Imagine the following scenario: A Louisiana school district introduces a “family life” curriculum for public preschools and elementary schools in which all students are required to participate—no parental opt-outs allowed. The curriculum—while not explicitly religious or sectarian—mandates that students read storybooks and be taught lessons promoting historical and traditional conceptions of sexuality, marriage, and family, with materials becoming more advanced each year.
The pre-K book is an alphabet storybook about a family whose dog gets loose as they attend a march in support of the traditional view of marriage as the permanent and exclusive union of one man and one woman. As the dog makes his way around the rally, he learns the alphabet from march attendees: C is for Chastity, F is for Fidelity, and M is for Monogamy. The third-grade book is about a brave statesman whose evil king punishes him for his principled refusal to celebrate the king’s decision to divorce the queen and marry another woman; the fifth-grade book features a boy who, after peer pressure, starts to think he might be a girl—but who, with the support of his parents, eventually realizes that his male sex is an innate and unchangeable part of who he is.
Local progressive parents sue the school district, arguing that the curriculum is itself unconstitutional because it represents “indoctrination into Christian morality”—but they also argue that even if the curriculum is not unconstitutional, the district’s decision to prohibit opt-outs violates their parental rights over their children.
The first argument is a loser. Governments have both the right and duty to craft public policy based on substantive conceptions of morality and the human good, and the notion of morally neutral public education is in any case an utter fiction. But the second argument is persuasive—and seems to be what anyone who affirms the natural right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children would inescapably conclude. Parents’ fundamental rights over their children subsist even in situations in which we strongly disagree with the content of what a parent is teaching a child.
The question for the committed progressive, then, becomes one of principle. Obviously, the progressive has significant normatively derived objections to the Louisiana school district’s curriculum. In a similar vein, committed social conservatives (be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or of any other faith or system of belief) had significant normatively derived objections to the overtly ideological pro-LGBTQ curriculum that the public school district of Montgomery County, Maryland, attempted to impose on students. Mercifully, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that Montgomery County violated the Constitution by seeking to prohibit parents from opting their six-year-old kids out of lessons and storybook readings promoting concepts like transgenderism, same-sex marriage, and Pride parades.
We can dispatch as frivolous—and, indeed, laughable—claims that the curriculum in question in Mahmoud was merely promoting “neutrality” and “tolerance,” rather than a contestable and contested substantive moral view. If a book teaching that L is for Leather and Q is for Drag Queen is not ideologically infused, then neither is a book teaching that C is for Chastity and M is for Monogamy. Of course, no one on the left believes that.
But while the Court’s judgment in Mahmoud primarily hinged on the question of whether the ban on opt-outs unconstitutionally burdened the parental plaintiffs’ religious exercise, the broader principle of parental rights applies to everyone—religious and non-religious parents, conservatives and progressives, alike. So, while the curriculum I described in the hypothetical Louisiana scenario would both accurately reflect moral truth and be constitutionally permissible, progressive parents must be able to opt their children out of participating in it—just as conservative parents, even setting aside the religious exercise question, merited opt-outs in Montgomery County.
Weighing Mahmoud and the Louisiana hypothetical, there are only three available positions for one to adopt: Require that parental opt-outs be available for the traditional curriculum, but not the pro-LGBTQ one; require opt-outs to be available for the pro-LGBTQ curriculum, but not the traditional one; or require that opt-outs be available for both.
Of course, there is only one ideologically impartial and principled position. Can progressives get behind it? If so, then there is no reason for progressive pearl-clutching and handwringing over the concrete implications of the Mahmoud ruling. The resources are present in both the moral order and our constitutional tradition for the robust protection of the fundamental right of parents to direct the moral and religious formation of their children. Parental rights for social conservatives means parental rights for progressives, too. Parental rights are for all parents—equally.
