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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.
Regarding the listed contents, I do think it is inappropriate to be teaching four-year-olds about "leather" - in a sexual context - or even "drag queens", the attempted desexualization of which I find more than a little bemusing. I don't believe crossdressing itself is inherently sexualized, but drag as a subcultural tradition has always had a strong erotic element, and it's kind of bizarre to teach children about it when they quite possibly haven't even properly done the birds and the bees yet.
"Intersex flag" I would, however, strongly defend. Being intersex is an anatomical trait, not a sexual behavior. Four-year-olds can very well be intersex themselves. Teaching them to be at peace with it, and teaching their classmates that it would be wrong to bully people for being intersex, seems perfectly defensible. Indeed, viewed in this context, the intersex flag is just about the only pride flag which could apply to a four-year-old.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the likelihood of any individual child being intersex or knowing an intersex child is vanishingly small (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome only affects 223 out of every 100,000 male babies, and often isn't even obvious until the subject starts puberty). This isn't like myopia, which affects nearly a quarter of the population. Even if I received credible assurance that the four-year-olds in question would only be taught about intersex conditions in a strictly medical context and would not receive any education about queer theory, gender ideology or pseudoscientific nonsense about "sex assigned at birth" - I would still question the utility of teaching four-year-olds about extremely rare medical conditions which affect such a tiny proportion of the population. Of course no hypothetical child suffering from motor neurone disease should be ashamed of themselves or face bullying because of their condition, but teach a class of four-year-olds about motor neurone disease, and no matter how many caveats you include about how rare it is (never mind statistics, these children don't understand addition yet), we both know what would happen: the dumber half of the class wouldn't know what you were talking about, while the smarter half would go home in floods of tears and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about being paralysed and dying young.
I
suspectknow that the only reason that children are being taught about intersex conditions at all is the same reason these conditions have been brought up 99% of the time they've been raised by anyone since the turn of the century: as a means of smuggling in gender ideology by the back door.The situation where a lesson on a medical condition is appropriate is when there's a child with that condition in or about to join the class. That's a known way of preventing shame and bullying.
So yeah, if there's a kid with CAH in the class, teach the class about CAH. Or if there's a wheelchair user, teach about wheelchairs, etc.
But that (ISTM) is why many standard blues support teaching trans stuff--the idea is "We can't know in advance if such a child will be in the class! So we should just assume one might be, and teach everyone!" It makes sense (is also why people put random wheelchair users into stories, for example). The problem is the side effects swamp the benefits. Well, IMO. But you gave a good description of some of the kind of side effects you'd see from any plan to "Just teach every 4-year-old about [some rare condition]!"
(Then when it comes to trans specifically, an additional problem is we don't actually know the truth of the assumptions underlying this plan, that "It's just like a medical condition that is 100% physical! It has a fixed rate of occurrence and you never know who will get it and you can only treat it one way!" And there's even some evidence that those assumptions are false. People often really want those assumptions to be true, I think because it'd make life / "doing the right thing" simpler for them. I sympathize...but I'm inclined to believe they aren't true. So they end up being harmful. And we shouldn't impose curricula based on them.)
Such a large proportion of people will require the use of a wheelchair for some period of time at some point during their life that it makes sense for schools to proactively teach children about wheelchairs, even if none of the pupils in the school are wheelchair-bound. This is also what I was getting at with the myopia example. Mass-release children's books in which the characters are a Five-Token Band wherein one child is shortsighted, one is wheelchair-bound, one is autistic etc.? Given the statistical frequency of these conditions, completely unobjectionable and even commendable. Now, mass-release children's books in which one character is trans, one character has CAH, one character has Huntington's etc.? That I find a lot more difficult to get onboard with.
There's also an obvious celebration parallax effect, in which activists will deny up and down that social contagion plays any role in trans identification, and yet are fully aware that teaching children about the concept of transgenderism (particularly when it's defined using an extremely broad constellation of "symptoms" which just about everyone might experience from time to time) is a surefire way to guarantee that at least some of them come out as trans. But of course they'll rationalise this away by claiming (unfalsifiably) that the children in question were already trans, but simply lacked the language to describe their experiences until they were educated about it.
The double standard/isolated demand for rigour is also on full display: any adult who's interacted with a child for more than five minutes knows perfectly well how impressionable how children are. If you teach a class full of children about X (where X is a medical condition, mental illness etc.), by the end of the class half of them will be convinced they suffer from it. (Never mind small children - how many first-year psychology undergrads have become convinced they suffer from schizophrenia after a single introductory lecture thereon?) But these same adults will turn around and insist that transgender identification is governed by a completely different set of psychological dynamics, wherein false positives simply do not exist under any circumstances.
Not quite. False positives exist when you start regretting cutting off your breasts or dick-n-balls, at which point it turns out you were never trans, and it's your fault for asking for those surgeries in the first place.
As a last resort, perhaps. They're much more comfortable just implying that detransitioners don't exist and trying their best to keep them out of the conversation entirely.
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