LET PARENTS PROTECT THEIR CHILDREN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

National Review

 

Let Parents Protect Their Kids from Gender Ideology in Public Schools

By Ashley McGuire

April 22, 2025 6:30 AM

 

The Supreme Court should affirm the right of parents in Montgomery County, Md., to opt out of radical teaching on gender.

 

Do parents have the right to be notified about sexually explicit gender ideology lessons in public schools and opt their children out for religious reasons?

 

That is the question before the Supreme Court today. And it’s a question the school board of my county, Montgomery County, Md., has answered with an emphatic “no.”

 

Imagine if your four-year-old was given a book with “intersex flag,” “[drag] queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” “zipper,” “xoxo,” in the “Search and Find Word List.” From a preschool teacher.

 

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), which has over 50,000 elementary students (making it the largest school system in Maryland and one of the largest in the country), insists that parents of children as young as three do not have the right to opt their children out of these lessons. They don’t even have the right to be informed about when such content will be used in the classroom.

 

The content of the lessons directly contradicts the deeply held religious beliefs of a wide swath of religious parents — including Muslims, Catholics, and Jews — about human sexuality. (Never mind the question whether it is age-appropriate or of educational value to begin with.)

 

In Mahmoud v. Taylor, religious parents are asking the highest court to hold the MCPS policy unconstitutional. They argue that the policy violates their parental rights to educate their children on sensitive matters about human sexuality according to their faith without interference from the state.

 

They are not asking the school district to remove the books from the classroom or the ideological sexual material from instruction. They are merely asking for the right to be notified and to opt their children out. This is a long-standing precedent in our public schools with regard to sex ed. This nation has historically respected the rights of parents to be the primary educators of children when it comes to sex and their bodies, even for nonsectarian reasons.

 

But my home county has bizarrely dug in. The book list is part of a broader initiative in MCPS focused on pre-K through fifth grade, titled “Building Community with LGBTQ+ Affirming Picture Books.” According to slides from that initiative, which were presented to teachers and obtained by one news outlet, teachers have been given a certain quota of these books to use in the classroom and can expect these lessons to be “embedded throughout.”

 

“As with all curriculum resources, there is an expectation that teachers utilize these inclusive lessons and texts with all students,” parents were told. When parents sued, one group of activists supporting the initiative actually doxed the names of the families on Twitter. They wrote, “If these are your children’s classmates, you have a duty to shun them.”

 

The “curriculum resources” include books such as Pride Puppy, which features illustrated pictures of men in drag “furries” and words such as “queer” and “intersectional,” and Born Ready, a story about a five-year-old girl named Penelope who decides that she is really a “he.”

 

The response to parents who want to opt their children out on religious grounds?

 

“Go private.”

 

That’s what I did with my five kids. Despite having access to some of the nation’s “best” public schools, I simply cannot in good conscience send my children to them. The risk that they will be taught a host of ideologies that violate our family’s Catholic faith is simply too high.

 

But not everyone can afford a five-figure opt out — if there is even an alternative nearby. The result is a kind of socioeconomic religious discrimination: religious freedom for rich people.

 

This has led to what former Attorney General Bill Barr, in his autobiography, called a “constitutional double standard” in America’s educational system. Public school students are subjected to “militant secular progressivism,” which is “given the protections of the Free Exercise Clause” but is not “subject to the prohibitions of the Establishment Clause.”

 

“The problem today is not that religion is being forced on others,” Barr writes. “The problem is that secular values are being forced on people of faith. Progressives claim not to like the law being used to force certain moral views on them, but they now want to use the law to force their moral values on others.”

 

Millions of parents are forced, either for financial or geographic reasons, to send their children to a public school where their children are forcibly indoctrinated with content that directly violates their religious beliefs.

 

That’s exactly what is happening in my county. And as a taxpayer, I am footing the bill for the county’s lawyers at the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale. Those lawyers will stand before the Supreme Court arguing that we don’t have basic parental rights when it comes to explicit content and our kids.

 

The Supreme Court should end this madness.