Education

The Books of Montgomery County, Part 3: Punitive Expedition Edition

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(Note the links to Part 1 and Part 2)

On Friday, the Supreme Court delivered its opinion in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case dealing with the right of parents to opt their children out of various LGBT+ curricula for religious reasons.

A bit of background…

In 2022, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) 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, a practice consistent with MCPS’s “Guidelines for Respecting Religious Diversity.” In 2023, MCPS rescinded the option for students to opt out of classes featuring the LGBT-themed materials.

A group of parents filed suit stating that the Board’s no-opt-out policy unconstitutionally burdened their free expression of religion. Last Friday, the Court issued an opinion that found in favor of the parents and issued a preliminary injunction, remanding the case to the lower court for resolution.

Some of the Court’s findings I found interesting:

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The Bathrooms of Loudoun County

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I had a strange sense of deja vu as I read this the other day:

Loudoun County Public Schools has opened a Title IX investigation into three high school boys who said they were uncomfortable with a female student using the boys’ locker room.
The Loudon County School Board policy allows students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identification, rather than biological sex.

Back in 2021, a trans-identifying boy had raped a girl in a Loudoun school girls bathroom. The school district covered up the crime and transferred the boy to another school where he proceeded to sexually assault a second girl.

The episode helped juice the 2021 Loudoun County school protests and lead to the Republicans generating an 11-point swing and propelling Glenn Youngkin to the Virginia governor’s mansion later that year. To top it off the school superintendent faced criminal charges for covering up the matter.

Usually when a scandal like this breaks, the organization involved is a bit chastened and becomes purer than Caesar’s wife. Yet less than four years later, here’s Loudoun not only playing bathroom games but crushing students who complain.

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The Books of Montgomery County, Part 2: School Choice Protecting Natural Rights

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In Part 1, I described how the Montgomery County school district was preventing parents from shielding their young children from messages and values they thought violated their Constitutional rights regarding the free expression of their religion.

Here, in Part 2, I will describe some options for what should be done to prevent future Constitutional-rights violations.

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The Books of Montgomery County, Part 1

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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.

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Reaching for the Alien Shore

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So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.

NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:

  • this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
  • lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
  • not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.

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