A lawsuit brought by parents against a Maryland school district has made its way all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it looks like it is going to end with a major victory for families everywhere.
The justices heard oral arguments Tuesday in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which a diverse group of parents of elementary school-aged children argue the Montgomery County Board of Education violated their religious rights by failing to provide an opt-out of instruction that includes books with LGBTQ themes.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by National Review’s Rich Lowry and Michael Brendan Dougherty to discuss the case and why it looks likely to result in a major win for parental rights.
The Case
As Megyn reported on Wednesday’s AM Update, a concerned cohort of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish parents in Maryland sued Montgomery County Superintendent Thomas Taylor over a mandated LGBTQ curriculum for young children. The parents wished to exempt their children from public school lessons involving stories about gay and transgender characters on religious grounds.
Montgomery County is one of the most Democrat-leaning counties in the U.S., but the dispute dates back to November 2022 when the school district introduced a set of LGBTQ-inclusive books into the English language arts curriculum for pre-K through fifth grade students.
The books in question include Pride Puppy, a story about a dog lost at a Pride parade, Love, Violet, about a young girl overwhelmed by her crush on a female classmate, and Jacob’s Room to Choose, about transgender students who lead a campaign to make their school’s bathrooms gender neutral.
Parents were initially given the choice to opt their children out of these lessons, but the school board reversed course in March 2023. Not only could parents no longer opt-out, but they would also not even be informed of when their children were exposed to material.
The attorney for Montgomery County Schools, Alan Schoenfeld, told the court that the school board tried to implement an opt-out program but found it increasingly complicated. He argued the policy gave rise to related concerns, including absenteeism, the “infeasibility of administering opt-outs across classrooms and schools,” and the “risk of exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.”
The Legal Theory
While this case has brought together families of multiple faiths, Dougherty took issue with the fact that this has to be argued on religious grounds to begin with. “There is kind of a problem in our ruling about religious freedoms, in that you have to prove that there is a sincere religious belief. Like, is it really a religious belief that men are men and women are women,” he asked “I suppose it is.”
But he wondered how far that logic could stretch. “We could have a school of people come along and say, ‘Technically when you sit on a chair, there actually is an exchange of molecules between the chair and your physical body, therefore, there is no distinction between the two, and I can throw you out of window just as easily as I throw the chair out of a window.’ And then I have to come and say, ‘Well, my Christian faith teaches me that, in fact, a person is a person and a chair is a chair,'” he joked. “I mean, give me a break.”
“Do we have anything common underlying our law,” Dougherty asked. “Or can any fool theory come out of an academic department and lead to us introducing four year olds to leather daddies and drag queens?”
The Likely Outcome
Regardless, the six conservative justices did not appear satisfied with the school district’s reasoning, and even liberal Justice Elena Kagan appeared taken aback about the age of the students being exposed to the content.
Megyn noted that most SCOTUS watchers believe the court will side with the parents, which she said would be a massive victory. “[It appears] they are going down, and it is going to be a glorious thing,” she said. “It will be a very historic ruling if they do side with the restoration of parental rights – which is another thing Donald Trump ran on, by the way – and this could be a ruling that could have far-ranging implications.”
Lowry agreed. “God bless these parents for standing up,” he said. “Public school should be consensus, boring, conventional educational matter. That’s it. College is when you take your courses on controversial literary theory or whatever, but not in grade school. And I think they will prevail. They should prevail.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Lowry and Dougherty by tuning in to episode 1,055 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.