Amicus Brief: Mahmoud v. Taylor

The Montgomery County (Maryland) Board of Education once promised parents that they could opt their students out of 20 new “inclusivity” books that were planned for teaching pre–K through eighth graders. Instead of basic civility and kindness, these books champion pride parades, gender transitioning, and pronoun preferences for children. One book tasks three- and four-year-olds with searching for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “[drag] queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker. Another encourages fifth graders to discuss what it means to be “non-binary.” Other books advocate a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, telling students that a decision to transition doesn’t have to “make sense” and that doctors only “guess” when identifying a newborn’s sex anyway.

But in 2023, the board issued a statement saying it would no longer honor requests to opt out of these books or even notify parents of their use in school curricula. Soon after, a diverse coalition of religious parents—including Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and others—began to speak out against these age-inappropriate, harmful, and anti-religious books. They eventually sued the board in federal court for violations of religious and broader parental rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that there was no burden on religious exercise because there was “no evidence at present” that the plaintiffs were “compel[led] . . . to change their religious beliefs or conduct” or “what they teach their own children,” nor were they “asked to affirm views contrary to their own” or to “change how they feel about” gender and sexuality. With the case now before the Supreme Court, the Manhattan Institute has filed a brief on behalf of seven psychologists describing the impressionability of young students and the potential for this type of book to undermine parental instruction.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

Tim Rosenberger is a legal fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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