SCOTUS Says Parents Can Follow Their Faith
Supreme Court Ruling Means Parents Can Follow Their Faith in
Raising Children
Thomas Jipping | Daniel Davidson | June 27, 2025
**WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: U.S. Supreme Court Associate
Justices Samuel Alito (L) and Clarence Thomas wait for their oppor-
tunity to leave the stage at the conclusion of the inauguration
ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025
in Washington, DC. Donald Trump took the oath of office for his
second term as the 47th president of the United States.
In one of its final decisions this term, the Supreme Court has
affirmed the right of religious parents to follow their faith in
making decisions about their children’s public school education.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court sided with parents who asked
that they be notified and given the chance to opt their children
out of instruction that violates their faith on matters of
sexuality.
The case originated in Montgomery County, Maryland, where the
school board requires certain pro-LGBTQ+ storybooks to be incorpo-
rated in the English language arts curriculum for all students,
including those as young as 5. The board had millions of books to
choose from, but it picked these books specifically to influence
students’ thinking about sexuality and to challenge parents’ tra-
ditional views.
How do we know? The board told teachers so, and it even de-
scribed ways for them to accomplish these goals.
The pushback predictably included parents, but teachers and
administrators also balked, questioning the efficacy and age
-appropriateness of this scheme.
Initially, the board said that parents would be notified when
this controversial material would be used and allowed to opt their
children out.
Like most school districts, Montgomery County provides for
parents to opt their kids out of all sorts of things, including the
use of sex education curriculum.
Then, without explanation, the board abruptly canceled this
accommodation policy and took the opposite position—making partici-
pation in pro-LGBTQ+ instruction mandatory for even the youngest
students and telling teachers not to notify parents at all.
With the Justice Department’s support, a group of religious
parents sued. Their particular faiths differed, but they agreed
that exercising that faith included guiding their children in
matters of sexuality. By not only blocking them from doing so, but
also imposing its own sexual ideology, they said, the school board
violated their First Amendment right to exercise religion.
The parents said they would likely prevail on the merits and,
therefore, asked for a preliminary injunction ordering that they be
notified and allowed to opt out in the meantime.
The district and appeals courts denied their request by
utilizing a very narrow concept of what burdens religious exercise.
Nothing short of the government compelling someone to abandon their
religious beliefs, they said, can burden the exercise of religion
—a standard that reduces the “exercise” of religion to little more
than private religious beliefs or perhaps formal religious worship.
The First Amendment prohibits an “establishment of religion”
and protects the “free exercise” of religion. The Constitution’s
framers thought of religious establishment narrowly and religious
exercise broadly.
Now, though, judges have turned the First Amendment on its
head. They see religious establishments that do not exist and, as
the lower courts did in this case, ignore the very real ways in
which the government interferes with religious practice.
In a 6-3 vote Friday, the Supreme Court reversed the lower
courts and granted the parents a preliminary injunction. Writing
for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito explained that the right to
exercise religion includes the parents’ right to direct the reli-
gious instruction of their children. Putting parents on the side-
lines while schools impose their own sexual ideology on students
obviously interferes with that right.
As Alito explained, “the Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+
inclusive’ storybooks—combined with its decision to withhold
notice to parents and forbid opt outs—substantially interferes
with the religious development of their children.”
Many parents have no choice but to send their children to a
public school, a decision that should not require them to surrender
their constitutional right. The bottom line, Alito wrote, is that
“government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it re-
quires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a
very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and prac-
tices that the parents wish to instill.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena
Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, distorted the parents’ position
the same way the lower courts did. She mischaracterized them as
demanding notice and an opt-out “of every lesson plan or story time
that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs.”
The parents never took that position. Instead, they objected
to instruction that poses a “very real threat of undermining” those
beliefs and the parents’ right to direct their children’s religious
instruction.
The fact is, as Alito pointed out, these materials are
“unmistakenly normative,” designed to promote certain values and
beliefs and to discourage others regarding sexuality and gender.
The threat to parents’ ability to guide their children’s instruction
on such sensitive matters is obvious.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court has never adopted the narrow,
crabbed view of religious freedom that the lower courts and
Sotomayor did in this case. The First Amendment, Alito wrote, is
not as “feeble” as Sotomayor claims. It protects us against much
more than compulsion to abandon our religious beliefs.
The Constitution gives parents a general right to direct their
children’s upbringing and education and, separately, a specific
right to exercise religion. This case arose where those rights
intersect, and the Supreme Court’s decision strengthens both of
them.**
God's Word is what our laws are based. God is the source of
all that is moral and ethical in America.
There will be a price to pay to those who pervert God's
Commandments both here and in eternity.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 