SCOTUS to Schools: You Don’t Own Our Kids, Freaks

It’s not all bad news from the Supreme Court this week. On Tuesday, ScotusBlog published a story headlined, “Supreme Court likely to rule for parental opt-out on LGBTQ books in schools.” By likely, ScotusBlog meant they tore the school board’s drag queens a new lower access point.

 
The above shows two pages from one of the textbooks involved in the lawsuit. It teaches kindergartners, “My pronouns are like the weather; they change depending on how I feel.” That’s confusing enough, but when you add that they are telling kids they can also swap body parts depending on how they feel, things get really cuckoo.

A group of Maryland public school parents weren’t okay with that. So they sued for the right to opt out their elementary-school-aged children from any instruction including such baffling and revolting LGBTQ+ themes. The Washington, DC-area school board refused to let them opt out, of course, and the parents claimed it violated their religious beliefs.

The case was a political powderkeg. The surprising lack of media coverage speaks volumes to where the culture is headed. (Activists held a twisted drag show outside the Supreme Courthouse during the arguments, which persuaded nobody, but spiked sales of eye bleach.)

The plaintiff parents were religiously diverse. They included Muslims, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Roman Catholics. The lower courts all sided with the school board. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals sneered that “the parents had not demonstrated that exposing their children to the storybooks compelled the parents to violate their religion.”

This time though, we have good Supreme Court news. During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral argument, a majority of the justices seemed clearly to agree with the parents, and several justices even wondered aloud: what’s the harm in simply letting parents excuse their children from the objectionble instruction?

Haha, the school board’s lawyer was hamstrung. He couldn’t afford to admit what the real harm was. The real harm the schools are afraid of is, in order to give parents an opt-out from the lessons, the schools will have to tell them the lessons are happening in the first place. I’ll bet $50 that 90% of Maryland parents have no idea what kind of gross stuff the teachers are spoon-feeding their kids. By “LGBTQ+ books,” they mean pornographic smut with erotic overtones.

CLIP: Laura Ingraham’s piece on the Oral Arguments including mashup (8:30).

Anyway, since the schools’ lawyer couldn’t say that an opt-out would force schools to give away their gross little sex secrets, he had to dissemble and obfuscate, leaving the judges wondering what the heck the argument was even about. If the parents simply want to have their children excused from instruction using these storybooks, Justice Alito asked, “what is the big deal about allowing them to opt out?”

Were I there, I would have added that we’ve already found it constitutional for parents to opt out of public schools entirely and become homeschoolers. Why should letting parents opt out of parts of public school not also be constitutional? The whole, after all, is just the sum of the parts, and so forth.

The conservative majority seemed intensely skeptical of the school board’s argument that mere exposure to school materials does not compel someone to violate their religious beliefs. Chief Justice Roberts disagreed with that logic, wondering whether giving unwanted and objectionable moral instruction to five-year-olds isn’t automatically coercive and immediately violates a family’s deeply held religious beliefs.

For their part, two of the liberal Justices wondered what the big deal was about making kids learn about legal alternative lifestyles, and fretted over creating ‘chaos’ by letting parents decide what materials their children can and can’t be exposed to. The notion, apparently, is that purple-haired, tattooed teachers are better equipped than parents to make those kinds of decisions.

My pronouns are: “public schools suck and are cesspools of bottom-feeding activists.” Four years ago, my sentiment was an outlier. But once again, we can thank the pandemic for ripping off the leather puppy mask, when school-by-computer allowed parents to finally learn for themselves the kinds of bizarre ideologies their kids were really being taught.

It’s a funny old world. Who knows whether we’d have gotten to this place of sanity without the FBI raiding soccer moms for criticizing school board members. And recall that, earlier this week, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court also found that gender means biological sex.

Now, thanks to covid, another conspiracy theory has become Supreme Court majority opinion. Progress. It seems the tide has turned in the conservative counter-revolution.

Read more