Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case which deals with parents in Montgomery County (MD) schools who wish to opt their children out of the reading of LGBT-themed books during class time.
The issue deals with the school district wanting to socialize young (often very young) children regarding certain behaviors that their parents find offensive and claim violate their right as parents to free exercise of religion.
As somebody familiar with Montgomery County and its (ahem) intricacies, I have been following this story for the past 2-½ years for the way it touches on some of the most critical issues of our time. The first issue deals with perhaps the most critical civil rights issue of the 2020s, school choice. The second issue is the re-emergence and appreciation of natural rights as the cornerstone of our liberty, and the perils of relying solely on the judicial system to protect them. The third issue is the necessity of creating the institutions necessary for such natural rights to flourish.
This all proved to be too ambitious for one post. In this first part I will cover the case, some of the background, and touch on parts of the oral argument. In the second part I will describe possible courses of action.
Some background.
Montgomery County schools allow parents to opt their children out of specific activities and areas of the curriculum that they find offend their religious beliefs. Such areas include sex education and the singing of religious-themed carols.
In 2022, Montgomery County introduced a number of LGBT-themed books into its ELA (English, Language, Arts) curriculum for students from pre-K through the 5th grade. Parents were initially allowed to have their kids opt-out of lessons where these books were used.
In March 2023, Montgomery County reversed course regarding parental opt-out on LGBT materials, stating that such a policy was no longer feasible due to classroom problems stemming from both the large number of opt-outs and the nature of how the books were used within the ELA curriculum (unlike sex ed courses, which were discrete units). Among other activities, books were read aloud by teachers to students during class time.
The suit was organized by a coalition of Christian and Muslim parents.
A few other details about Montgomery County and the surrounding area.
First, Montgomery County is one of the wealthy, very blue counties in the DC suburbs. In terms of median household income, it ranks 20th in the country; eight of the top 20 wealthiest counties in the US by median household income are located in the DC metro area.
Second, the school district as the name implies is county-based and is quite large, approximately 80,000 students. County-wide districts are the standard system of K-12 organization in Maryland. Keep that fact in mind for later.
Third, there is a recent history of controversy regarding Wokeism in the DC area schools. The Loudoun County school protests in 2021 were sparked by the inclusion of CRT (Critical Race Theory) themes in the curriculum. It was these protests which led indirectly to Merrick Garland’s infamous directive of October 5, 2021 for the FBI to investigate parents protesting schools. There was an additional controversy in 2021 in Fairfax County when parents protested the inclusion in school libraries of various LGBT-themed books (“Gender Queer”, “Lawn Boy”) that had graphic descriptions of sexual behavior.
The Fairfax controversy led to an incredible exchange when a concerned parent began to read from one of those books at a school board meeting. She was reprimanded by a board member for using the explicit language in the book, and after she continued to read, was tossed out of the meeting. Irony? Too bad Tom Wolfe wasn’t alive to write about it.
In fairness to Montgomery County, the books on their curriculum list were not as graphic.
Turning to the transcript of the oral arguments for Mahmoud….
Reading the Supreme Court oral arguments reminds me of the inadequacy of our reliance on the legal system to settle matters of policy and political philosophy. Court hearings in which the granting of relief to the plaintiff turns on definitions of “coercion” and “exposure,” and on consideration of whether the religious rights of individuals are unduly “burdened,” are inadequate for this purpose.
I get it, we’re dealing with the judicial system and the limitations of positive law, but still: courts have problems when dealing with issues of rights, especially when compared to politics. Also, our public discourse is further corrupted by people who analyze Supreme Court decisions in the same way some people look at how many times their sports team covers the spread; give it a break.
One thing that leaps out from the transcript is how Machiavellian, almost magnificent, was the way in which the Montgomery County schools constructed their LGBT book policy. The books are not included as a separate unit of curriculum, unlike in sex ed, but instead are woven into the larger ELA structure as supplementary material. This arrangement, by design, makes it difficult for parents to opt out.
