Imagine your child has been placed in the care of people dead set on imposing an ideology squarely at odds with your religious convictions. At first, you are told that you can shield them, only to be informed shortly thereafter that you can’t.
This is what is happening at pre-K-8 public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, and the Supreme Court has asked the school board to explain itself.
Two years ago, Maryland’s largest public school district announced that “Pride Storybooks,” a collection of around 20 books for pre-K through eighth-grade classrooms, would be woven into the language arts curriculum. The themes of the books included gender identity, drag queens, intersexuality, and prostitution. The books are explicit, sexually charged, and brazenly ideological. A group of principals voiced their concerns that the books included in the supplemental curriculum were not “appropriate for the intended age group, or in one case, not appropriate at all for young students.”
Montgomery County Schools have since disapproved two books in the collection for classroom use. The elimination of those books, however, is small consolation for parents who want to opt their children out of these classes altogether. Just consider the “instruction” that accompanies one of the books still in play. Teachers of elementary school students reading Born Ready, the story of a girl named Penelope who identifies as a boy, are directed to teach students that people “guess about our gender” at birth, but “we know ourselves best.” The people doing the “guessing” include, you guessed it, parents.
Parents from faith traditions, including Islam, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, objected to the intrusion of the books in their children’s school day. They draw the line at mandatory instruction that is at odds with their spiritual convictions. When protests and pleas were unheeded by the school board, some of these parents filed a lawsuit. They didn’t ask that the books be banned but merely that their young children be spared exposure to instruction on gender and sexuality.
Disappointingly, justice has eluded these parents so far. A district court ruled the parents couldn’t show that the school board’s “no-opt-out policy” burdens their religious exercise. A divided 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel agreed. Unwilling to give in to the bullying tactics of their school board, the parents filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court.
“It is hard to imagine an injury more irreparable than a child’s lost innocence,” they explain in papers filed with the court. The court has requested a response from Montgomery County’s Board of Education by Dec. 18.
My eldest two sons attended kindergarten at our neighborhood school in Arlington, Virginia, just a stone’s throw from Montgomery County. I reviewed the “health” curriculum before the school year began. As a Roman Catholic, I believe parents are the first and primary educators of their children, especially when it comes to matters related to human sexuality, and I decided to opt my boys out of health class. It worked out surprisingly well. Their teacher would send the boys to the library during health class, nurturing a life-long love of reading.
Like Virginia, Maryland has long safeguarded parents’ rights to determine when and how their children are first taught about human sexuality. In fact, 47 states and the District of Columbia offer parents sex education opt-out protection. Stripping Montgomery County school parents of this protection when it comes to the “Pride Story Books,” particularly in light of the overwhelming faith-based opposition of parents, is an arrogant imposition on many young learners and their families, and it’s unconstitutional.
In the 1970s, members of the Old Order Amish and the Conservative Amish Mennonite Church objected to Wisconsin’s compulsory education law, which required a child’s school attendance until age 16. Vindicating those parents, the Supreme Court observed that government schools are not “empowered … to ‘save’ a child from himself or his [religious] parents” by imposing “compulsory” education to “influence … the religious future of the child.”
The court reaffirmed this principle recently when it recognized that Montana’s exclusion of religious schools from a tuition assistance program burdened the free exercise rights of families of children who attend or hope to attend them.
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“Drawing on an ‘enduring American tradition,’ we have long recognized the rights of parents to ‘direct the religious upbringing’ of their children,” observed Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority.
Stripping parents of their God-given and constitutionally recognized right to decide when and who introduces their children to matters related to human sexuality and identity is not at all what our public schools should be about. Perhaps this explains the Supreme Court’s request for a response. Given the board’s adamant refusal to accommodate objecting parents to date, however, review of this case by the Supreme Court looks to be the only way left to remedy the glaring injustice.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
