Religious opt-outs for parents antithetical to good education

Photo by Emil Widlund on Unsplash

I’ve been a voracious reader my entire life and know the importance of reading widely. 

I had the massive privilege from a very early age to be surrounded by books, both at home and through constant trips to the public library, and parents who made a point to read to me every night before bed. I learned how to read extremely early. Throughout elementary school, I was constantly sent up to the upper-level classrooms to borrow reading material between weekly trips to the school library, much to the consternation of my older sister, who was not a fan of her baby sibling showing up in her classroom in the middle of the day. I was also lucky enough that, despite attending a Catholic elementary school, my parents and teachers had few hang-ups about what content I read. 

I give a lot of credit to growing up in that type of environment for how I am today — and especially the way I approach law and policy. Books gave me windows into worlds that I would have never encountered in my rural Indiana hometown. They helped me develop empathy and understanding for people who didn’t look, act, believe or talk like me, and played a major role in developing my sense of social justice. To this day, I still read at a rapid pace, and I’m typically working through three different books at any given time.

Unfortunately, not everyone sees the value in giving their children access to the world through books, and with the mass cultural panic surrounding the existence of LGBTQIA-plus content in schools, this issue has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, and will decide in the coming months whether a public school’s elimination of its “opt-out” program for parents who object to their children being exposed to LGBTQIA-plus content in the public school setting was a violation of those families’ religious liberties. 

To summarize: A Maryland school district, seeking to prepare its students for the reality that they are going to meet a wide variety of people of different sexual orientations, genders and other identities in their lives, and need to be able to peacefully and respectfully interact with them as good citizens of a pluralistic society, chose to expand the district’s reading lists for various grade levels to include books that depict these different identities. Anticipating backlash against this, the district at first created an option for parents and guardians to opt their students out of the program, but later retracted it, as the books were integrated throughout the English/Language Arts program, as opposed to being part of a separate unit on gender/sexuality allowing students to be easily removed from the room to do a different activity. The opt-out meant that during completely random lessons, students would need to be removed and provided an alternate lesson that covered the same information. The district determined that this system was unrealistic for already heavily burdened public school teachers to manage. A group of Muslim, Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox parents came together to file suit in federal court, claiming that these books were coercive, and that by not receiving the opportunity to opt their children out, their religious liberties were being infringed upon.

Because apparently, an alphabet book about a puppy getting lost at a Pride parade is more powerful than all the other ways families can raise their children with religious belief. (Yes, that is really the plot of one of the books that these parents object to.)

The Freedom From Religion Foundation filed an amicus brief for the Supreme Court to consider, which you can find here, and you can listen to those attorneys break the case down more thoroughly, along with the oral arguments on this recent episode of “Ask an Atheist.”

I am not optimistic about the case’s outcome based on the oral arguments. Multiple justices equated elementary schoolers simply having a book read to, or even made available to them, as going beyond “exposure.” Over the years, the court has emphasized that simply having material that is potentially objectionable in public schools is not a violation of parental rights, and that there must be some kind of endorsement of the material as being “correct.” This concept was discussed multiple times during the argument, with the conservative wing of the court seemingly implying that students would inherently view the material as a moral endorsement on the part of their schools and teachers, and not just another possible viewpoint. 

As usual, the liberal women on the court did a good job of finding flaws in a curriculum opt-out requirement for potentially objectionable material in public schools. Perhaps the best summary of their efforts can be found in the exchange between Justice Elena Kagan and the school’s attorney, concerning whether this type of policy would open the door to opting students out of other types of education, such as the teaching of evolution in high school science classes. While earlier in the argument the parents’ attorney shrugged off that concern, saying that families rarely opt out of instruction on evolution, making it a nonissue, the school’s attorney had a different response: “If you constitutionalize it, people will invoke it.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor also brought up the fact that religious organizations have long raised challenges to more than just books on LGBTQIA-plus issues, pointing to challenges to books that discuss historical achievements of women outside of the domestic sphere, books that depict “immodest” dress, books that address divorce, and books that address interfaith marriage. This case could create an opt-out requirement for any potentially objectionable material in a classroom, hindering the social and emotional growth of any number of students.

The majority of the court seemed to indicate that they will side with the parents on this one, and now the only question that remains in my mind is how far they are going to let their decision reach.

As I mentioned earlier, the liberal wing of the court noted that this will go beyond LGBTQIA-plus content, a perspective the team at FFRF spent a significant amount of time working through in its brief to the court. But there was one other exchange during the arguments that caught my ear as an expert on trans rights specifically.

It seemed at one point that the conservative wing of the court was seriously considering a proposition that would take this beyond the rights of particular parents to opt-out of certain curricular materials for their own students and instead give religious parents a veto over how teachers treat other, completely unrelated students. The parents’ attorney was presented with a hypothetical scenario. Say a teacher refers to a trans student in the classroom with their chosen name and pronouns (presumably with the permission of the trans student’s parents), would that level of exposure be a substantial burden on the religious rights of parents opposed to trans people? According to the parents’ attorney, the answer to that question is “yes” because a child might read that as a moral endorsement of trans identity on the part of the teacher. This was a short exchange, with no real further pushback, and that lack of pushback concerned me in the context of this court’s extreme privileging of religious belief.

It indicates to me that this isn’t as simple as “parents’ rights,” as many people like to frame opposition to the acknowledgement of LGBTQIA-plus people in schools. If it’s a matter of parents’ rights, after all, how can one parent have a veto over the decisions of another parent? No, this is about providing special rights to religious people whose beliefs happen to align with the conservative theology of the majority of the Supreme Court.

The impact here will go far beyond mere opt-outs. As the school district pointed out, allowing opt-outs for material that might be religiously objectionable is a logistical nightmare for teachers and administrators, who would then have to arrange for supervision, space and additional curricular materials for those students. The more likely outcome is that material that in some way might defy conservative religious belief will be eliminated from public schools completely for efficiency’s sake. Books will be removed from shelves and reading lists, basic lessons on different world religions and mythologies during history, social studies and foreign language classes will be scrapped, policies allowing parents to advocate for their individual children will be replaced with one-size-fits-all policies that favor conservative views, and teachers will be forced to hide any part of themselves that does not align with these viewpoints. Wave goodbye to accurate science education, free self-expression — and a society where our children are adequately prepared to cooperate with people from a wide variety of life experiences.

This is, of course, the ultimate goal of the people who worked to bring this case to the Supreme Court. This is the exact type of thing I have been referring to when I say that the anti-LGBTQIA-plus movement is a proxy movement for the constitutional legitimization of censorship, social repression and theocracy regarding a wide range of issues.

The fact of the matter is, religious families are not being harmed by a diverse range of identities being represented in public school curricula. They have plenty of options regarding their children’s education, from private school to homeschooling to simply taking the time to engage with their children and explain that “while some people might believe ‘x’ we believe ‘y’” until such time that their kids are old enough to make decisions for themselves. Whether these options are actually in the best interest of the child is a completely separate question, but the fact remains that these options exist and are more than adequate to resolve the issue of “coercion” being brought up by these parents. This was not a policy created out of animus toward religious belief; it was made for the perfectly legitimate secular reason of wanting to prepare students for the real world and the wide variety of people they’re going to encounter in their lives.

Every single child deserves an education that not only teaches them the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic, but also prepares them to be good citizens who are ready to engage in a pluralistic society. Creating an environment where kids cannot learn about other ways of being will be a net negative for the future of this country, and we should be furious that any child would be denied such opportunities. Every child deserves the opportunity to explore worlds beyond their own cultural bubble — and no method is as effective as providing them with access to a wide array of books.

Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.