The Supreme Court’s three Democratic-appointed justices on Friday dissented from the majority opinion in a case involving a group of parents wishing to opt their children out of elementary school lessons with LGBTQ storybooks, writing that the decision “ushers in that new reality” eroding kids’ “opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society.”
The high court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines on Friday morning to send the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, back to a lower court for a final decision on whether Montgomery County, Md., must provide an opt-out option for parents.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that, in the meantime, the school district must notify parents in advance of the books being read and allow them to remove their children from the classroom. The district’s lack of such an option likely substantially burdens parents’ constitutional right to freely exercise their religion, he wrote.
“Exposing students to the ‘message’ that LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in Friday’s dissent, joined by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Given the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country, countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parent’s religious beliefs. If that is sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny, then little is not.”
Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, a move typically reserved for justices emphasizing their strong disagreement with a decision.
It is the third time this term that Sotomayor has read a dissent from the bench. The first time, she did so in the court’s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, in which it upheld a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors. She did it again Friday in dissenting with the court’s ruling on President Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
The result of the court’s Mahmoud v. Taylor decision, Sotomayor said, “will be chaos for this Nation’s public schools.”
“Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” she wrote. “The harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too. Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students’ learning and development.”
“Worse yet, the majority closes its eyes to the inevitable chilling effects of its ruling,” she wrote. “Many school districts, and particularly the most resource strapped, cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences. Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections. The Court’s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards. Because I cannot countenance the Court’s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.”
