Sotomayor Rips SCOTUS for Causing Total “Chaos” in LGBTQ Books Case
Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated the nation’s highest judiciary Friday for ruling 6–3 to permit a group of Maryland parents to withdraw their children from LGBTQ+ exposure in the public school curriculum on the basis of religious freedom.
The progressive justice railed against the majority opinion, writing that the result of the decision will be “chaos” as school administrators are forced either to overextend themselves to accommodate parents’ newly constitutionalized authority or strip LGBTQ+ material from the curriculum entirely.
In a dissenting opinion, Sotomayor argued that the decision would “impose impossible administrative burdens on schools” by requiring them to provide advance notice to parents before they utilized or taught LGBTQ-related content, in order to give parents ample time to “opt out” of the lesson plan.
“The harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too,” she said. “Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students’ learning and development.”
But worse still, according to Sotomayor, is the opening that the nation’s highest judiciary has handed to a vocal minority of parents to disrupt local democracies, allowing them to legally challenge the decisions of publicly elected school officials, sparking educational ramifications for all families whether they agree with the curricula or not.
“The majority closes its eyes to the inevitable chilling effects of its ruling,” she wrote. “Many 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,” Sotomayor continued. “The Court’s 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’s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.”
The court’s decision Friday was the culmination of a three-year legal battle. In 2022, the Montgomery County school board approved the use of LGBTQ+ themed storybooks for elementary school–age children, including Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, in which a kid goes to her uncle’s same-sex wedding, as well as a book where a puppy gets lost in a Pride Parade. At the crux of Friday’s case was a decision made the following year by the Montgomery County school board, preventing parents from opting their kids out of the coursework.
The ruling is most likely to result in a reduction in LGBTQ-adjacent education across the country, as cash-strapped educators attempt to avoid ruinous lawsuits.
Legal experts analyzing the case were quick to point out other flaws riddled in the decision, arguing that the “level of subtlety” permitted by the court to constitute a religious liberty violation could cook up more lawsuits along other theologically contested lines.
“Case in point: arguably this would permit Christian Scientists to opt out of any book where a doctor heals someone,” posted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
