A group of Montgomery County parents has asked the Supreme Court to review the school system’s refusal to let them opt their children out of classes that use LGBTQ+ books in lower elementary school grades.

, filed last week, claims the school system’s refusal to let parents opt their children out of the classes infringes on their religious liberty rights by exposing the children to gender and sexuality norms that contradict their religious beliefs.

The policy gives parents – who include Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox families – “no protection against forced participation in ideological instruction by government schools,” as their petition claims.

A Montgomery County school spokesman said the system was aware of the Supreme Court appeal and was reviewing it, but that the system would not comment on ongoing litigation.

The appeal is the latest twist in a case that began two years ago, when the schools unveiled a list of “LGBTQ+-inclusive texts for use in the classroom.” Those included books to be used in lower grades, including one for use in kindergarten and pre-K classrooms.

The books were introduced in the 2022-23 school year and are not part of a mandatory reading list for the classrooms but can be used by teachers in classroom instruction.

At issue are seven books in the lower grades, which include titles such as “My Rainbow,” which tells the story of a mother who creates a rainbow-colored wig for her transgender child; “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a girl worried she will lose time with her soon-to-be-married uncle, until his boyfriend befriends her and gains her trust; and “Pride Puppy,” about a puppy lost at a Pride parade, which uses each letter of the alphabet to describe the people it might have met there. The last book, for kindergarten and pre-K, invites students to search for drag kings and queens, lip rings, leather and underwear, among other items, according to court documents.

In court documents, a school system official said the books were not planned to be part of “explicit instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary school, and that no student or adult is asked to change how they feel about these issues.” Instead, the official said, teachers were expected to make the books available in the classroom, recommend them as appropriate for particular students or offer them “as an option for literature circles, book clubs, or paired reading groups; or to use them as a read aloud” in class.

Parents who objected to the use of the books were originally allowed to opt their children out of lessons that included the books. But the school system in March 2023 announced that opt-outs would no longer be allowed, beginning in the 2023-24 school year. It said parents can opt students out of parts of sex education, but not other parts of the curriculum, like language arts.

That sparked a lawsuit by a group of parents who objected on religious and secular grounds. They said they were not trying to ban the use of the books in Montgomery County schools but argued that, with no opt-out requirement, they were being forced to expose their children to ideas that conflicted with their firmly held religious beliefs.

So far, the underlying elements of the case have not been heard, merely the parents’ request for a preliminary injunction of the school system’s opt-out policy, which the parents have repeatedly lost.

A federal district judge in August 2023 denied the parents’ request for a preliminary injunction and a divided panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in May, writing that the parents had not met the high burden of showing that they were likely to win on their claim that the lack of an opt-out policy was actually coercing them to abandon part of their faith.

The majority opinion, written by Circuit Judge G. Steven Agee, said that because the record in preliminary injunction hearings was extremely sparse, the parents had not been able to “connect the requisite dots” to show that a burden on their First Amendment rights existed.

While the parents had shown that the books “could be used in ways that would confuse or mislead children and, in particular, that discussions relating to their contents could be used to indoctrinate their children into espousing views that are contrary to their religious faith. 
 none of that is verified by the limited record that is before us,” Agee wrote.

“Should the Parents in this case or other plaintiffs in other challenges to the Storybooks’ use come forward with proof that a teacher or school administrator is using the Storybooks in a manner that directly or indirectly coerces children into changing their religious views or practices, then the analysis would shift in light of that record,” Agee wrote.

The fact that parents might feel forced to forgo a public school education and pay for private school was not sufficiently coercive to be a burden on the parents’ First Amendment rights, based on the record so far, he wrote.

In a dissent, Circuit Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. said parents had met their burden for a preliminary injunction while the case was heard.

“Both sides of the issue advance passionate arguments. Some insist diversity and inclusion should be prioritized over the religious rights of parents and children. Others argue the opposite,” Quattlebaum wrote.

But the parents have made the case for an injunction of the opt-out policy for now, he wrote.

