In preparing for a Supreme Court argument on Tuesday over the role of religion in public schools, the justices and their law clerks have considered the usual pile of briefs, pleadings, declarations and exhibits.
But this time the key documents in the court record are seven colorful books for young children, with sparse text and cheerful illustrations. They include “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost at a Pride parade; “Love, Violet,” about a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate; “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a same-sex union; and “Born Ready,” about a transgender boy.
Those books are at the center of the case, which asks whether parents’ rights to the free exercise of their faiths are burdened if public schools do not allow them to withdraw their children from classes on days that books with gay and transgender characters and themes are discussed.
Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, added the books in 2022 to the curriculum for students from prekindergarten through fifth grade. The school system’s list included, its lawyers told the justices, “a handful of storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters for use in the language-arts curriculum, alongside the many books already in the curriculum that feature heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles.”
At first, the Montgomery school system gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused from those sessions. But the school system soon eliminated the advanced notice and opt-out policy, saying it was hard to administer, led to absenteeism and risked “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.”
Parents of several faiths sued, saying the books violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion. The books, their complaint said, “promote one-sided transgender ideology, encourage gender transitioning and focus excessively on romantic infatuation.”
The parents said they did not seek to remove the books from school libraries and classrooms but only to shield their children from having to discuss them. (The school system has since withdrawn two of the seven books, including “Pride Puppy.” In court papers, officials said the books had been re-evaluated under standard procedures but did not elaborate.)
Billy Moges, a member of Kids First, an association of parents and teachers that is a plaintiff in the case, said in an interview that the books were “teaching things that are exactly in contradiction with what we believe in.”
“It steals their innocence,” she said of the impact the books have on children. “It destroys the foundation that they have, the structure of who they are, in God and in our faith. And it just makes absolutely no sense. It just defies common sense.”
Ms. Moges said she has withdrawn her three young children from public schools and has sent them to a private one she helped found that would, she said, “not brainwash kids with these ideas.”
Still, she said, “I want to send my kids back to Montgomery County schools because we don’t have the resources that they do.”
Jodie Patterson, the author of “Born Ready,” said she was flummoxed by the controversy. “My initial reaction was, ‘My little book? How is that harming anyone?’”
Her book, about a transgender boy who wins a karate tournament with the support of his family and a school principal, was well received when it was published in 2021. Kirkus Reviews said it “shines with joy and affirmation” and amounted to “a triumphant declaration of love and identity.”
On reflection, she said she felt the parents’ objections amounted to erasing the experiences of some families. “When certain religions and certain religious people say, ‘This is not appropriate for my religion,’” she said, “it’s problematic.”
“Not because I don’t want to respect people’s religions,” she went on, “but because reading stories about children who are different is fundamental.”
In recent cases, the Supreme Court has expanded the role of religion in public life, sometimes at the expense of other values like gay rights.
The court has ruled in favor of a web designer who said she did not want to create sites for same-sex marriages, a high school football coach who said he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games and a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia that said it could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who had applied to take in foster children.
Some legal scholars said that accepting the logic of the Maryland parents’ arguments would have broad consequences for the ability of public schools to manage their curriculums, citing cases in which parents unsuccessfully challenged course materials on evolution and the Big Bang theory and storybooks about wizards and giants.
“The First Amendment does not shield public school students from the mere exposure to ideas that conflict with their personal views, whether secular or religious,” Justin Driver of Yale Law School and Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University wrote in a brief supporting the school system.
The school system does allow parents to withdraw older students from sex education classes for any reason. Lawyers for the parents said that differing treatment by the school board was telling.
“The board designed a regime where there was no notice or opt-outs only for discussions involving these storybooks — an area of curriculum that it knew was laden with religious import,” their brief said.
The Supreme Court has in recent years been exceptionally wary of treating religion exemptions differently from secular ones. “The Supreme Court has adopted a very expansive notion of religious inequality,” said Zalman Rothschild, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
Lower courts have ruled against the parents.
“There’s no evidence at present that the board’s decision not to permit opt-outs compels the parents or their children to change their religious beliefs or conduct, either at school or elsewhere,” Judge G. Steven Agee wrote for the majority of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Judge Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, added that “simply hearing about other views does not necessarily exert pressure to believe or act differently than one’s religious faith requires.”
In dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., who was appointed by President Trump, said the parents had made a modest request.
“They do not claim the use of the books is itself unconstitutional,” he wrote. “And they do not seek to ban them. Instead, they only want to opt their children out of the instruction involving such texts.”
The school board, in its Supreme Court brief in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297, wrote that the dispute was based on a misunderstanding about what lessons students are intended to draw from the books.
“The storybooks themselves do not instruct about gender or sexuality,” the brief said. “They are not textbooks. They merely introduce students to characters who are L.G.B.T.Q. or have L.G.B.T.Q. family members, and those characters’ experiences and points of view.”
The books supplement rather than replace other children’s stories like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Goldilocks, which, the brief noted, also depict families, communities and relationships.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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