Conservative Ohio advocacy group urges U.S. Supreme Court to allow opt-outs against LGBTQ+ materials
An Ohio conservative advocacy group gave their two cents in a U.S. Supreme Court case that will decide whether parents can claim religious protections in opting for their children not to learn lessons if they include LGBTQ+ themes.
The Protect Ohio Children Coalition joined other similar groups from California, Colorado, Nebraska, and Texas in a brief urging the court to allow parents to opt children out of certain instruction at schools that may include mention of gender or sexuality.
In the case originally out of Maryland, the Supreme Court will decide whether parents’ religious rights are violated if elementary school students are required to participate in gender and sexuality education in public schools, including “pride storybooks and other specified controversial texts.”
The storybooks at issue were LGBTQ+ inclusive books, approved by the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board to be used as part of the English Language Arts curriculum. The parents who sued in the original case claimed the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment would be violated if “individualized opt-outs from all potential uses of the storybooks within the Language Arts curriculum, as well as all discussions that may arise related to their use” were not allowed, according to documents in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals case that led to the Supreme Court appeal.
The Maryland school district said the books were part of an effort to include materials that “better represent” the students and families, including historical figures from “a range of cultural, racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds,” and the books were “made available for individual reading, classroom read-aloud and other educational activities designed to foster and enhance literacy skills.”
“Like all other books in the language-arts curriculum, these storybooks impart critical reading skills through engaging, age-appropriate stories,” representatives for the district wrote to the Supreme Court.
The Ohio group and other state organizations argued to the court in their brief that the case is not attempting to make “broad changes in a school’s curriculum,” instead the issue is a “pure opt-out case.”
“The parents merely do not want their own children to be subjected to what they view as attempted indoctrination,” the organizations stated.
In the brief, the groups told the court the existence of opt-out provisions “should be seen as a welcome development for courts across the country that are tasked with resolving these thorny issues.”
They cite cases dating all the way back to 1925 in arguing that allowing the parents to opt-out of instruction “follows a long history of decisions in which this court has confirmed parents’ rights to have their children removed from aspects of public education, particularly where it conflicts with their religious convictions.”
Cases cited included a 1925 case in which children in religious schools were exempted from attending public schools, a 1943 case in which a child who was Jehovah’s Witness was excused from a school board regulation requiring a salute to the flag and recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and a 1972 case in which Amish children were released from the obligation of attending high school.
“The Constitutional history and tradition that grew out of these cases … led to and informed the growth of the opt-out/opt-in statutes that swept the nation during the rise of the sex-ed era,” the groups told the Supreme Court.
Parental opt-outs were a “popular movement for parents’ rights to protect their children from what they considered to be pernicious, contra-religious teaching, usually on sexual topics,” according to the brief.
Ohio has such a rule in current state law, stating that education on sexually transmitted infections; child sexual abuse prevention and personal safety and assault prevention in kindergarten through 6th grades; and dating violence prevention and sexual violence prevention in grades 7 through 12 are all required lessons in a school curriculum, “except that upon written request of the student’s parent or guardian, a student shall be excused from taking instruction” in those subjects.
Parents are also already allowed under Ohio law to examine instruction materials in those areas.
The Protect Ohio Children Coalition is an organization that has set its focus on monitoring school boards and districts for “indoctrination,” standing against education methods such as comprehensive sexuality education, social and emotional learning and “critical race theory,” a phrase often misused by opponents to represent teaching students about the history of race and racism in America.
“POCC is grounded in Judeo-Christian beliefs and promotes the use of opt-outs in school-based, sexual-education controversies,” the group said in the brief to the Supreme Court.
The coalition supported a “Parents Bill of Rights” measure that requires Ohio educators to notify parents of the sexuality of their students, and allows parents to request other instruction if they don’t want students learning about “sexuality content.” The bill was inserted into another bill regarding religious release time during the school day, and was one of several anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed in the last Ohio General Assembly.
Oral arguments in the Supreme Court case are set for April 22.
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