Updated June 27, 2025 at 2:00pm ET
Three months after oral arguments led many to believe the Supreme Court would deliver a victory for parental rights, the justices did in fact rule in a 6 to 3 decision that a group of Maryland parents are entitled to opt their children out of school lessons that violate their religious beliefs.
The Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling fell along ideological lines with Justice Samuel Alito authoring the majority opinion. The case dated back to November 2022 when a concerned group 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, but, on Friday’s show, Megyn said the decision will likely have a much larger impact. “Don’t make any mistake, this ruling is going to be applied well beyond what was being shoved down the throats of these Maryland children,” she said. “It’s happening in schools beyond Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized it, and it has now issued a powerful ruling arming parents – state to state, coast to coast – with the tools they need to shut it down when it comes to their child.”
This is, she said, vindication for groups like Moms for Liberty who have been fighting against children being exposed to inappropriate sexualized content. “That one was for you, Scott Pelley… Moms for Liberty went on 60 Minutes [in March 2024] trying to say, at very young ages, schools are shoving leftist, woke ideology down the throats of young children… and Scott Pelley told America it wasn’t happening,” she recalled. “Screw you, Scott Pelley. In a 6-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court just said it is… absolutely happening and parents have a right to say no.”
Justice Alito wrote as much in his majority opinion. “The storybooks unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage and gender. And the Board has specifically encouraged teachers to reinforce this viewpoint and to reprimand any children who disagree. That goes beyond mere ‘exposure,'” he wrote, in part. “We reject this chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.”
Megyn said this ruling also hits particularly close to home for her family. “If you’re woke and you want to let your kid go in there and learn about chopping off his penis when he’s 12, more power to you… I think it is sad for your child that you want that. I think it’s sick for a teacher or a school district to offer it at all, but there is zero chance I am letting my child sit there,” she explained. “And I have not just talked that talk; I have walked that walk. It is why we left our schools in New York… we had previously loved because they tried to indoctrinate our children on the issue of gender and race and we had had it.”
“Now, we finally have a Supreme Court decision saying we were right. Schools don’t have the right to do this to our children,” she added. “This ruling says religious grounds will give you the power you need to get your child out of it… but it will be expanded beyond this because parental rights are not limited to those who are faithful.”
Original article from April 23, 2025 below:
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.