Supreme Court Saves Religious Parents From Radical LGBTQ Indoctrination of Their Children – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Over the past 10 years, the radical ideologues who dominate school boards and educational leadership roles across the country have proved themselves determined to achieve a singular task: convincing a generation of American schoolchildren to accept a novel vision of human sexuality.

In this novel vision, the truths the human body makes clear are irrelevant. A girl can become a boy if only she declares herself to be so — oh, and if she pays to have her breasts chopped off and for a piece of flesh (“a skin flap”) vaguely resembling a penis to be stitched onto her. Two men can be “married” if they seek sexual pleasure together in activities that sexual ideologues deem equivalent to the actual marital act. The fact that this union inherently excludes the generation of children is papered over by a growing market in which women will accept payment to give birth to strangers’ children.

When parents from a variety of religious traditions (Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant) objected to the reading and dispersal of children’s books that were obviously aimed at convincing children to accept this radical vision of human sexuality — a vision that violates core principles of their religious faiths when it comes to family, sexuality, and gender — the Montgomery County School Board first responded by allowing religious exceptions before, in a matter of months, slamming down the hammer and forcing children to sit through these lessons against the objections of their parents, who did not want to them to be taught this alternative worldview that is gravely at odds with their religious faith. And when parents continued to object, members of the school board responded by mocking religious faiths for having antiquated views and explaining that children needed to be turned against their parents’ dangerous beliefs. (RELATED: Religious Liberty Cases Return to Supreme Court)

Several religious couples of various faiths sued the Montgomery County Public Schools, saying that the forced lessons teaching their children principles at odds with their core religious beliefs violated their right to the free exercise of their religion. After the district and circuit courts ruled against them, the Supreme Court agreed to hear their case. Today, in an opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court ruled, by the 6–3 majority, that the parents are entitled to a preliminary injunction that will allow them to exempt their children from the lessons because they are likely to succeed on their claim that the school board’s policies “unconstitutionally burden their religious exercise.” The court wrote: “Without an injunction, the parents will continue to suffer an unconstitutional burden on their religious exercise, and such a burden unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.” (RELATED: Elementary School Parents Fight Gay/Trans Books)

The Court’s majority grounded its reasoning in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, on the precedent set in the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder, which concerned an Amish challenge to a Wisconsin law that sought to require children to attend school beyond eighth grade. Alito wrote that Yoder established that parents have “a right ‘to direct the religious upbringing of their children’ and that this right can be infringed by laws that pose ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that parents wish to instill in their children.” This right stems from the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor makes clear that parents’ right to the free exercise of religion is violated when they are forced to expose their children to sexual ideology that opposes their faith beliefs. This has major implications given the scale of sexual indoctrination present in public schools across the United States. In California, for instance, the state’s “health education” curriculum says that fifth-grade sex education “must affirm diverse sexual orientations and include examples of same-sex relationships when discussing relationships.”

The ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor means that religious parents have a constitutional right to receive notice about, and opt-outs from, such public school curriculum components that normatively teach values contrary to the religious beliefs that parents are trying to instill in their children. Public school leaders will no longer be able to force onto children the LGBTQ ideology they are so desperate to indoctrinate them into without notifying religious parents who object to the lessons and offering them the opportunity to remove their children from them. This will be a major impediment to LGBTQ activists’ mission to make all children assent to LGBTQ ideology, as it will make holding such lessons difficult. Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed in her dissent that the result of these required opt-outs will be “chaos for this nation’s public schools.” Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his concurring opinion, however, that such sex education lessons are a recent innovation and run against a long history in which “schooling seldom extended beyond the elementary subjects.”

It is appropriate that picture books are the means through which the Supreme Court has affirmed that forcing children to be taught LGBTQ ideology is a violation of their religious parents’ right to the free exercise of religion, as radical sexual ideologues have consolidated in recent years around the use of picture books to impart their beliefs on young minds. Picture books lend themselves well to this purpose, given that they are geared toward teaching children a worldview through the use of story and pictures. But whereas the Berenstain Bears, for instance, taught children innocuous moral lessons, like not to bully or throw a tantrum, LGBTQ books teach that the ideology is the truth and that those who are opposed to it are bigots.

Justices Alito and Sotomayor, in their respective opinion and dissent, engaged in a war of pictures using the LGBTQ picture books in dispute. Justice Alito included images from the picture books that highlighted their propagandistic nature, while Sotomayor included images that sought to convince that the books were just about inclusion. Alito, in the opinion’s appendix, included a page in which a mother declares to her daughter that two men getting married is simply what grown-ups do when they love each other; a page in which a mother tells her daughter that she is a boy because she wants to be like her dad; and a page in which said mother tells her son who objects to his sister’s “transition” that “This is about love.” Sotomayor alternatively included an image from a picture book that says a little girl loves her gay uncle.

Mahmoud v. Taylor shows quite clearly that public school leaders use these books to turn children against the religious beliefs of their parents. An email from principals of the Montgomery County Public Schools reported that the country’s school board had selected the radical LGBTQ books for the curriculum based upon factors such as “Is heteronormativity reinforced or disrupted?”; “Is cisnormativity reinforced or disrupted?”; and “Are power hierarchies that uphold the dominant culture reinforced or disrupted?”

It will be an enormous relief to religious parents that the Supreme Court’s ruling will spare their children from being subject to such indoctrination. Now, the battle begins for religious parents to ensure that their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children is upheld in all public schools. It will be an uphill battle given how determined LGBTQ activists are to ensure that all children assent to their novel vision of the human body.

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