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Notes -
In lieu of the normal SCOTUS Mottezins... wake up, honey, the Culture War went to court again. Arguments for Mahmoud v. Taylor just dropped (PDF). A less oppressive SCOTUSblog write up here.
Obligatory disclaimer that I do not know anything. The gist of the case:
I know we have some skeptics of "woke" curriculum, so for a probably not unbiased overview of the material, BECKET, the religious freedom legal advocacy non-profit backing the plaintiffs, provides examples in an X thread. They also provide a dropbox link to some of the material in question. In one tweet they claim:
The Justices had read the books in question. Kavanaugh acknowledged Schoenfeld, representing Montgomery County, had "a tough case to argue".
The county asserted that mandatory exposure to material, like a teacher reading a book out loud, is not coercion (or a burden?) that violates a free exercise of religion. Sotomayor seemed to support this position. Schoenfeld, arguing for Montgomery County, said these books that are part of a curriculum that preach uncontroversial values like civility and inclusivity. Alito, skeptical, said Uncle Bobby's Wedding had a clear moral message beyond civility or inclusivity.
The liberal justices were interested in clarification on what Baxter, arguing for the parents, thought the limits were to. What limits are placed on parents with regards to religious opt-outs? Kagan was worried about the opening of the floodgates. Sotomayor drew a line to parental objection to 'biographical material about women who have been recognized for achievements outside of their home' and asked if the opt-out should extend to material on stuff like inter-faith marriage. Baxter didn't give well-defined lines, but said nah, we figured this out.
Sincerity of belief is one requirement for compelled opt-outs. The belief can't be "philosophical" or "political" it has to a sincere religious belief. Age was discussed as another consideration. Material that may offend religious belief to (the parents of?) a 16 year old does not apply the same sort of burden as it does to a 5 year old, because a 16 year old is more capable of being "merely exposed" rather than "indoctrinated". A word Eric Baxter, arguing for the parents, used several times and Justice Barrett used twice.
Eric Baxter also stabbed at the district's position that there was ever an administrative issue at all. Chief Justice Roberts agreed and seemed to question whether the school's actions were pretext. Baxter had one exchange (pg. 40-42 pdf) with Kavanaugh who, "mystified as a life-long resident of the county [as to] how it came to this", asked for background.
Baxter also pointed at ongoing opt-out polices in neighboring counties and different ones in Montgomery itself. He clarified the relevance of Wisconsin v. Yoder where it was found strict scrutiny should be applied to protect religious freedom. One example of an ongoing opt-out policy in Montgomery allowed parents to opt their children out of material that showed the prophet Mohammed.
Thots and Q's:
The eternal fight over what the state uses to fill children's minds in a land of compulsory attendance is main conflict, even if this legal question is one of what a compromise should look given religious freedoms.
It can do so in a few different ways and avoid a trip to SCOTUS. I support preaching civility and inclusivity to children. There are thousands children's books that preach these things without drag queens or bondage. In an ideal world, knowledge of and tolerance for queer people can also be taught without, what I would call, the excess. Schools can also program curriculum to account for opt-outs when it comes to touchy subjects.
Sex education can be crammed into 1 hour classes for a week of the year. This allows parents to opt-out without placing an unmanageable burden on the administration. A curriculum that requires teachers to read a number of controversial book at least 5 times each a year is a curriculum designed to, intentionally or not, make opt-outs onerous. In this case it was so onerous and so controversial that Montgomery was compelled to change the policy. Which is an administrative failure even if one doesn't believe it to be ideologically motivated.
I've seen it argued both ways. That outlets notoriously don't link cases or share case names, but in this case the plaintiffs -- a mixture of Muslim, Christian, Jewish parents -- the absence is notable. Were this an evangelical push we could expect some evangelical bashing.
Alito should have been more skeptical that "civility" and (especially) "inclusivity" are uncontroversial. Any teaching of "civility" is teaching not just that people should act in ways which are civil and not in ways which are uncivil, but teaching WHICH ways are civil and WHICH ways are uncivil, and those things vary sharply across the population. "Inclusivity" is worse, in that it's basically a positive label for progressive values rather than a label for anything uncontroversial at all.
We are at risk, because I am paraphrasing after reading most of the transcript yesterday, making some notes, and editing them into a post today while referencing some stuff. Here is that exchange:
It's more accurate to say Alito doesn't worry too much about determining the goodness of the book. Maybe it is good, maybe it is not not good. The concern is whether someone can make a religious objection to it. He thinks that is a pretty obvious, yes. This is a moral formation rather than information.
I agree "inclusivity" in the context of education has a clear progressive meaning. "Civility" I think we should hang on to or fight for. It is possible to be civil while maintaining moral disagreements. Happens all the time here and that's good. The well is poisoned enough that it's reasonable to want to* detach all the goodness terminology from progressive mantras.
The discussions that fly here civilly wouldn't be seen as such in many spaces, certainly school. Even that term carries baggage.
I'm also not sure it matters. "Diversity" may not have had the progressive meaning until it allowed one to discriminate on diversity grounds and now the term has been used as a license so often that invoking it in certain context just screams progressive thing. "Safety" was also ruined when it became useful.
The liberal thesis was that there was some objective grounding to these concepts that people would naturally gravitate towards.
I think we can safely say at this point that the liberal thesis was wrong. "Consensus" is not a fixed, naturally-occuring attractor fit for anchoring a society. Values can drift without apparent limit, and mutually-incompatible value sets are not only possible but are routinely observed in the real world. Attempting to share power between mutually-exclusive value-sets is a fool's errand. The solution is borders; I pursue my values here, you pursue yours over there, and we do our best to leave each other alone. No level of language games is going to provide a sustainable workaround to this simple reality.
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