Pride and Prejudice
Céleste Perrino-Walker January/February 2025When deeply held religious beliefs clash with public school lesson plans, finding workable solutions can be a challenge. What happens, though, when a solution is obvious, but compromise has been taken off the table?
Illustration by Michael Glenwood
On March 22, 2023, parents of public school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, received an email from the school board confirming their continued ability to opt their children out of curriculum that contradicts their religious beliefs. The very next day, in an abrupt volte-face, they received notice in a revised message that they would instead not be allowed to opt out of lessons and texts the school board had chosen, to encourage “all classrooms to be inclusive and safe spaces for students, including those who identify as LGBTQ+ or have family members in the LGBTQ+ community.”1 Parents were also informed that teachers would no longer be sending out letters giving advanced notice of when the inclusive materials would be used in their child’s classroom. No reason was given for the sudden change aside from the fact that incorporating a wide range of personal characteristics in the curricular and instructional materials would contribute to the Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) System’s goal of creating “inclusive and safe spaces.”
The Backstory
Montgomery County, Maryland, is a religiously diverse area of the country, and that religious diversity is reflected in its school systems as well. In the 2023 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) Census of American Religion on Religious Identity and Diversity, it is listed as the most religiously diverse school system in America.2 Until March 2023 the school board honored that rich diversity and gave parents and students even more accommodations for their religious beliefs than did Maryland law. Parents were allowed to opt their children out of any instruction or activity that was against their religious beliefs. Indeed, when the collection of books, referred to as the Pride Storybooks, had initially been introduced the previous year, parents were given the opportunity to opt their children out. It wasn’t until the second year they were in use that the opt-out was rescinded with no explanation.
The Pride Storybooks were adopted following an antiracist audit the school conducted for the stated purpose of addressing racial barriers. As a result, in October 2022 the school board introduced a selection of more than 22 LGBTQ+-inclusive texts that would be used in classrooms from pre-K through eighth grade. They include picture books about attending a Pride parade, the marriage of two men, a young girl’s crush on another girl, and a true story about a boy named Penelope, among others. In Pride Puppy, intended for pre-K children, the book’s “Search and Find Word List” instructs children to look for items such as: [drag] king, [drag] queen, lip ring, intersex [flag], and underwear. Rather than focusing on basic manners, civility, or kindness, the books’ themes promote transgender and queer ideology and present questionable facts as scientific material. For example, if children question how a girl can “become” a boy, teachers are instructed that they can respond by saying, “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 and sometimes they’re wrong. Our body parts do not decide our gender.”3 The curriculum instructs teachers to “tell students they are ‘hurtful’ if they question these controversial ideologies.”4
The troubling nature of the ideas presented in the Pride Storybooks is disputed not only by parents but by the school board’s own principals as being age-inappropriate and failing to meet the school board’s stated goals for them. The principals expressed concern that the communicated purpose of MCPS for the materials was simply to allow students to be able to see themselves and their families represented in LGBTQ+ characters in literature covered in the classroom. This was supposed to be intended to promote inclusivity rather than teach elementary school students about sexual orientation or gender identity as stand-alone concepts. The principals disagreed, stating, “Several of the books and supporting documents seemingly contradict this message.”5 They went on to express concern over the dissolution of the opt-out, citing that because of “the concerns shared earlier about the plot and nature of the books, this creates a significant concern by some parents about ‘indoctrination’ or ‘hidden agendas.’”6 In addition, they stated that as teachers had not been trained on the use of the materials and how to handle the questions or conversations that might follow, some had “shared their discomfort about the content, the terminology, and the appropriateness of the books developmentally as well as from a sexual education perspective.”7
The Law
Following the denied opt-out, the school board’s summer meetings were understandably packed with concerned parents from many faiths, including Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, who shared that the content of the curriculum conflicted with their deeply held religious beliefs and again requested not that the curriculum be changed, but only that they be allowed their former right to opt their children out. In response, they were accused of promoting “hate” and were likened to “white supremacists” and “xenophobes.” Unable to convince the board to restore their rights, the parents had no recourse but to file for an injunction to regain the opt-out by legal means, which they did on May 24, 2023, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
When they were denied on August 24, 2023, they appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, where they were again disappointed. In a 2-1 decision, their appeal was denied. However, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum, who dissented, observed in his opinion that “the board seems to question the relative importance of the parents’ religious beliefs that their children should not be taught with the books the board required be used to promote diversity and inclusivity to the LGBTQ+ community. To explain, the board only denied opt-outs for instruction involving those books. So despite disclaiming that it is doing so, the board’s arguments, which the district court adopted, really view the parents’ religious objections to the texts as less important than the board’s goals to improve inclusivity for the LGBTQ+ community. But this is the precisely the sort of value judgment about parents’ religious claims that courts must not make.”8
Faced with the decision to forfeit a public school education or accept the continued denial of an opt-out for the materials, the parents appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court on September 12, 2024. “We’ll also get a number of briefs from states all across the country, various prominent legal scholars, parental organizations, and other religious organizations detailing why they believe the Court should hear this case,” says William Haun, an attorney for Becket who is involved in the litigation. At the time this article went to press, Becket was still awaiting the Court’s response.
