The Supreme Court, LGBTQ+ indoctrination, and switching the story

The Supreme Court, on June 27th, upheld the right of parents to remove their children from gender-laden indoctrination in public schools. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled 6-3 that Montgomery County, Maryland, violated the rights of parents of children from preschool through grade 5 by denying them opt-outs from mandatory teaching and book readings promoting a gender ideology agenda.

Deferring to the lawyers to analyze the details of the Court’s reasoning and how robust Mahmoud is in the light of the Magna Carta of parental rights, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, my first response is to comment on the reactions to the decision. I call it trying to “switch the ‘story.’” I will look at three examples.

First, the ruling itself. The 135 pages of opinions (majority ruling, dissent) are unusual in that I would call it the “battle of the storybooks.” Rarely does one see pictures in Supreme Court opinions. But Mahmoud v. Taylor’s got pictures, pictures of pages from children’s storybooks: 10 for the majority opinion, 26 for the dissent.

As “a picture is worth a thousand words,” each side picked pictures likely to elicit visceral reactions to support the opinion in which they are inserted. The ten in the majority opinion are all intended to show unvarnished approval of same-sex “marriage.” The 26 inserted in the dissent are mostly bland vanilla about “love,” trying to suggest the case is much ado about nothing (except, maybe, for some kind of phobic religious zealots trying to impose their views on Maryland kids).

Yes, these books are pretty simple: after all, we’re talking about children aged four to maybe ten—a very impressionable phase of life. And that is when Montgomery County decided it has a “right” to “co-parent” with real mothers and fathers in the values to which impressionable young minds are exposed.

If we want to be honest about the vulgarity of these gender ideology curricula, consider that books on lists in other school districts for older children attacked by parents there were defended by Senate Democrats as opposition to “book bans.” Now watch this video. It features Louisiana Senator John Kennedy reading excerpts from one of the books being defended. Listen to how much of Kennedy’s reading is bleeped out because its content is deemed inappropriate in public media. I remember a similar video last year of a parent reading excerpts to a local school board from a similar book being defended by some members opposed to “book bans.” That board shut the parent down from reading the book aloud in an open meeting because its content was deemed inappropriate to a general audience.

Inappropriate to a general audience but fitting for children confined to the public school plantation?

Second, Democrats. “Senate Judiciary Democrats” is the public X feed of the minority members of the U.S. Senate committee responsible for courts and constitutional rights. Illinois Catholic Senator Dick Durbin, as ranking minority member, is the face of the feed. It tweeted two attacks on the ruling. One was the usual accusation: Mahmoud “allows for LGBTQ+ discrimination in public schools” while being a “loss for freedom of speech, public education, and LGBTQ+ rights.”

But the tweet that interested me was short and pithy: “LGBTQ+ stories matter—no matter what the Supreme Court says” (emphasis added). Their spin was that the stories gender ideologues tell must be heard by your children … even if you and the United States Supreme Court disagree.

Third, religious gender activists. Not to be outdone by the judges and politicians, Jesuit priest James Martin likewise assures us of the importance of “stories.” “Allowing people to exempt their children from hearing stories, even fictional ones, with LGBTQ people, can prevent them from the kind of deep learning needed to build empathy with those from different backgrounds, a key step in the development of a moral life” insists the New York Jesuit. Exempting them for allegedly religious reasons is to misunderstand another “story,” the parable of the Good Samaritan, where “religious reasons” were used to waive two of the sojourners’ obligations towards the hurting victim. Our failure to tell (or hear) these gender ideology stories impedes people (including children) from “get[ting] to know them as our brothers and sisters. And our friends.”

For Fr. Martin, the plaintiff parents are not just wrong but guilty–probably invincibly, but maybe not–of bad parenting.

As is often the case, the interests that lost in Mahmoud sought to redefine the narrative, to “rewrite the story.” They know that children in the age group that Montgomery County demanded sit through this indoctrination are highly impressionable, which the Court majority also admit. They know that the message being sent is one of approval of these lifestyles. As Justice Alito wrote in the Opinion of the Court (p. 7):

… if a parent were to ask whether the school was attempting to teach a child to “reject” the values taught at home, teachers were encouraged to respond that “[t]eaching about LGBTQ+ is not about making students think a certain way; it is to show that there is no one “right” or “normal” way to be.

If that’s not approval (or undermining of parents) via the dictatorship of relativism, it’s hard to imagine what would be. It’s clear: if parents tell their single-digit-aged child there is a “’right’ …way to be,” Montgomery County has decided to tell that child that mommy or daddy is wrong.

What is particularly invidious is saying that what parents teach is wrong, through the highly effective use of stories fed to minds lacking the capacity for critical reason, respecting authority figures like teachers, and using that respect to pit the child’s most important and loving authority figures against other ones precisely to erode that parental primacy.

The Supreme Court was having none of that. One would likewise suspect neither would Christ—and that He might find a deficit of millstones for those deliberately corrupting children while feigning their studied and neutral, innocent benevolence.

Justice Sotomayor revisited this issue more directly in her dissent. To her, it is the usual “education as ‘partner’ to parents” shtick. According to that paradigm, public education is essential to inculcating the values of living in a pluralistic, democratic society that the parochial perspectives of parents (especially those “clinging” to religion) might omit. In that mindset, the public school exists to liberate the child from parental blinders to expose (inculcate) him with the “values” of that society.

It’s the same bit that every “we know better than parents” proponent invokes to bludgeon parental rights. Oregon nativists in 1925 were going to save youngsters from the Romish immigrant parents by rescuing them from parochial education. Maryland gender ideologues in 2025 were going to protect youngsters from X-phobic parents (some of whom were immigrants) by exposing preschoolers to two husbands.

Montgomery County may have lost, but the proponents of gender ideology will no doubt come back to fight another day. Expect them to do so with slogans of “book bans” for older kids and “partnering with parents” for toddlers and tweenies. It’s no coincidence to note that the same day Mahmoud came down, it also upheld (Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, same 6-3 split) Texas’s requirement that pornographic websites verify users were at least eighteen years old. The plaintiff’s arguments in Paxton were classic obscenity defenses: pornography is in the eye of the beholder and impossible to define, so don’t abridge potential access in the name of free speech. Within hours, The New York Times published an op-ed praising the value of internet pornography.

My favorite response to the tall tales being told by the Court’s minority, many Democrats, and religious shills for gender ideology is to demand these stories be told … out loud, in public. Because, after having listened to an excerpt from some books being defended for young people read aloud in a school board meeting—content that would have largely been bleeped out like Senator Kennedy’s public reading—the local mayor was unambiguous: either get these “stories” out of school or he would file charges against the Board under his state’s distribution of obscenity to minors statutes.