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In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority sided with parents in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case at the nexus of education, parental rights and religious freedom. At issue was whether Montgomery County Public Schools violated parents’ rights to freely exercise their religion under the First Amendment by not allowing them to have their children opt out of instruction involving LGBTQ-themed storybooks.

In three minutes, Assistant Professor of Law Jeremiah Chin lays out the case, the arguments for both sides and the court’s decision, and provides insight on how the case affects children’s own rights.

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Jeremiah Chin (JC): Hi, my name is Jeremiah Chin. I'm an assistant professor of law at the University of Â鶹ÉçÇø of Law.

Â鶹ÉçÇø Law: Can you give a brief overview of the Mahmoud v. Taylor Supreme Court case?

JC: Mahmoud v. Taylor is a case between a collective of parents in the Montgomery County Public School District in Maryland, and obviously the Montgomery County Public School District. The district integrated more diverse books into a curriculum, including books about race, about gender and sexual orientation. And this case is specifically about books that include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or other non-heteronormative sexual orientations as a part of its school curriculum for children, usually between the ages of five and 11. The parents, who are of Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic and Muslim faith, want their children to be, want to have notice when their children are being read these books, and have an opt out where they can pull their children from the classroom whenever those books are being read.

Â鶹ÉçÇø Law: What were the petitioners’ and respondents’ arguments?

JC: The petitioner parents argued that they have a right under the First Amendment, which guarantees the free exercise of religion to all persons in the United States. They were using a line of Supreme Court cases that recognize that parents have a right to control the religious upbringing of their children, going back to the early 20th century, with cases like West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnett and in the 1970s Wisconsin v. Yoder, which both featured parents attempting to include their religious beliefs in the classroom environment. The respondent school district, on the other hand, argued that they were creating an inclusive classroom environment by including textbooks and storybooks from different racial, ethnic, religious and sexual orientation and gender identities as a part of the overall school curriculum to help students understand that not only do these identities exist, but they have rights and value in and of their own as well.

Â鶹ÉçÇø Law: How did the court decide?

JC: The court decided in favor of the parents by finding that the parents right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment was unduly burdened by the state's failure to provide notice and opt out whenever these storybooks were being read. This would allow the parents not only to receive notifications on when and what day stories are being read to their children but also provide them a right to pull the child from the classroom on any given day where they have a religious objection to a storybook.

Â鶹ÉçÇø Law: What does this mean going forward, and what larger implications might this case have?

JC: This is a case that seems fairly narrow but has ridiculously broad implications, particularly given the tenor of the Supreme Court as far as religious freedom goes. This is just one in the latest of a string of religious free exercise cases that the Supreme Court has heard and dramatically expanded the conception of the Free Exercise Clause under the First Amendment, giving individuals right to almost micromanage governmental actions that they disagree with on religious grounds, whether it's requiring notice and opt out in Mahmoud v. Taylor or overturning entire public accommodations law in Colorado in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a couple of years prior. The implications for this case, in particular, are particularly haunting to me because it completely ignores and overwrites the rights of children, the actual persons of interest in the case, and doesn't recognize their right to associate, their right to express themselves or even have religious beliefs on their own, making this entirely about the parents versus the schools.