The Fallout
In her declaration in support of the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, Grace Morrison, whose adopted 10-year-old daughter was born in Ukraine and has Down syndrome and attention deficit disorder, detailed how her family’s religious beliefs are being affected by the cessation of the opt-out. She and her husband are Roman Catholics whose beliefs conflict with the material in the Pride Storybooks. Because of their daughter’s learning disabilities, they are unable to help her understand why they disagree with the material presented by her teachers and how it differs from their religious beliefs. They were forced to make the painful decision to withdraw their daughter from public school, forfeiting her access to special programs that she needs. Instead, they will teach her at home, at significant cost to themselves. The Morrisons estimate it will cost them $25,000 a year to replace the special programs their daughter qualified for in public school, and they are concerned that homeschool will not be a successful experience for her. Judge Quattlebaum predicted this very dilemma in his dissent when he wrote, “The parents have shown the board’s decision to deny religious opt-outs burdened these parents’ right to exercise their religion and direct the religious upbringing of their children by putting them to the choice of either compromising their religious beliefs or foregoing a public education for their children.”9 The Morrisons are but one of many families facing this impossible choice.
The free exercise clause of the First Amendment provides some protection for religious practices. “It protects people not only from what the court calls ‘direct coercion,’ when you’re directly forced to violate your religious beliefs,” says Haun, “but also against what it calls ‘indirect coercion,’ the pressure that can be put upon you to modify your religious beliefs. And that is exactly the kind of thing that’s going on here. Parents are being told that they must choose between what no one disputes is a very important public benefit, which is going to public school, or financing their own children’s education because they have to give up that public benefit over their religious beliefs. That is indirect coercion. It’s been recognized as such in every other kind of Supreme Court case from unemployment benefits to school choice programs, even in prisons. The question that we must ask now is Why does a school board get more deference from a court when it cuts parents out of their own kids’ education than a prison gets when it’s handling inmates? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Flawed Inclusivity
It appears the “inclusivity” the Montgomery County School Board is interested in excludes parents whose ideas differ from their own. This does not have to be a zero-sum game. Montgomery County parents are not attempting to control or direct a public school curriculum. They are simply asking for the ability to decide for themselves, based on their own deeply held religious beliefs, when and how their children are exposed to topics that are not consistent with those beliefs. The real question is whether the Montgomery County School Board, other public school systems throughout the country, and potentially the Supreme Court, are willing to offer parents of faith communities the same anti-racist consideration they are offering to members of the LGBTQ+ community.
“The mere existence of religious accommodation should not be offensive to people,” says Haun. “It’s simply saying, ‘I’m going to stand aside.’ Our clients don’t have any objection to teaching children how to be kind and respectful to everyone. They are not in this litigation challenging the presence of the books in the curriculum. They’re not trying to get the county, through this litigation, to adopt new kinds of books in the curriculum. All they’re simply asking for is an ability to know what their kids are learning and the opportunity to guide their education by allowing them to be excused from instruction that would violate their religious formation.”
1 “Revised Message Regarding the Use of Inclusive Texts,” Montgomery County Public Schools website, March 23, 2024.
2 Public Religion Research Institute staff, “2023 PRRI Census of American Religion: County-Level Data on Religious Identity and Diversity,” PRRI, August 29, 2024, p. 2.
3 “Declaration of Robert McCaw,” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, June 26, 2023, https://bit.ly/40uci9R.
4 ”Mahmoud v. Taylor,” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, https://bit.ly/3AsWpps.
5 “Declaration of Robert McCaw,” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, https://bit.ly/40uci9R.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Mahmoud v. Taylor, appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, at Greenbelt. Deborah Lynn Boardman, District Judge (8:23-cv-01380-DLB), decided May 15, 2024.
9 Ibid.