The Supreme Court\u2019s three Democratic-appointed justices dissented Friday from the majority opinion in a case involving a group of parents wishing to opt their children out of elementary school lessons with LGBTQ storybooks, writing that the decision \u201cushers in that new reality\u201d\u00a0eroding kids’ \u201copportunity to practice living in our multicultural society.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The high court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines<\/a> Friday morning to send the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, back to a lower court for a final decision on whether Montgomery County, Md., must provide an opt-out option for parents. \u00a0<\/p>\n Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that, in the meantime, the school district must notify parents in advance of the books being read and allow them to remove their children from the classroom. The district\u2019s lack of such an option likely substantially burdens parents\u2019 constitutional right to freely exercise their religion, he wrote. <\/p>\n \u201cExposing students to the \u2018message\u2019 that LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny,\u201d Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in Friday\u2019s dissent<\/a>, joined by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. \u201cGiven the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country, countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parent\u2019s religious beliefs. If that is sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny, then little is not.\u201d <\/p>\n Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, a move typically reserved for justices emphasizing their strong disagreement with a decision. <\/p>\n It is the third time this term that Sotomayor has read a dissent from the bench. The first time she did so was in the court\u2019s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti in which the court upheld a Tennessee law<\/a> banning gender-affirming care for minors. She\u00a0did it again Friday in dissenting with the court\u2019s ruling<\/a> on President Trump\u2019s birthright citizenship order.\u00a0<\/p>\n The result of the court\u2019s Mahmoud v. Taylor decision, Sotomayor said, \u201cwill be chaos for this Nation\u2019s public schools.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cRequiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent\u2019s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too. Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students\u2019 learning and development.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWorse yet, the majority closes its eyes to the inevitable chilling effects of its ruling,\u201d she wrote. \u201cMany school districts, and particularly the most resource strapped, cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences. Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections. The Court\u2019s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards. Because I cannot countenance the Court\u2019s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Supreme Court\u2019s three Democratic-appointed justices dissented Friday from the majority opinion in a case involving a group of parents wishing to opt their children out of elementary school lessons with LGBTQ storybooks, writing that the decision \u201cushers in that new reality\u201d\u00a0eroding kids’ \u201copportunity to practice living in our multicultural society.\u201d\u00a0 The high court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines Friday morning to send the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, back to a lower court for a final decision on whether Montgomery County, Md., must provide an opt-out option for parents. \u00a0 Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that, in the meantime, the school district must notify parents in advance of the books being read and allow them to remove their children from the classroom. The district\u2019s lack of such an option likely substantially burdens parents\u2019 constitutional right to freely exercise their religion, he wrote. \u201cExposing students to the \u2018message\u2019 that LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny,\u201d Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in Friday\u2019s dissent, joined by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. \u201cGiven the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country, countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parent\u2019s religious beliefs. If that is sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny, then little is not.\u201d Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, a move typically reserved for justices emphasizing their strong disagreement with a decision. It is the third time this term that Sotomayor has read a dissent from the bench. The first time she did so was in the court\u2019s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti in which the court upheld a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors. She\u00a0did it again Friday in dissenting with the court\u2019s ruling on President Trump\u2019s birthright citizenship order.\u00a0 The result of the court\u2019s Mahmoud v. Taylor decision, Sotomayor said, \u201cwill be chaos for this Nation\u2019s public schools.\u201d \u201cRequiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent\u2019s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too. Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students\u2019 learning and development.\u201d \u201cWorse yet, the majority closes its eyes to the inevitable chilling effects of its ruling,\u201d she wrote. \u201cMany school districts, and particularly the most resource strapped, cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences. Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections. The Court\u2019s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards. Because I cannot countenance the Court\u2019s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":613,"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions\/613"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francereal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}