A Review of Oral Arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor
In Montgomery County, Maryland, a radical school board devised an English curriculum with the specific purpose of indoctrinating children as young as three-years-old with storybooks that promoted LGBTQ inclusivity. The worst part was that the school board was intent on preventing any parents, regardless of specific objection, from opting their children out of the offensive and sexually explicit material.
When religious parents, led by a Muslim family, raised concerns, the county refused to provide accommodations that are typical for many other similar sex-education classes. The county is so radical in this sense, it decided to fight these parents all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
It spent millions of dollars to get embarrassed in front of the whole world at the nation’s highest court. Here is a short review of what happened this week at the oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor. Concerned Women for America submitted an amicus brief supporting parental rights and religious liberty.
First to argue was Eric Baxter, Senior Counsel at the Becket, on behalf of the parents. He stated simply and eloquently:
MR. BAXTER: Parents everywhere care about how their young children are taught sexuality and gender identity. That’s why nearly every public school in the country that provides sexuality education requires parental consent first. But Montgomery County is an extreme outlier, insisting that every elementary school student must be instructed that, among other controversial matters, doctors guessed at their sex when they were born and that anyone who disagrees is hurtful and unfair.
Forcing Petitioners to submit their children to such instruction violates their religious beliefs and directly interferes with their ability to direct the religious upbringing of their children.
It should not be surprising that radical, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor saw no problem with the books promoting LGBTQ+ acceptance and chiding pre-school children who would find anything wrong with the celebration of same-sex weddings. She wouldn’t let Mr. Baxter even finish a sentence before she charged on that there was nothing per se bad about these simple books. To which Justice Samuel Alito finally interjected that there was no question what the books were intended to do.
JUSTICE ALITO: It has a clear moral message. And it may be a good message. It’s just a message that a lot of religious people disagree with.
MR. BAXTER: And when you add to that, Your Honor, instruction that if a student disagrees, teachers are supposed to say things like: “Well, I have friends in that situation, do you think it’s really fair for you to agree or to suggest that it’s hurtful for students who disagree…”
This case is so extreme it should have never even started. Justice Brett Kavanaugh addressed the issue:
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And then I guess I am a bit mystified as a life-long resident of the county how it came to this. Can you just tell us what happened?
MR. BAXTER: Well, I share your concern… we’re not even entirely sure because, for the entire first year, the Board promised in multiple places, on –on Fox News and other media, that parents would be –be notified and then they would be opted out.
The last notice happened on March 22, 2023. The very next day, overnight, with no explanation, the Board came out and said: We’re changing the rule because we –because we want every –all students to be instructed on inclusivity…
Hundreds of parents complained. These were mostly -¬according to news articles, mostly families from Muslim faith and Ethiopian Orthodox who were objecting.
When they –when they spoke to the Board, the Board accused them of using their religious beliefs as another reason to hate, accused a young Muslim girl of parroting her parents’ dogma, and then accused the parents of aligning with racist xenophobes and white supremacists.
The whole point of this curriculum was to enact this secular worldview. Mr. Baxter explained, “the Board said, when you select these books, we want you to select books that will disrupt cis-normativity, disrupt hetero-normativity.”
But, by far the most radical member of the Court today Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was the most hostile to the parents’ plea. At first she tried to say there was no evidence of how these books were used, until she was given specific declarations by parents. And then she apparently demanded that the parents must be in the classrooms in order to object to the content their children show them is being taught:
MR. BAXTER: All of our clients have –in their declarations, they describe which books are going to be read to their children and why they asked it -¬
JUSTICE JACKSON: Were the clients in the classroom?
MR. BAXTER: They were not in the classroom, but they know –in the end, we don’t have to wait until the injury has happened to get relief. The point of a preliminary injunction is that we can –when –when the injury is imminent, we can seek relief -¬
JUSTICE JACKSON: All right. Let me ask you one other set of questions about coercion…
She then pivoted to argue that children should get out of public schools if they don’t want to be indoctrinated in pro-LGBTQ+ propaganda:
JUSTICE JACKSON: I guess I’m struggling to see how it burdens a parent’s religious exercise if the school teaches something that the parent disagrees with. You have a choice. You don’t have to send your kid to that school. You can put them in another situation. You can home-school them.
How is it a burden on the parent if they have the option to send their kid elsewhere?
MR. BAXTER: Well, Your Honor, the world we live in in this case is that most parents don’t have that option. They have two working parents. They can’t afford to send to private school.
Tough luck, says Justice Jackson.
Sarah Harris, Principal Deputy Solicitor General for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), participated in support of parents. It should be pointed out that this is a welcomed change from the Biden DOJ who stood firmly against parents and in support of every demand of the radical LGBTQ+ lobby.
Justice Jackson went back to the idea that the kids do not need to go to public school; they can leave, if they want.
JUSTICE JACKSON: You agree that they’re not being compelled to actually go to that school where this sort of thing is happening that they disagree with?
MS. HARRIS: I think two points on that. One is that actually shows the burden because you’re being forced to forego the benefit of a public education and pay for a private school.
JUSTICE JACKSON: Well, we’ll get to that. I’m just trying to understand -¬
MS. WILSON: Yeah, I think that’s a problem.
JUSTICE JACKSON: I’m trying to understand. So you’re saying, even –even if the parent has a choice to put their kid in another environment that doesn’t do the kind of thing that they object to, it’s still a burden if they opt to put their parent –their child in this environment?
MS. HARRIS: Absolutely…
Finally, it was time for Mr. Alan Schoenfeld to defend the indefensible actions of Montgomery County, Maryland. It went about as well as he could have hoped. It was a complete disaster.
