A Maryland federal judge denied on Thursday a request from parents to ‘opt-out’ their children from LGBTQ+ history and topics education. The case, Mahmoud v. McKnight, involved three families with elementary-aged children who objected on religious grounds to the use of storybooks featuring LGBTQ+ characters in the Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) system.
The lawsuit began when the MCPS school board announced in 2023 the discontinue of the parent’s option to remove their children from select LGBTQ+ storybooks’ instruction. Initially, when the curriculum was adopted in October 2022, parents were notified about the use of these books and could excuse their children from relevant instruction.
Interestingly, the school board abolished the opt-out policy as principals and teachers found that they could not ‘accommodate the growing number of opt-out requests without causing significant disruptions’ to the education environment. This alteration triggered several confrontational school board meetings.
The books at the center of the controversy include, among others, Pride Puppy!, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, My Rainbow, and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope.
The three families involved in the case claimed that the new policy infringed on the free exercise and free speech rights of their children as per the US Constitution’s First Amendment and substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. They also asserted in the lawsuit that it was central to their religious objections that the storybooks taught about transgender individuals.
US District Judge Deborah Boardman, however, dismissed the parents’ First and Fourteenth Amendment claims on Thursday. She found that MCPS’s opt-out policy reversal didn’t burden the religious exercise of students or parents and that ‘mere exposure in public school to ideas that contradict religious beliefs does not burden the religious exercise of students or parents.’ The court established that all but one of the parents had not demonstrated that the no-opt-out policy would likely lead to the indoctrination of their children.
Furthermore, Judge Boardman found that the Fourteenth Amendment claims were unlikely to succeed since she determined that the MCPS system had a ‘legitimate interest in fostering social integration and cultural inclusiveness of transgender and gender nonconforming students.’
In addition to the claims on the basis of the US Constitution, the parents also had claims under Maryland law. They argued that the MCPS system had an obligation to provide parents and guardians with the opportunity to view instructional materials used in teaching family life and human sexuality and that their children could be opted out from the same. In return, the MCPS system asserted that the Maryland law applied exclusively to their curriculum on sexuality, and the books under contention were deemed part of the literary curriculum.
Last Thursday’s decision addressed only the parents’ US Constitution claims in rejecting their request for a preliminary injunction, ignoring the parents’ claims under Maryland law.