Supreme Court Affirms Protections for Children
In a trio of June rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed nontraditional forms of sexuality in areas of health, education, and employment. Christian religious liberties organizations had been hopeful of such outcomes.
On June 27, on the final day of the 2024-25 term, justices ruled 6-3 in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents have a religious right to opt children out of public school classroom readings of storybooks promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LBGTQ) lifestyles.
In 2022, the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland introduced a variety of LGBTQ-affirming books for students ages 5 to 11. With titles such as Pride Puppy and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the storybooks celebrate gender transitioning, drag queens, pride parades, and pronoun preferences. The following year, the school district, without explanation, announced there would be no more notifications about the book readings or opt-out opportunities. The board ignored more than 1,000 parents who signed a petition asking that opt-out rights be restored.
A coalition of religious and racially diverse parents sued with help from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Parents protested that the instruction violates their First Amendment rights to freely exercise religious beliefs and the ability to direct the religious upbringing of their children.
William J. Haun, Becket Fund senior counsel, is encouraged that the court supported the religious beliefs of parents of all faiths.
“This is an outstanding victory for the First Amendment and for religious liberty, and really for common sense,” says Haun, 38. “The court recognized that parents don’t lose their rights when they send their kids to public schools.”
Writing for the majority in a 41-page opinion, Justice Samuel Alito declared that the school board’s introduction of “LGBTQ+ inclusive” storybooks, combined with the decision to withhold notice to parents and to forbid opt outs, substantially interferes with the religious development of the petitioners’ children.
The materials present a real threat to undermine values of many religious parents, Alito wrote, and “are designed to present the opposite viewpoint to young, impressionable children who are likely to accept without question any moral messages conveyed by their teacher’s instruction.” He noted, “The storybooks present same-sex weddings as occasions for great celebration and suggest that the only rubric for determining whether a marriage is acceptable is whether the individuals concerned ‘love each other.’” Likewise, he said, the books suggest that it is hurtful and even hateful “to hold a viewpoint that gender is inextricably bound with biological sex.” The books are geared to “disrupt” a child’s thinking about sexuality and gender as well as to exert a psychological “pressure to conform” upon children to values that might be hostile to the religious beliefs of their parents, Alito wrote. The board encouraged teachers to reprimand children who disagreed.
In a concurring opinion in the Mahmoud case, Justice Clarence Thomas cited two earlier decisions that reinforced parental rights regarding public education. In 1972, the Supreme Court recognized in Yoder v. Wisconsin that parents have a right “to direct the religious upbringing of their children.” And a century ago, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, justices determined “the child is not the mere creature of the state.”
Linda A. Seiler, executive director of ReStory Ministries, an organization recommended by the Assemblies of God that equips local churches to address homosexuality and gender identity matters, applauded the Mahmoud opinion for allowing parents to make the best decision for their child’s education based on deeply held religious beliefs.
“The ruling not only upholds First Amendment rights, but it allows parents to educate their children according to the scientific fact that biological sex is hardwired into our DNA,” says Seiler, 52. “It cannot be changed. It is a lie to tell children otherwise.”
The Mahmoud decision came 10 years and one day after a more moderate Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage throughout the nation in Obergefell v. Hodge.
SKRMETTI CASE
On June 18, by the same 6-3 coalition as the Mahmoud case, the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti upheld a state’s authority to prevent adolescents from accessing harmful treatments in an attempt to change their gender.
The court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, supported a Tennessee law that bans body-altering surgery for minors. Two dozen states have enacted similar legislation, prohibiting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-transition surgery for children and youth with gender dysphoria.
The court rejected the argument of three teens who identify as transgender (plus their parents and a physician) that the law violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause and that medical treatment for minors needed to be held to a more heightened standard of scrutiny.
Roberts noted that Tennessee lawmakers found minors lack the maturity to fully understand that treatments can lead to sterility, increased disease and illness, and potentially fatal psychological consequences. The chief justice said there are “extensive and sometimes irreversible consequences of hormonal therapy and sex reassignment surgery” that some individuals later regret. Such treatments should only be administered to adults, he said.
In a concurring Skrmetti opinion, Thomas scoffed at the plaintiffs’ notion that “overwhelming evidence” among medical practitioners supports the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children as young as age 8. “The treatments at issue are subject to a rapidly evolving debate that demonstrates a lack of medical consensus over their risks and benefits,” Thomas wrote. He suggested that aside from interrupting a child’s normal development, puberty blockers may lead to everything from decreased bone density to impaired brain development.
Beyond medical questions, Thomas said state governments may legitimately question the ethics of transgender medical intervention.
“States could reasonably conclude that the level of young children’s cognitive and emotional development inhibits their ability to consent to sex-transition treatments,” Thomas wrote.
There also is the biblical perspective. Seiler says she is grateful the Supreme Court decided to protect “vulnerable minors from the deceptive social contagion of transgender ideology.” She says the plaintiffs’ argument that the Tennessee statute constituted sex discrimination disregards one’s God-given biological gender, as noted in Psalm 139.
“Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth by a doctor, nor is it determined by a child’s mental perception,” Seiler says. “Biological sex is designed by our Creator, who knit us together in our mother’s womb. It cannot change by ingesting cross-sex hormones or rearranging the skin on the body.”
Seiler, who serves as applied theology and cultural specialist for the national Chi Alpha team from her West Lafayette, Indiana, base, says Christians need to help young people process the difficulties in life from which they are trying to escape.
“Rather than affirming the lie that a child can ‘become’ the opposite sex, we must protect children from making decisions that permanently alter their body and affect their fertility before their mind has the rational capacity to understand the long-term ramifications of those decisions,” Seiler says.
Alito and Amy Coney Barrett also filed concurring opinions in Skrmetti. Sotomayor and Kagan wrote dissenting opinions.
In an earlier June decision, Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Marlean Ames, who claimed after 15 years of employment at the agency she had been deprived of a job promotion because of her heterosexuality. The justices agreed with the woman’s contention that she had been the victim of reverse discrimination: denial of a new management position while working for the Ohio prison-rape prevention program and then demoted. Instead, a person who identified as lesbian received the promotion and Ames got reassigned when a newly hired 25-year-old man identifying as gay received her former post. Ames had a homosexual supervisor at the time.
