WASHINGTON, D.C., June 27, 2025 – The Supreme Court has issued its opinion in Mahmoud v. Taylor, ruling 6-3 that parents can opt their children out of any lessons or instructional materials schools offer that they feel conflict with their religious beliefs or practices. This case focused on books with LGBTQ+ characters and content, which the conservatives on the Court falsely portrayed as sexual in nature. The ruling will create administrative burdens for schools and open the door for families to try to restrict other aspects of the curriculum as well.
Justice Alito writes for the majority, and his well-documented bigotry against LGBTQ+ people is on display as loudly as ever. Learning that LGBTQ+ people exist in society, he believes, poses a very real threat of undermining the beliefs of those who would reject them. His distortion of the children’s books in question reflects this deeply rooted bias, such as his objection to the applause that Prince & Knight receive at their wedding, because this connotates that such a union is “a good thing.” Acknowledging the very existence of a right the Court has protected for ten years, he writes, is “hostile” to the parents’ religious beliefs. He is unconcerned by how LGBTQ+ students might feel stigmatized by this result, because he believes the students who are taught to reject them would face stigma in return.
Justice Sotomayor spends much of her dissent providing context for Alito’s distortions of the books, complete with an appendix full of images from them. She also warns that this ruling will have a chilling effect on schools overall, because in order to avoid the costs of litigation from any number of new parental lawsuits, they will be incentivized to self-censor their curricula to avoid creating religious objections. “The Court’s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards,” she writes.
Alliance for Justice President Rachel Rossi issued the following statement:
“Education is under attack in this nation and this decision will only exacerbate the problem. The existence of LGBTQ+ people is a fact — not a belief — as are so many of the important lessons of the world we should expect our students to learn in school. We cannot claim to be an educated society if kids can be prevented from learning anything their parents don’t want them to know about the world. We can’t ignore that this ruling will harm LGBTQ+ students and those with LGBTQ+ family members who will see their peers ‘opt out’ of recognizing their existence. Under the guise of protecting religious beliefs, the court has established a new precedent that will no doubt be weaponized to advance discrimination and censorship in our school system. The Court’s conservative majority seems set on finding new ways to make our society less equal and less safe for all people, and we must respond in turn with vigilance to protect our progress.”