguing that it is not coercive for woke schools to teach left-wing ideology so long as parents have other options, Justice Jackson was implicitly conceding the case for universal school choice. We’d love to see that day, but for now, Maryland has only very limited school choice options. At least until that changes, the traditional First Amendment rights of parents to direct the schooling of their children must be respected by their neighborhood public schools.
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