Maryland Parents Petition Supreme Court to Reinstate Parental Right to Opt Out of Gender, Sexuality Lessons

Families in Maryland’s largest school district asked the Supreme Court to reinstate their right to opt out of controversial sexuality and gender curriculum on Thursday, continuing a fight Christian, Muslim, and Jewish parents embarked on years ago to protect their religious liberties.

Represented by Washington, D.C.-based law firm, Becket Fund, the multi-faith coalition banded together in the fall of 2022, when Montgomery County Public Schools reversed a policy that had previously allowed parents to opt their children out of lessons promoting radical gender ideology. Parents did not challenge the curriculum itself; rather, they asked the district to allow parents the choice to opt their children out of such lessons. MCPS refused.

“Parents shouldn’t have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to introducing their children to complex and sensitive issues around gender and sexuality,” Becket Vice President and senior counsel Eric Baxter said. “Nearly every state requires parental consent before high schoolers can attend sex-ed. Parents should have the right to excuse their elementary school children when related instruction is introduced during story hour.”

Families object to MCPS’s no-opt-out policy on religious grounds, namely that by instructing children against their parents’ spiritual convictions, the school district burdens parents’ constitutional right to free exercise of religion. The district’s gender and sexuality curriculum prides itself on being “inclusive” instruction in what the parents say are not age- or school-appropriate topics, such as gender identity, drag queens, intersexuality, and prostitution. Teachers are required under the curriculum to read aloud “Pride Storybooks” which contain all of these themes to students in pre-K through eighth grade classrooms.

“The School Board is pushing a controversial ideology that has been rejected by governments around the world and has even been criticized by the Board’s own principals as inappropriate for the intended age group,” Grace Morrison, a member of parental advocacy group Kids First, said. “Children deserve a period of innocence. The Supreme Court should take this case, restore the opt-out, and let parents decide how and when to introduce their own elementary school kids to these sensitive topics.”

Mandatory instruction in gender and sexuality is “critical for education children in a diverse society,” the school district’s lawyers argued in front of a lower court last year in August, and the curriculum “doesn’t work” if only some students participate. MCPS has spent nearly $1.8 million in legal fees so far this fiscal year, up 147.04 percent from the same period in fiscal year 2023, in large part due to expenses incurred from the opt-out case. MCPS Communications Director Christopher Cram called the legal fees “investments in ensuring that our school system operates within the bounds of the law, ethically, and always in the best interest of our students and staff.”

A lower court upheld MCPS’s opt-out ban, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled against the parents last year, prompting Becket to petition the Supreme Court. In the fall, the Court will decide whether or not to hear the case.