“The parents have shown the board’s decision to deny religious opt-outs burdened these parents’ right to exercise their religion and direct the religious upbringing of their children by putting them to the choice of either compromising their religious beliefs or foregoing a public education for their children,” Quattlebaum wrote. “I would 
 enjoin the Montgomery County School Board of Education from denying religious opt-outs for instruction to K-5 children involving the texts.”

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State Rep. , R-Frisco, sent a letter on Wednesday to school districts asking school officials to sign the pledge. In his letter, Patterson said children across Texas have been exposed to material such as “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” a graphic novel that has both nationwide and in Texas among some parents and Republican officials.

The book, by Maia Kobabe, depicts the author’s experiences growing up and struggling to identify as gay, bisexual or asexual. It contains a few pages of explicit illustrations depicting oral sex, which have outraged some parents and state leaders.

The nonbinary author, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, told The Texas Tribune last year that students need “good, accurate, safe information about these topics” instead of “wildly having to search online” and potentially stumble across misinformation.

But some Republicans, including Gov. , have called the book “pornographic.” Patterson repeated that depiction in his letter.

“Both local districts and the Legislature will be working diligently on policies to prevent such books from being allowed on campus in the future,” Patterson wrote. “However, we also acknowledge school districts have a lot [of] power in the market when purchasing books and that if we stand together against explicit materials for children, book vendors will be forced to adjust.”

The letter was signed by an additional 26 Republican lawmakers, including state Rep. R-Fort Worth, who initially compiled a list of some that he asking for information about how many are available on their campuses.

“Respectfully, I ask you to take this pledge on behalf of every Texas child in public schools who doesn’t deserve to be exposed to obscene materials,” Patterson said.

Abbott cited “Gender Queer” when directing the Texas Education Agency to related to “the availability of pornography” in November and also cited the book when directing the TEA, Texas State Library and Archives Commission and State Board of Education to develop standards to block books with “overtly sexual” content in schools.

Shannon Holmes, executive director of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said in a statement that pornography has a legal definition and not everything a person finds distasteful meets that definition.

“ATPE urges school districts to recognize the power of the elected school board to work with parents and educators to find the right balance for their local communities and avoid getting caught up in these types of politically motivated pledges,” Holmes said in a statement.

Brian Lopez is an education reporter at , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. This article  at TexasTribune.org.

On Jan. 10, the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, . The book, a graphic novel by Jewish American cartoonist Art Spiegelman depicting the grim realities of the Holocaust, expressed the absolute inhumanity of what happened in clear terms that children could understand. 

As the child of Polish-born parents who lost much of his own family to the Holocaust, Spiegelman understood the gravity of the subject matter and committed himself to one clear idea: “Never again.”

To its great shame, the school board argued the book contained objectionable language and was unsuitable for use in the classroom. Despite pleas from history teachers concerning the importance and effectiveness of the work, the conservative school board chose to diminish its own school community’s understanding of the horrors of Nazism. Ironically, it did so by taking a tactic directly employed by Nazis themselves.

In 1933, German logician Olaf Helmer was busy writing his doctoral dissertation in the mathematics building at the University of Berlin when he looked through a window and noticed a group of thugs building a bonfire, then hurling library books into the flames. He immediately knew whose books they were, but the thugs confirmed his worst fears. He heard them shouting “I condemn to the flames the work of the Jew.”

Helmer — who one of us interviewed two decades ago, when he was 94 — escaped Germany in 1934, emigrating to America to become the assistant to a logician at the University of Chicago. He worked for the Air Force and became an American citizen, and in 1968 he co-founded the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit think tank. Still, he never shook the memory of losing family in the Holocaust. He drew a straight line from books thrown into bonfires to bodies burned in ovens.

Personal interviews with others who, like Helmer, managed to escape the Nazis, revealed similar haunted memories. Survivors have trouble using words to describe a society being taken over by genocidal hatred. They often rely on understatement, accented with sarcasm, and Helmer was no different. “It was very unpleasant,” he said, “the last year there.”

