On Friday, the Supreme Court gave bigoted parents their biggest legal gift of the Trump era. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court ruled that parents can opt their children out of public school education that doesn’t comport with their religious hangups. The vote was 6–3, and broke along the usual bigot vs. liberal lines
There was a time in this country when such threadbare legal arguments would fail in a court of law—and these parents did, in fact, lose when their case went before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. But we live in a theocracy run by the six unelected law priests at the Supreme Court. Writing for the majority, Sam Alito found that the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion allows these religious parents to change the public school curriculum for their children. He ruled that parents are entitled to be notified in advance about any text that might offend their religious sensibilities, and that after receiving such notice, they must be allowed to pull their kids out of the lesson.
The practical result will be that schools will be far less likely to include any picture book where LGBTQ people exist, because it is a giant pain in the ass. Montgomery County allowed parents to opt out in the past, and found the situation unworkable. It’s possible that the school district will stay committed to inclusive teachings, but it’s hardly likely.
Alito’s opinion is flatly homophobic. There is no other way to put it. Alito is hysterically concerned about pronouns, repeatedly uses “scare quotes” around the acronym LGBTQ+, and consistently mischaracterizes the books at issue. As part of his supporting evidence, Alito includes pictures from the books in his opinion—pictures that, to the normal eye, merely show LGBTQ people existing. But Alito includes them as evidence of the deeply subversive nature of these books.
Here’s how Alito describes Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a story about a man who gets married to another man as told through the eyes of his niece:
The atmosphere is jubilant after Uncle Bobby and his boyfriend announce their engagement. (“Everyone was smiling and talking and crying and laughing” (emphasis added)). The book’s main character, Chloe, does not share this excitement. “‘I don’t understand!’” she exclaims, “‘Why is Uncle Bobby getting married?’” The book is coy about the precise reason for Chloe’s question, but the question is used to tee up a direct message to young readers: “‘Bobby and Jamie love each other,’ said Mummy. ‘When grown-up people love each other that much, sometimes they get married.’” The book therefore presents a specific, if subtle, message about marriage. It asserts that two people can get married, regardless of whether they are of the same or the opposite sex, so long as they “‘love each other.’”
This seems like a good time to point out that the law of the land and the precedents of Alito’s own court affirm the message of the book: that two people can get married so long as they “love each other,” even if the idea makes Alito foam at the mouth like a caveman with rabies. At least that’s the law until a future term when the bigots on the Supreme Court take that away too.
To be clear, the book is not coy about why Chloe is worried. She thinks that by getting married, Uncle Bobby will have less time to play with her. That is the plotline in, roughly, eleventy-billion children’s books. It is the plot in every children’s story about remarriage after death or divorce. It’s the plot in every children’s story about the introduction of a new sibling. Sometimes you see the plot when a dog gets jealous about the family’s new baby, or pet. It’s, more or less, the plot of the entire billion-dollar Toy Story franchise. Getting replaced when adults make new connections is a universal fear of children. Helping them conquer that fear has proven to be great fodder for children’s stories.
Alito is the one being “coy.” He’s trying to suggest that Chloe shares his bigoted, retrograde views on gay marriage, without remembering that children are not born broken and curdled like Alito is. Chloe doesn’t care that Uncle Bobby is gay; Alito does. And that’s why Alito thinks the book can be drummed out of public schools. He gets to the heart of his point here:
The book’s narrative arc reaches its peak with the actual event of Uncle Bobby’s wedding, which is presented as a joyous event that is met with universal approval. And again, there are many Americans who would view the event that way, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. But other Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.
Yes, Sam, the book presents a gay wedding as something to be universally approved. The point of the book is to reinforce the message, at a very young age, that being an evil bigot is not cool. How I wish someone would have read Uncle Bobby’s Wedding to Sam Alito when he was a young child. The entire country might have been saved from his unhinged bile.
That system is completely unworkable. It would lead to a retrograde Christian parent objecting to a book that depicts an unmarried woman… having a job and owning property. Alito would probably agree to such an objection. But would he agree to a fundamentalist Muslim parent objecting to a book depicting a married woman uncovering her hair in public? Would he agree to a Jewish parent objecting to a book depicting a person eating a cheeseburger to “universal approval”? Would he agree to me objecting to the inclusion of the US Constitution at story time, since slavery and white male supremacy are incompatible with my spiritual beliefs?
Perhaps the most dangerous part of Alito’s opinion is that he essentially declares all public schools must act like religious schools, because the cost of religious education is too high for some parents. He writes:
Private elementary schools in Montgomery County are expensive; many cost $10,000 or more per year prior to financial aid. And homeschooling comes with a hefty price as well; it requires at least one parent to stay at home during the normal workday to educate children, thereby forgoing additional income opportunities. It is both insulting and legally unsound to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faiths, when alternatives can be prohibitively expensive and they already contribute to financing the public schools.
This paragraph quite simply redefines the nature of public education in this country. Public schools are supposed to be good for everybody, including people who don’t want God in their schools, precisely because they’re free (after a fashion… just imagine I’ve written a 2,000-word tangent here about property taxes and the way public schools ensconce wealth disparity). Alito reforms that idea to say that, because they’re free, public schools must now give religious parents all the benefits of private education, including support for their bigotry.
I’ve written before that the cultural solution for the parents in Mahmoud is… homeschool; homeschool is where you go when you don’t want your children to be taught by society. When you do cede your parental right to teach your kids only what you want them to learn, then you should be forced to accept that they’ll learn some things that you disagree with. I do not homeschool my children. That means that my kids are subjected to the racism of the white man. It’s not ideal. But I can’t run to court and sue every time the school tells my kid that slaver-rapist Thomas Jefferson was a “great American.”
That’s an obvious legal principle, and an uncontroversial one, unless you hate gay people. But for Alito and his Republican friends on the court, their animus toward the LGBTQ community has led them to try to change the very nature of public education.
It’s a terrible decision. But we live in terrible times.
By Elie Mystal