Carter: The Supreme Court is right to respect parents’ faith

Here s why I think the Supreme Court might be on to something in its Friday decision allowing a group of Muslim and Christian parents to opt their young children out of public-school lessons that feature LGBTQ -inclusive texts my wife and I sent our kids to private school How does B lead to A Let me explain The episode before the court Mahmoud v Taylor arose from Montgomery County Maryland generally described as the greater part religiously diverse county in the United States Part of that rich diversity will include a variety of views on gender and sexuality When the school board realized that LGBTQ issues and characters were under-represented in the curriculum it took a series of measures to present students with a richer spectrum of images and ideas So far so good The original proposal included a provision under which parents harboring religious objections to the new materials could opt their children out In the end however the opt-out was abandoned The suit was filed on behalf of elementary school children by Muslim and Christian parents whose views on gender and sexuality skew traditionally religious Related Articles Feldman Court s originalists reinterpreting precedent to justify discarding it Opinion Supreme Court s unitary executive theory threatens our balance of power Supreme Court clears way for deportation to South Sudan of several immigrants with no ties there Supreme Court will take up a new occurrence about which school sports teams transgender students can join Chemerinsky Supreme Court weakens federal judiciary when it is needed the bulk The parents didn t ask that the texts in question be banned They solicited that their kids might be excused The school board responded that the materials did no more than expose the children to new ideas and that in any circumstance nobody was being coerced The Supreme Court by the now-familiar - vote sided with the parents Justice Samuel Alito s opinion for the majority goes on at length about the contents of the materials at any point in our lives we can choose to identify with one gender multiple genders or neither gender one discussion guide explains in another story the prince rejects the several ladies who might rule beside him and in the end falls in love with a male knight but although I think the court reaches the right decision in the end I wonder whether this long recital isn t wide of the point The majority s view is that the lessons in the end violate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment because the students are coerced they have no choice but to view and listen to and discuss materials to which their parents have religious objections I m not at all sure however that coercion is the right First Amendment test or for that matter that exposure equals coercion But I m equally unpersuaded by the argument that pooh-poohs parental fears in which families struggling to preserve their own religions against the overweening tides of post-modernity are reduced to something like Kipling s lesser breeds without the law ignorant savages whose children the school must civilize The right test is surely the extent to which the ability to raise children in one s chosen religion is burdened And there our instinct under the Free Exercise Clause should in majority of cases be one of deference to the parents Undesirable consequences In her dissent Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented what lawyers call a parade of horribles attainable bad consequences of the majority s rule several of which were drawn from a brief written by people I know and admire But friends may disagree Teachers will need to adjust homework assignments to exclude objectionable material and develop bespoke exams for students subject to different opt-out preferences she writes Schools will have to divert guidance and staff to supervising students during opt-out periods too which could become a vital drain on funding and staffing that is already stretched thin Moreover she continues the majority s new rule will have serious chilling effects on constituents school curricula Sparse school districts will be able to afford costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert materials to administering impracticable notice and opt-out systems for individual students The foreseeable effect is that certain school districts may strip their curricula of content that risks generating religious objections Let us concede that these consequences are undesirable But will they all happen An attractive possibility is that parental objections will turn out to be inadequate and easily managed another is that reasonable people working together will find reasonable compromises But if those possibilities seem like so much pie in the sky we have a much bigger difficulty than the headaches of administrators charged with running the opt-out project Because at that point if parents will in fact seek exemptions willy-nilly for their children we will have to admit that at least in the eyes of several families the public-school project has failed And let s be clear about what that job is It s educating the young but it isn t just educating the young It s working with families to help them raise their children Schools shouldn t be competing with parents they should be collaborating with them This is particularly true when children are in elementary school often taking their first efforts into the world beyond the one their families have created Blunt instrument The Supreme Court s new test with its implicit suggestion that coercion is uncovered in exposure to materials that go against central tenets of parental religion is more sledgehammer than scalpel But if the instrument the majority wields is too blunt the predicament it s trying to solve is real I quite recognize that we live at a time when advances on issues of gender and sexuality are not only under threat but in selected cases being actively rolled back But those battles should be fought on their own terms when it comes to raising children parental freedom is entitled to a wide berth Which brings us back to how B leads to A When our children reached school age we decided on private rather than constituents instruction even though the community schools in our district were top-notch academically But we yearned more than academics We required them to have an schooling that would reinforce rather than do battle with the values we sought to teach them at home Not everybody can afford those choices but the citizens schools should do their best to find avenues to accommodate those who wish they could And no my wife and I had no predicament with Heather Has Two Mommies back when that now quaint-seeming book was the big cultural battleground But I ve been writing about religious freedom for four decades and I m not about to argue that the parents should win only if I agree with them Stephen L Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and professor of law at Yale University Bloomberg Distributed by Tribune Content Agency