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U.S.|Supreme Court to Hear Case on Religious Objections to L.G.B.T.Q. Storybooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/us/supreme-court-lgbtq-school-books.html
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Parents in Maryland said a school board’s refusal to notify them and to excuse their children from discussions of the storybooks violated the First Amendment.
Jan. 17, 2025, 6:46 p.m. ET
The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would enter a new battlefield in the culture wars, agreeing to decide whether the Constitution guarantees parents of students in public schools the right to have their children excused from classroom discussion of storybooks featuring L.G.B.T.Q. characters and themes.
Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, adopted the new curriculum in 2022. It included, its lawyers told the justices, “a handful of storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters for use in the language-arts curriculum, alongside the many books already in the curriculum that feature heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles.”
Among the storybooks were “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost at a Pride parade; “My Rainbow,” about a mother who creates a colorful wig for her transgender daughter; and “Love, Violet,” about a story about a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate. (Some of the books have since been dropped from the curriculum.)
In a run of recent cases, the Supreme Court has expanded the role of religion in public life, sometimes at the expense of other values, like gay rights and access to contraception.
In the past few years, the court has ruled in favor of a web designer who said she did not want to create sites for same-sex marriages, a high school football coach who said he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games and a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia that said it could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who had applied to take in foster children.
The school system in the new case, based in Washington’s liberal suburbs, at first gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused from those sessions. The school system soon changed that policy.
