NWLC, along with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and PFLAG, joined Lambda Legal’s amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court today in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which urges the Court to reject a free exercise challenge brought by a group of parents claiming that their religious exercise rights were unconstitutionally burdened by a Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) policy barring opt-outs from children’s storybooks featuring LGBTQI+ characters in its English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum.

The brief outlines the importance of MCPS’s ELA curriculum in ensuring that young people have access to stories that reflect their experiences and their families, as well as their peers to ensure students can develop empathy and tolerance for those different than them. It also explains that an opt-out policy permitting parents to object for any reason to certain stories because of the identities or lived experiences of the characters in them sends a message that hostility towards people like those characters is acceptable. In short, when students watch their peers leave the room because of a book features an LGBTQI+ character, it worsens stigma-driven harassment and bullying of LGBTQI+ students—or of any other student group featured.

The brief further explains that MCPS’s opt-out policy does not burden the free exercise rights of the parents challenging the policy, because it is neutral with respect to religion and bars opt-outs for any reason, whether requested because of someone’s religious objection to a storybook or because of a secular reason. And, even if the policy did burden their free exercise rights, MCPS has a compelling interest in ensuring the well-being of all its students that warrants upholding the policy—an interest that can only be achieved by ensuring all students have access to a curriculum that is inclusive of them and their families and promotes tolerance.