PDE Files Supreme Court Amicus Brief in Tahmer Mahmoud, ET AL., v. Thomas W. Taylor, ET AL.

Parents Defending Education is a national, nonprofit, grassroots association. Its members include many parents with school-aged children. Launched in 2021, it uses advocacy, disclosure, and litigation to combat the increasing politicization and indoctrination of K-12 education.

The bond between parent and child is “the most universal relationship in nature.” 1 Blackstone 446. Accordingly, the common law “recognized that natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.” Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584, 603 (1979). The law also recognized that from this same “impulse of nature” flowed a “natural duty” for parents to provide for their children. Of those parental responsibilities, the “duty of giving [their children] an education” was “of far the greatest importance of any.” 1 Blackstone 448-49. Moreover, “[a]s [parents] are bound to maintain and educate their children, the law has given them a right to such authority.” 2 J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law 203 (1827). PDE exists to defend that right.

PDE has a significant interest in eliminating policies that strip parents of their right to remove their children from lessons about sexuality and gender identity that conflict with their deeply held religious beliefs. Montgomery County’s policy is not an aberration. Other school districts across the country have
adopted similar parental exclusion policies in recent years, threatening to splinter the “national consensus respecting parental control over instruction on gender and sexuality.” Pet.Br.6. Like this Court, PDE believes that children are best served when their parents control their upbringing. E.g., Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65-66 (2000) (collecting cases). Affirming the Fourth Circuit’s decision would render that principle a hollow promise where education is concerned and strip parents of their right to direct their children’s development on the most sensitive, sacred—and increasingly fraught—aspects of the parent-child relationship.

Respondents here—the Montgomery County Board of Education and its officials (the “Board”)—frame this case as a garden-variety disagreement about classroom content and maintain that the questions
it presents have been asked and answered already. See Pet.App.117a. The Board claims that petitioners’ parental rights are not burdened—or even implicated—by its decision to teach gender identity theory to their young children over their objections. The Board offers a variety of reasons for this assertion, but none are convincing.

Parental rights are strongest in matters involving the religious education of children. See infra I. And
despite the Board’s best efforts, the record plainly demonstrates that the school district’s new instruction about sexuality and gender identity not only conflicts with the religious instruction Petitioners provide to their children but actively contradicts that instruction as well.

Its vigorous defense of its new curriculum notwithstanding, the Board’s primary argument appears to be that Petitioners’ concerns about the sex and gender identity-themed storybooks are overblown. It suggests that Petitioners’ young children cannot be harmed by mere “expos[ure] to different ideas” and that such exposure does not interfere with parents’ religious instruction of their children. As explained below, see infra II.A, the Board’s new lessons on “gender identity diversity and sexual identity diversity” are not unique: similar or identical storybooks—in some cases, accompanied by lesson plans that match the Board’s lessons almost verbatim—have popped up in school districts across the country in recent years. The impact of the Board’s policy has been field-tested in classrooms around the nation, with observable results. And the evidence reveals a clear pattern of confusion, anxiety, and fear expressed by the students involved, and religious students in particular.

The Board’s fallback positions fare little better. The school district asserts that parents categorically
have no right to object to materials that “professional educators” choose “to include … in the curriculum,” Pet.App.643a, and that parents surrender all rights by enrolling their children in school regardless. But no decision of this Court has ever said that, and the Court’s parental-rights decisions conclusively point in the opposite direction. Moreover, the Board cannot implicitly or explicitly condition waivers of fundamental rights on actions, like sending one’s kids to public school, that are “a virtual necessity” of life in society. Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705, 715 (1977); see infra II.B.

Affirming the Fourth Circuit’s decision will strip millions of parents of the right to control their children’s
education on sensitive issues that involve their religious beliefs and implicate the core of the parent-child relationship. This Court should reverse.