Another dimension of Montgomery County’s Machiavellian brilliance is that the County’s argument facilitates the mischaracterization of opposing parents’ actions as deriving from fear of exposure, rather than from opposition to government coercion. So the County’s opponents look like bigots, unworthy of public sympathy. From the transcript:
JUSTICE JACKSON: “…what if a student group puts up “Love is Love” posters around the school featuring same-sex couples or trans youth? May parents — do parents have to have notice of this and the ability to opt their children out of going into the parts of the school where these posters are?”
Ah yes, “Love is Love”, the mic-drop moment for the Left for all LGBT+.
Another one….
JUSTICE JACKSON: “Can I give you one more? What about a trans student in the classroom? There’s a student who’s in the class. Must the teacher notify the parents of the student’s existence and give them an opt-out to not be in the same classroom with this child?”
A trans-identifying preschooler?
Jackson and her ilk make a straw man argument according to which the parents are trying to shield their children from exposure. This argument obscures the obvious fact that teachers and schools are authority figures who lend an air of credibility to any material they teach within the classroom. What the parents are really objecting to is this abuse of authority to push ideas that some parents object to on the students.
The book “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding”, which was assigned to kindergartners, deals with objections raised by a young girl as to why her beloved uncle was marrying his boyfriend. Anybody who has worked in sales understands what the author is trying, which is to preempt objections to a desired conclusion by structuring the discourse: the young girl in the story having her objections overcome by an authority figure is a stand-in for the kindergartner in the classroom.
Montgomery County wants you to believe that they are the modern incarnations of John Dewey, providing opportunities for students to expose themselves to and interact with the curriculum. However, such exposure and interaction are only designed to arrive at a single destination or conclusion.
You may think that same-sex marriage is something to be accepted or celebrated in civil society, but the role of a taxpayer-funded school system is not to develop values within very young children that conflict with those of their families.
Another example of the absence of prudence by Montgomery County was noted by Justice Gorsuch when he questioned counsel for Montgomery County about the book Pride Puppy, which was initially assigned to pre-K classrooms. The book encouraged small children to find certain characters in the book, including leather-clad drag queens.
Preschoolers and drag queens? Kindergartners and same-sex weddings? We know what’s going on here and it’s not boosting the County’s proficiency scores, which barely crack 50%
In fairness, it could be worse. Montgomery County could have found a preschool version of “Lawn Boy.”
What is to be done, that’s for Part 2.
John Dewey was also a rabid Progressive. Was the point that he, too, was a Progressive playing with education for political ends? Or was Dewey supposed to be a contrast? I’m honestly not sure.
One of the more fascinating parts of John Dewey is how he and is work has been separated from his historical context into a form of a cartoon figure in order to justify the educational or social fad of the moment
Popular imagination of the romantic Left sees him as a latter-day construct of the Existentialists seeing “education” as a means of child self-exploration.
In reality, as you state, Dewey was a Progressive and believed in a Hegelian view of History and knowledge, that we were moving toward greater knowledge and enlightenment. Part of that process involved shucking off the “wisdom” and traditions of the past. Education was not about receiving wisdom such much as restructuring the educational environment through “exploration” to destroy it. It wasn’t some turn-of-the-century version of self-discovery buta system to provide the “right” answers
Much in the same way with Montgomery County. I found the transcript interesting because it exposed the limits of the hearing in terms of the overall debate. Montgomery County wasn’t simply exposing pre-K through 5th graders to LGBT themes in order to round out their education but using the full weight of its implied authority to indoctrinate the kids.
Sounds a little harsh?
Well school curriculum has its scarce currency time and student attention; it needs to make decisions on how to invest those scarce resources in order to achieve preferred outcomes. It has invested alot of that scarce currency, not to mention all the legal battles, in pushing LGBT positive themes in the interest if exposure as opposed to say providing exposure for orthodox religious people who even in Montgomery County would be a much higher percentage – though more despised – part of the population than LGBT
environment in
Well, it seems I’ve been beaten to it, but “Montgomery County wants you to believe that they are the modern incarnations of John Dewey.’
Yes, they are. They’re just taking the evil he brought to education a bit further.
yes he’s a progressive, and despite his criticism of the Purge trials, his influence was noxious upon the body politics, more than we ever suspected, he was a fore runner of constructivist education, rather than fact based ones,