Supreme Court Allows Parents to Opt Children Out of LGBTQ+ School Curricula, Expanding Religious Liberty Protections

27 Jun 2025, 16:15 by Solcyré Burga · TIME

The Supreme Court sided in a Friday ruling with a group of Maryland parents seeking to opt their children out of school curricula that featured LGBTQ+ characters and themes, marking an expansion of religious liberty protections.

The parents argued that the school board violated their rights to practice their religion under the First Amendment by rescinding measures that allowed them to opt their children out of discussions involving LGBTQ+ storybooks. The books were not used for classroom instruction on gender and sexuality.

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the nation’s highest court agreed with the parents and ruled that schools cannot require children to participate in lessons involving books that their parents object to on religious grounds. "We have long recognized," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, “the rights of parents to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children. And we have held that those rights are violated by government policies that substantially interfere with the religious development of children.”

Alito’s fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts also sided with parents in the case.

President Donald Trump celebrated the decision on Friday.

“That ruling was a great ruling. It’s a great ruling for parents. They lost control of the schools, they lost control of their child, and this is a tremendous victory for parents,” he said.

The case comes as a growing number of states have moved to implement “Don’t Say Gay” laws barring mentions of LGBTQ+ people or history in schools. Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas are among those that have enacted LGBTQ-specific school censorship laws, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Books related to the topic have also become the subject of mounting bans across the U.S.: More than 10,000 book bans were recorded for the 2023-24 school year, a quarter of which featured LGBTQ+ characters, according to PEN America.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the parents in the case, previously told TIME that it would not cause “a seismic shift throughout our country.” But advocates for LGBTQ+ rights and other critics of the lawsuit expressed concerns that the court’s decision could enable school districts to censor school curricula or other discussions that mention the LGBTQ+ community.

The liberal justices of the court expressed similar worries. “The reverberations of the Court’s error will be felt, I fear, for generations. Unable to condone that grave misjudgement, I dissent,” wrote Justices Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion. Fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.

What is the case about?

The lawsuit at the heart of Mahmoud v. Taylor was filed by six Montgomery County Public School parents of various religious denominations who were concerned about the addition of LGBTQ+ storybooks to their children’s curriculum. The titles included queer characters or themes in varied ways, with one centering around a puppy lost at a Pride parade and another featuring a prince who falls in love with and marries a knight.

Montgomery County Public Schools, the country’s most religiously diverse county, initially notified parents of what books were being discussed and allowed students to be excused when such books were being used. The school district later changed its policy, however, citing a high number of requests that it claimed caused high student absenteeism. The school board also alleged opt-outs were difficult to carry out, as teachers had to find alternative lesson plans for excused students, according to court documents.

In March 2023, the school board issued a new policy barring opt-outs for the books. That May, parents sued the school board, alleging that its actions violated their religious freedom rights.

What did the Supreme Court rule?

The Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court’s decision denying the parents’ request, forcing Montgomery County Public Schools to bring back opt-out measures for curricula featuring LGBTQ+ inclusive books for now. The lawsuit will still proceed in the lower court, though the justices signaled in Friday’s decision that parents would likely succeed in their claim.

Legal experts say the ruling expands religious freedom rights and breaks from previous court precedent. “The thought was that the mere exposure to ideas was not enough to trigger a religious freedom violation—it didn't amount to substantially interfering with the right of parents to educate their children,” says Cornell Law School professor Nelson Tebbe. “But here the Supreme Court takes a different approach.”

The majority opinion asserted that the government cannot “substantially interfere” with parents’ right to dictate their child’s religious upbringing. Alito pointed to the decision made in Wisconsin v. Yoder, a unanimous 1972 Supreme Court ruling in favor of Amish parents who sought exemptions from a state truancy law mandating students to attend public school until age 16 because they claimed the law violated their religious beliefs. The court found that such laws would “pressure” students “‘to conform’ to contrary viewpoints and lifestyles,” in violation with the First Amendment, Alito noted. While lower courts argued that the precedent set in that case was a “special exception” distinct from the questions at issue in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the majority said that the case embodies a general principle of protecting religious liberty.

Alito said that the use of LGBTQ+ inclusive books in the curriculum, in combination with the decision to not notify parents and allow for opt-outs, poses a similar religious infringement burden. He pointed to one of the contested books that celebrates same-sex marriage as an example. “The storybooks present same-sex weddings as occasions for great celebration and suggest that the only rubric for determining whether a marriage is acceptable is whether the individuals concerned ‘love each other,’” in contradiction with parent’s own religious beliefs, Alito wrote.

And while a lower court found that parents had not provided sufficient evidence of a religious exercise burden because they did not specify how the books are being used in classrooms, the Supreme Court said that plaintiffs don’t need to wait for damages in order to seek legal review.

Some critics have argued that the decision interferes with the job of public schools to expose students to a pluralistic society of different beliefs and ideas. “There have been these cases that are talking about how to appropriately strike the balance between respecting the fact that people with many different kinds of religious views are attending public schools, that teaching only things that everybody agrees on is not possible or even useful,” says Cathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy at the Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit advocating for LGBTQ+ rights. “Unfortunately, the opinion of the court today was that the religious beliefs of a few parents who are of different faiths that happen to share a religious belief that being LGBTQ is morally wrong … are more important than the government being able to serve the children in these schools and their families.”

What are the implications of the decision?

The decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor does not require schools to change their curricula and ban certain books, but its broadness has raised concerns that it could threaten classroom inclusivity.

“It's hard to know exactly how the court will treat future cases involving other faiths, or other parents in different factual situations,” says Tebbe, “but at least the reasoning of the case leaves open the possibility that school officials will have to deal with a wide range of claims for exemptions from aspects of the curriculum.”

Tebbe adds the Supreme Court’s ruling is part of a decade-long pattern of decisions that have skewed in favor of religious interests.

Oakley says she believes some schools may begin to reconsider inclusive curricula if they fear numerous parents will object to their children’s participation in instruction featuring a contested topic.

Former Montgomery County Board of Education member Jill Ortman-Fouse called the decision “dehumanizing” and said it would be “extremely difficult to operationalize in our schools,” in a statement to TIME.

“If teachers must get permission from all parents whenever they read a book some parents might disagree with, and find a separate space for those students and staff to teach them a different lesson, the books just won’t get read,” she says, “which is what they want—legal discrimination.”