The Supreme Court on Friday in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines ruled in favor of a group of parents in Montgomery County, Md., seeking to opt out their children from instruction that uses books with LGBTQ themes.
It hands another win to religious rights advocates, who have regularly earned the backing of the high court’s conservative majority in a series of high-profile cases.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the six Republican-appointed justices, found the lack of an opt-out option likely substantially burdens parents’ constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.
The decision sends the case back to a lower court for a final decision on whether that requires the county to provide an opt out. In the meantime, Alito said the school district must notify parents in advance and enable them to have their children removed from the instruction.
“In the absence of an injunction, the parents will continue to be put to a choice: either risk their child’s exposure to burdensome instruction, or pay substantial sums for alternative educational services. As we have explained, that choice unconstitutionally burdens the parents’ religious exercise,” Alito wrote.
The court’s three Democratic-appointed justices dissented.
“The result will be chaos for this Nation’s public schools,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” Sotomayor continued. “The harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too. Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students’ learning and development.”
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Located just across the border from Washington, D.C., Montgomery County runs one of the nation’s largest and most diverse public school systems.
In fall 2022, the county began introducing books with gay and transgender characters in language arts curriculum in elementary schools. Initially, the county allowed opt outs before rescinding the option as a flood of parents sought to do so on religious grounds.
A coalition comprising an organization formed to fight the policy as well as Muslim, Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox parents sued.
The parents appealed to the Supreme Court after a federal district judge rejected their bid to require an opt-out option and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in a 2-1 vote.
The parents were represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which regularly brings religion cases before the high court.
They were backed by the Trump administration, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and other religious groups, more than five dozen Republican members of Congress, 26 Republican state attorneys general and various conservative legal groups.
Montgomery County was backed by another coalition of religious groups, Democratic attorneys general from Washington, D.C., and 18 states, the American Civil Liberties Union and LGBTQ advocacy groups.
The case is one of several at the Supreme Court this term implicating religious rights.
The court deadlocked 4-4 on the bid to create the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school, leaving intact a lower ruling blocking the Oklahoma school’s contract.
And the justices are also weighing whether Wisconsin can refuse to extend its religious exemption from paying unemployment tax to Catholic Charities Bureau by questioning whether it has a religious purpose.
