Christian and Muslim Parents Win the Right to Opt Out of LGBT Education
July 16th, 2025
In June of 2025, Christian and Muslim parents scored a victory in the US Supreme Court, winning the right to pull their children out of education involving LGBTQ+ themes. The case represents an example of two distinct faiths working together to achieve a shared goal, and it highlights the fact that conservative views on sexuality and gender still generally prevail at the Supreme Court. What does this Supreme Court ruling tell us about the state of religious freedoms in the United States?
Maryland Parents Push to Opt Out of Instructional Materials with LGBT Characters
With a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision that disallowed parents to opt their children out being exposed to books with LGBTQ+ characters. Initially, parents argued that they should have the right to control the themes and ideas their children experience in school, mostly on religious grounds. Citing the First Amendment, these parents argued that they should be able to freely exercise their religious rights as to how their children are instructed.
The case stems from a 2022 decision by the Montgomery County school board that approved select stories featuring LGBTQ+ characters. The board argued that exposure to these stories was necessary to help children adapt to a diverse range of families in the country, including families at the schools in question. This is an idea that one of the dissenting Supreme Court justices echoed, arguing, “That experience is critical to our Nation’s civil vitality.”
The justices in the majority argued that when a government forces parents to submit their children to these teachings, it conflicts with the religious values the parents are trying to instill in their children.
Why Did the School Board Make These Teachings Mandatory?
The school board claims that it made stories with LGBTQ+ characters mandatory out of logistical necessity, and not for ideological reasons. According to board representatives, numerous parents began opting their children out of these sessions. By 2023, so many parents had opted out that any storybook sessions seemed untenable. The children who remained in the storybook sessions risked ostracization and bullying from their peers, according to the school board.
While this argument might seem logical and unbiased, the truth is that it still rests on an ideological foundation that exposure to the diversity present in both the school district and the country at large is a common good for creating a multicultural, tolerant society. However, while the lessons helped children learn English, there was no academic reason for them to include LGBTQ+ characters other than to represent this diversity. If a parent requested to opt out of math class for religious reasons, this would obviously raise more eyebrows. But opting out of an English class with books that depict LGBTQ+ characters is a better argument to make, since the theme itself serves no academic purpose other than to exposure children to diversity.
At the end of the day, this case pit religious parents’ rights to instruct their children regarding LGBTQ+ people versus the rights of students and parents in the school district to better have their own identities and families reflected in the curriculum in order to create a multicultural, pluralistic democracy. However, if one has been following any of the recent Supreme Court cases regarding the rights of religious conservatives to exempt themselves from otherwise established precedents of non-discrimination law, the school district stood no chance. In other words, this was a fairly open-and-shut case for the conservative Christians that make up a majority of the Supreme Court.
Continue Reading the Universal Life Church’s Blog
After its 2015 Obergefell ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, the United States Supreme Court gained several new conservative justices. As a result, many people fear that the Court will revisit LGBTQ+ issues it has already ruled on and issue new rulings curtailing LGBTQ+ rights. The Universal Life Church’s blog focuses on documenting the most noteworthy LGBTQ+ cases. We strive to do so in a way that objectively examines both sides and can easily be understood by readers.