Justice Clarence Thomas started by asking him the obvious: “Couldn’t you solve those differences simply by restoring the opt-out?” Every other district in the entire nation allows for an opt-out. But apparently Montogomery County is too enlightened for such inferior forms of thinking. They will fight to the death to indoctrinate children into an LGBTQ+ affirming worldview one way or another. That is why they have fought all the way to the Supreme Court. Leftists are proud of it.
Chief Justice John Roberts tried to get the state to acknowledge the ridiculousness of how young the kids are they are trying to indoctrinate.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel, you said that nothing in the policy requires students to affirm what’s being taught or what’s being presented in the books.
Is that a realistic concept when you’re talking about a five-year-old? I mean, do you want to say you don’t have to follow the teacher’s instructions, you don’t have to agree with the teacher? I mean, that may be a more dangerous message than some of the other things.
There was no acknowledgment. It’s clear they want to shame the little bigots.
But Justice Neil Gorsuch exposed the county’s bigotry following that exchange in asking Mr. Schoenfeld whether making a Muslim kid see an image of the Prophet Muhammad would be a violation of religious freedom.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, the child is sitting passively and the teacher’s just reading a –a storybook.
MR. SCHOENFELD: I –I think, if the storybook features the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad -¬
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yes.
MR. SCHOENFELD: –that is a compulsion to engage in conduct that violates your religious belief.
After having the gall to say that, Justice Gorsuch asks about the county’s specific instructions on the LGBTQ+ textbooks in this case:
JUSTICE GORSUCH: We also have in the record some guidance materials for teachers and one of which is, if a student says that a boy can’t be a girl because he was born a boy, a teacher is to respond: That comment is hurtful, and we shouldn’t use negative words to talk about people’s identities.
Is that just –is that exposure, or is that something else for a three-to five-year-old?
That’s totally different, and it is merely “exposure to particular ideas and teaching students to be civil in the classroom.”
Justice Gorsuch also asked about the county’s bigoted comments towards parents:
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Here, we have some statements from Board members suggesting the students were parroting their parents’ dogma, suggesting that some parents might be promoting hate and suggesting that it was unfortunate that they were taking a view endorsed by white supremacists and xenophobes….
Does that suggest a hostility toward religion akin to what we found in Masterpiece? And why wouldn’t that be enough to trigger strict scrutiny on its own?
But to the state, this is something to be proud of, bigotry towards religion alone is not enough to violate religious liberty. It is truly remarkable, the level of contempt for the Constitution, the Court, and American’s religious liberty rights the county and Mr. SCHOENFELD showed.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So you take the view that even if you have a non-neutral policy, and even if it was motivated by hostility toward religion, and even though the parents claim a burden, you still have to somehow meet an additional objective substantial burden test?
MR. SCHOENFELD: Correct.
With Justice Samuel Alito, the state tried to represent the material as completely neutral, but it was too big a burden.
MR. SCHOENFELD: There is obviously an incidental message in some of these books that these life choices and these lifestyles are worthy of respect. I don’t know how you can teach students to respect each other without teaching that. If the book were about, you know, Uncle Bobby’s wedding, they get married, and the rest of it is that was awful, then there would be a serious equal protection violation in the presentation of that curriculum.
There is no argument as to why the board doesn’t simply allow students to opt-out. Justice Kavanaugh asked again. And Mr. Schoenfeld finally admitted that too many kids were asking to opt out. And, instead of simply understanding that they are highly offensive, the school decided mid-year, “let’s force it on them, no more opt-outs.”
MR. SCHOENFELD: So, again, I think what’s in the record is that with respect to these books as they were deployed in the classroom, there was high absenteeism in some schools…
Wonder why?
The school’s admission of its evil plot to indoctrinate three-year-olds was really the pinnacle of the whole argument:
JUSTICE GORSUCH: You’ve included these in the English language curriculum rather than the human sexuality curriculum to influence students, is that fair? That’s what the district court found. Do you agree with that?
MR. SCHOENFELD: I think, to the extent the district court found that it was to influence, it was to influence them towards civility, the natural consequence of being exposed to -¬
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Whatever, but to influence them.
MR. SCHOENFELD: In the manner that I just mentioned, yes.
Yes. And they cannot opt out. They must be indoctrinated, under government compulsion, if they want to be educated in the public schools.
The whole thing was a debacle for the county. Justice Kavanaugh almost with a lament asked for the shameless attorney to comment, saying:
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Maryland was founded on religious liberty and religious tolerance, a haven for Catholics escaping persecution in England going back to 1649. I’m sure you’re aware of this history.
And Montgomery County has been a beacon of that religious liberty for all these years with a strong Catholic population, a substantial Jewish population, lots of different Protestant. I mean, you drive down any -¬any –Connecticut Avenue or Georgia Avenue, you know, you see religious building after religious building.
And I guess I’m surprised given that this is, you know, this is the hill we’re going to die on in terms of not respecting religious liberty given that history. And so history comes up. I just want to give you a chance to respond to how you situate that in Maryland and Montgomery County’s history.
It did not matter one bit. The county continues to contend that saying to three-year-olds on the transgender issue that, “When we’re born, people make a guess about our gender and label us boy or girl based on our body parts. Sometimes they’re right; sometimes they’re wrong. When someone’s transgender, they guess wrong. When someone’s cisgender, they guessed right.” is perfectly appropriate and not coercive at all.
Let us pray that the Justices send a clear message in support of religious liberty in this case.