00:00On Friday, the Supreme Court delivered an incredible victory for parental rights activists in a case called Mahmood versus Taylor centered around a case that happened where I live in Montgomery County, Maryland.
00:11I've been covering this case for two years since I accidentally drove by a protest outside of the school board in the summer of 2023 and centers around the idea that parents should have the right to opt their children out of LGBTQ books, books that are anything about gender and sexuality, not necessarily.
00:30LGBTQ. So there was a group of parents who were majority Muslim, most of them immigrants.
00:37There was also a lot of Ethiopian Christians who at the bottom of an email that they got from the school district were notified that they would no longer be allowed to opt their children out of books that they believed violated their religious rights.
00:50And so they at first they approached the school board and they said, hey, guys, this is a violation of our religious beliefs.
00:56And they were met with silence. They were totally ignored.
00:58And so then they started protesting outside of the school board meetings.
01:02Simultaneous to their decision to protest, they filed a lawsuit.
01:05They lost it at both the district level and then again at the next level.
01:09And they they appealed to the Supreme Court.
01:12And at that point, Beckett law firm decided to take their case for them and brought it to the Supreme Court.
01:17And the Supreme Court accepted the case.
01:20And oral arguments happened in April.
01:22And it was a really fascinating conversation.
01:24And even Alana Kagan said, you know, even parents who aren't religious might object to this content.
01:30But the content was objectionable on its face, religious or not.
01:34There was one book called Born Ready that focused on a transgender child.
01:39And the brother of that child said, you know, this doesn't make sense.
01:43You can't just become a boy.
01:44And the mom chided him and said, well, you know, this isn't about making sense.
01:49This is about love.
01:50Implication being, if you don't believe that someone can change their gender, you're not a loving person.
01:55Another one of the books that was actually for the kindergarten age was called Pride Puppy.
02:01These books are just not well written and not well illustrated.
02:04They're not terribly engaging.
02:06But what was really telling was at the end of the book, they had a word search.
02:10And so there were words at the back of the book.
02:13And you can look for those pictures in the book.
02:15This is for kindergarten age.
02:17Some of the words that you could search for in the book were drag king, drag queen, lace,
02:24leather, I think was in there, high heels, insulin pump.
02:28These are not topics that I think the vast, vast majority of parents of kindergarten age kids
02:34would feel comfortable with their kids learning.
02:36So now sort of after this Supreme Court decision, we're going to see how does the county handle this?
02:42And the county in their first initial email to parents and staff afterwards
02:47said that it made it more difficult for them to foster an inclusive and welcoming environment for students.
02:53It didn't.
02:54It just made it more difficult for them to promote their own agenda.
02:59But for these families who were religious, who didn't have any options because they were
03:03mostly immigrants and lower class people who didn't have the luxury of going to private
03:08school or homeschooling.
03:10And that's something that Samuel Alito, in his majority opinion, said that, you know,
03:14you can't deny people a public benefit because of their religious beliefs.
03:18And so it was on that basis that the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision voted in favor of these parents.
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