Parents fighting lack of opt-out for LGTBQ schoolbooks get Supreme Court hearing
Case is second the court has taken this term that deals with religion

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that could determine whether parents have the constitutional right to opt their children out of instruction involving books that they object to on religious grounds, the court announced Friday.
The court said that it was accepting the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which three sets of parents are challenging the policies of the Montgomery County (Md.) School Board, which in 2022 added half a dozen books with LGTBQ themes as part of its language-arts curriculum. The board at first allowed parents to opt out of instruction using the books, but it rescinded that option in 2023 after the number of parents objecting made granting opt-outs unwieldy.
The parents are not objecting to the school district including the books in its curriculum, only the lack of an opt-out policy for those books.
According to a court document filed by the parents, Montgomery County is the most religiously diverse county in the country. The document said most of the objecting parents were Muslim or Eastern Orthodox; the parents bringing the case are three Roman Catholics, two Muslims and a Ukrainian Orthodox adherent.
Mahmoud v. Taylor is the second religion case the high court has accepted for the current term; last month, the court agreed to hear Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, which relates to how religion is defined in a tax case. It is also the court’s second case this term relating to LGBTQ issues; in December, the court heard oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, which relates to gender-affirming care for minors. Although both cases involve disputes over the balancing of governmental interests with parental rights, the high court is unlikely in either case to use its powers to define the limits of constitutional restrictions on parental authority.
So far, the Maryland parents been unsuccessful in court. After failing to obtain a federal injunction require the school district to allow opt-outs, they went to the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. But a panel from that court decided 2-1 that the school district was not acting in violation of the Constitution.
As is usual, when the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the appeal, the court did not indicate its reasoning nor how many justices wanted the case to proceed. No date has been set for oral arguments; a ruling is most likely to come in June.
The two judges of the appeals court siding with the parents were Steven Agee, a George W. Bush appointee, who wrote the majority opinion; and DeAndrea G. Benjamin, a Joe Biden appointee. The dissenting judge was Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Donald Trump appointee.
Agee found that the Montgomery County board acted legally because it did not require the parents nor their children to change their religious views:
[T]he Parents’ declarations do not suggest, nor does the existing record show, that the Parents or their children have in fact been asked to affirm views contrary to their own views on gender or sexuality, to disavow views on these matters that their religion espouses, or otherwise affirmatively act in violation of their religious beliefs. We have no basis in the current record for concluding that schools have acted inconsistent with the Assistant Superintendent’s declaration that “no student or adult is asked to change how they feel about these issues.”
Agee also wrote:
Supreme Court precedent requires some sort of direct or indirect pressure to abandon religious beliefs or affirmatively act contrary to those beliefs. ... And simply hearing about other views does not necessarily exert pressure to believe or act differently than one’s religious faith requires.
In his dissent, Quattlebaum suggested that the school board was prioritizing LGTBQ inclusivity over religious inclusivity because it didn’t view the parents’ views as important enough:
[W]hen the onion layers of the board’s argument are peeled back, the board seems to question the relative importance of the parents’ religious beliefs that their children should not be taught with the books the board required be used to promote diversity and inclusivity to the LGBTQ+ community. To explain, the board only denied opt-outs for instruction involving those books. So, despite disclaiming that it is doing so, the board’s arguments, which the district court adopted, really view the parents’ religious objections to the texts as less important than the board’s goals to improve inclusivity for the LGBTQ+ community. But this is the precisely the sort of value judgment about parents’ religious claims that courts must not make. To repeat, it “is not within the judicial ken to question the centrality of particular beliefs or practices to a faith, or the validity of particular litigants’ interpretations of those creeds.”1
The material in quote marks comes from a 1989 Supreme Court decision involving the tax liability of the Church of Scientology.