(RNS) — On Friday (June 27), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of religious parents from Maryland’s Montgomery County who sought to remove their children from classes that discussed LGBTQ-themed storybooks.
Conservative justices voted 6-3, with liberal justices dissenting, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, brought before the court in April. The lawsuit represented Muslim and Christian families who argued Montgomery County Public Schools infringed on their religious rights by barring them from opting their children out of the lessons.
While not definitive, the decision signals the justices’ inclination to see religious parents succeed in their two-year legal challenge to the school’s policy that has dominated discussions at school boards and divided county residents.
And though the decision concerns advocates of the LGBTQ+ community, the county’s religious parents celebrated what they considered a victory. The case is also one of many related to religious freedom on the court’s docket for this term, signaling a sustained interest and concern for religious liberty and expression.
The school board’s decision interfered with children’s religious development and burdened parents in the exercise of their religion, wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion.
The books, Justice Alito wrote, are “unmistakably normative,” and “designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected.”
Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, the legal group representing the religious parents, called the ruling a “historic victory for parental rights in Maryland and across America.”
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