In a strikingly unnerving decision, a federal court has locked horns with Maryland parents. After enduring tireless pushback, the court finally decreed that parents can’t divert their children from exposure to left-leaning ideologies at school. Welcome to their new world order: your kids are no longer really yours.
Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) parents finally drew a line in the sand last year, fed up with radical lessons being fed to their grade-schoolers. Things took a sour turn in March 2023 when the school district decided the parents didn’t need to know about this content before it gets on their children’s desks. Children are now nose-deep in progressive narratives like “The Pride Puppy,” “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” and “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope.” The content doesn’t just stop there, but dips into themes like drag queens, furries, and the likes.
As any good parent would, they argued that such materials and ideas, wholly unsuitable for young minds, infringe on the children’s First Amendment right that reps the free exercise of religion by force-feeding antithetical ideologies that contradict their faith’s beliefs.
The aggrieved parents, adherents of Islam and Christianity, teamed up with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty to challenge MCPS in court. But the verdict wasn’t in their favor. The Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 vote that merely airing out these ideas in the open doesn’t violate the First Amendment.
Here’s the skinny. The court affirmed that being subjected to contrary ideas is an insufficient burden to raise First Amendment issues. They further claimed that dealing with disagreements on such subjects, even on religious grounds, is part of the package deal for parents who choose public school education for their children.
So, what’s the court’s message loud and clear? Our way or the highway. Homeschool your kids if you can’t stomach our curriculum.
If nothing else, this alarming event serves as a wake-up call. The danger is real. The threat to parental rights and the independence of family is at an unprecedented high. The takeaway here is that parents need to roll up their sleeves and take the reins of their children’s school curricula like never before. Let’s hope we heed this warning.
