Related: Mahmoud v. Taylor: Everything to know about the Supreme Court case to ban LGBTQ+ books
The Court determined that not allowing opt outs violates the parents’ freedom of religion, with Justice Samuel writing the majority opinion, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
“We have long recognized the rights of parents to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children,” Alito wrote. “And we have held that those rights are violated by government policies that substantially interfere with the religious development of children.”
Mahmoud v. Taylor was brought by parents of varying faiths who have children in the Montgomery County Public Schools. When several LGBTQ-themed books were made available in classrooms in October 2022, parents were offered an opt-out.
However, it became difficult to accommodate the number of opt-outs, according to the school district, and school officials worried that students who are part of the LGBTQ+ community or have family members who are would be subjected to social stigma and isolation. The opt-out policy also put the district at risk of noncompliance with anti-discrimination laws, so the district ended the policy in 2023.
Parents sued to get the policy reinstated. Both a U.S. district court and an appeals court denied their request, so they appealed to the Supreme Court. The named plaintiff is Tamer Mahmoud, a Muslim parent with three children in the district, but several other Muslim and Christian parents are involved. The named defendant is Thomas W. Taylor, the Montgomery County superintendent of schools.
Sotomayor said in her dissent that the ruling “threatens the very essence of public education,” as it “constitutionalizes a parental veto power over curricular choices long left to the democratic process and local administrators.”
“That decision guts our free exercise precedent and strikes at the core premise of public schools: that children may come together to learn not the teachings of a particular faith, but a range of concepts and views that reflect our entire society,” Sotomayor wrote. “Exposure to new ideas has always been a vital part of that project, until now. The reverberations of the Court’s error will be felt, I fear, for generations. Unable to condone that grave misjudgment, I dissent.”
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