The “Parental Rights” Movement Takes Its Anti-LGBTQ Agenda to SCOTUS

A prince vanquishes a dragon and falls in love. A younger woman named Violet works up the braveness to offer her classmate crush a valentine. One other woman fears she received’t get to see her Uncle Bobby as a lot after he will get married, however after spending a day with him and his fiancé, she realizes she’s simply gaining a brand new member of her household.

All of those tales are present in kids’s image books, and none are significantly uncommon. They contact on common subjects like bravery, friendship and household. However because the books function LGBTQ protagonists — the prince falls in love together with his knight, Violet’s classmate is a woman, Uncle Bobby is homosexual — they’re now on the heart of Mahmoud v. Taylor, a Supreme Court docket case introduced by dad and mom who say that the books’ inclusion in public colleges violates their parental rights and non secular freedom. If, as seems likely, the Court docket’s conservative supermajority guidelines in favor of the dad and mom, the case would notch a significant win for the so-called “parental rights” motion — a pernicious right-wing campaign to undermine public schooling, church-state separation and kids’s autonomy beneath the guise of preventing for particular person civil liberties.

Although accounts differ on its precise origins, the parental rights motion may be traced again at the very least to 1925, when a biology teacher got here beneath hearth for educating evolution in violation of Tennessee regulation. Different consultants level to when dad and mom used their own rights as a pretext to struggle in opposition to the prohibition of kid labor within the Twenties. (This same argument is cropping up once more in 2025 as Florida Republicans push to weaken baby labor legal guidelines.) And because the Crimson Scare swept the U.S. and public colleges started racial integration within the Fifties, the parental rights argument flared once more, with conservative dad and mom monitoring colleges for “communist infiltration” or pulling their kids out of the desegregated public system.

What you’ll discover is that none of those situations has to do with precise civil rights — they’re all about enacting a specific right-wing imaginative and prescient for the nation. The current-day parental rights motion builds upon this legacy. Because the COVID-19 pandemic pressured studying on-line in 2020, a brand new wave of fogeys started rallying beneath the banner of parental rights, preventing in opposition to college closures and vaccine mandates. Mothers for Liberty, shaped in 2021, is likely one of the main instigators, muscling its far proper members onto college boards and ballots.

Whereas these teams decry authorities intervention on the extent of public well being, they concurrently advocate for elevated state management over schooling — banning books, cracking down on inclusive academics and lesson plans, and pushing to undo range, fairness and inclusion initiatives. As a result of, in fact, Mothers for Liberty and its allies aren’t preventing for the rights of fogeys who want to help their kids’s entry to gender-affirming care. Nor are they supporting dad and mom who assist their kids get hold of abortions. And the parental rights motion makes no point out of the rights of fogeys whose kids are forcibly taken away from them by the state, in a household policing system that disproportionately targets low-income households and Black moms.

As a substitute, the parental rights motion is targeted on increasing conservative dad and mom’ management within the public sphere and suppressing the illustration of any ideologies or identities with which they personally disagree. A first-rate instance of the motion’s impression is Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law, which was formally titled the Parental Rights in Schooling Act. The regulation restricted academics from referencing sexual orientation and gender id in public colleges, however its parameters have been so sweeping and obscure they have been partially rolled back by means of a 2024 settlement.

As a Vox headline famous final week, Mahmoud v. Taylor now “threatens to carry ‘Don’t Say Homosexual’ to each classroom in America.” The case stems from a lawsuit filed in 2023 in opposition to the Montgomery County Public Colleges district in Maryland. The Board of Schooling made LGBTQ books obtainable in pre-kindergarten by means of twelfth grade school rooms in 2022, citing the range of the county’s pupil physique and the objective of promoting “fairness, respect, and civility.”

Whether or not academics truly included the books of their classes was left as much as them; the truth is, the district said in a court brief that the books weren’t used to show about gender or sexuality. Fairly, the texts have been made obtainable for college students’ personal studying, classroom read-alouds and different instructional actions. Whereas Montgomery County initially provided an opt-out choice for fogeys who wished to exempt their kids from publicity to LGBTQ books, the district eliminated the coverage in March 2023, citing “excessive pupil absenteeism, the infeasibility of administering opt-outs throughout school rooms and colleges, and the danger of exposing college students who imagine the storybooks characterize them and their households to social stigma and isolation.” A bunch of six Christian and Muslim dad and mom then sued to dam the rule earlier than it took impact.

The Supreme Court docket is predicted to problem its resolution by early July, however the conservative justices appeared sympathetic to the plaintiffs throughout oral arguments on Tuesday. Montgomery County is essentially the most religiously numerous county within the U.S., and the dad and mom behind the lawsuit come from a number of totally different religion backgrounds. Why, conservative justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh requested, might the college district not simply reinstate its opt-out coverage?

However that framing downplays what’s truly at stake in Mahmoud v. Taylor. Whereas the precise could select to amplify the problem as considered one of non secular range, the allegations of indoctrination merely don’t maintain water. As Nelson Tebbe, a regulation professor at Cornell Regulation Faculty, told TIME, “The lengthy standing settlement is that non secular dad and mom don’t have a proper to choose out of components of the general public college curriculum that they disagree with.” If that have been the case, dad and mom might choose their kids out of studying about evolution, which courts sometimes haven’t supported. The books at problem aren’t even getting used to show particular classes; they’re simply representing the truth that LGBTQ college students exist within the college district — which they do. “Mere publicity to concepts shouldn’t be itself thought-about a burden on faith beneath these precedents,” stated Tebbe. As such, intercourse schooling is at present the one space of instruction that college students may be fully exempted from in Montgomery colleges.

After all, if dad and mom don’t want their kids uncovered to scientific information and elementary realities, they do have an alternative choice: personal college. There isn’t a scarcity of spiritual establishments to select from. However imposing the desire of some dad and mom on the schooling of 1000’s of schoolchildren is antithetical to the objective of public schooling, which, by definition, exists to serve the general public — not cater to the calls for of a choose few.