As scholars who studied the period, we knew the horrors that Helmer and the others were hinting at. As adults, we could read the pain beneath their sarcasm. Children, however, struggle to recognize such cues, and as a result, struggle to understand that such evil is possible. Spiegelman’s answer to that dilemma was Maus. 

If the Tennessee school board’s ban had been an isolated incident, perhaps it might be dismissed as a localized example of overzealous language policing. Sadly, it’s merely the latest in a string of concerted censorship efforts targeting the actual history of people who suffered at the hands of white Americans and Europeans. It belongs alongside recent , which chronicles the collective sin of American slavery; the , which has nothing to do with critical race theory and everything to do with not allowing critical thinking about race in America; and .

We all saw the photographs of the January 6 insurrectionist proudly wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt. We all heard the Charlottesville protesters chanting “Jews will not replace us,” just before being called “very fine people” by the then-president. We’ve all seen the right-wing meme depicting a murdered man of color above the abhorrent caption “Black Lives Splatter.” We‘ve all seen postings by militia members calling for a race war in America, listened to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert echo the call for “a Second Amendment solution” and watched Rep. Madison Cawthorne take out and clean his handgun during an online House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.

Worse still, the former president has signaled his approval of the insurrection. Most recently, at a rally in Texas on Saturday, he said, “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he noted. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons.” He also decried investigations into his business practices and possible election tampering — all headed by African-American prosecutors — as “. The same weekend saw , complete with Hitler salutes and signs reading “Vax the Jews,” and .

This, we fear, is what Olaf Helmer saw coming in Germany. This is the looming horror that Art Spiegelman tried to depict for children, and for us all. We cannot claim to be unable to see the warnings. They are right here.

Helmer noted that he saw right through the Nazi charade at the bonfire. Afterward, you could still find copies of the books they burned — works by Albert Einstein and other Jews — in the university library. “They were very careful,” he said, “not to burn the last copy.” The Nazis may have been evil, but they were not so stupid as to destroy their own access to knowledge. As for our homegrown nationalists here in America, we should be worried that they will.

Correction: The slogan on the January 6 insurrectionist’s sweatshirt said “Camp Auschwitz.”

Steven Gimbel is professor of philosophy and affiliate of the Jewish studies program at Gettysburg College. Gwydion Suilebhan is executive director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and project director of the New Play Exchange for the National New Play Network. 

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union’s current effort — to bolster the science of reading, strengthen the school-family connection and give kids “free books to read, love and keep” — pre-dates the backlash, but stands in contrast to it.

“We have [long] been trying to increase the titles that are available for children,” Weingarten told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. Still, “this [campaign] does counter 
 all those who are trying to either burn books, or to censor books,” she added. 

The nation’s second-largest teachers union has nurtured a years-long partnership, Weingarten said, with , a marketplace that provides affordable children’s books to educators of high-needs students. The “Reading Opens the World” campaign’s 1 million books will be sourced from their site and distributed at events beginning this holiday season and running through 2022.

“In the aftermath of this [pandemic,]” Weingarten said, “we thought we would step in and do something muscular and fun.”

The $2 million, multi-year campaign kicked off Tuesday in the cafeteria of Malcolm X Elementary School in Washington, D.C., a majority-Black school where a hand-drawn banner reading “My Black is Beautiful” hung above the lectern. After the event, which concluded with read-aloud groups, students were sent home with books by Black authors or that featured Black main characters, including and . 

The AFT’s ambitious effort drops as controversies over what students learn — and read — roil to fever pitch. In late November, the American Library Association said that schools had seen than at any previous point in recent decades.

“What we’re observing, really in the last year, is a real effort to remove books dealing with the LGBTQ person’s experience, or the experiences of persons who are Black, Indigenous or persons of color,” ALA Director Deborah Caldwell-Stone told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. 

Many of those challenges have come from parents and community members who have received materials from conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education, Caldwell-Stone said. Social media frequently accelerates complaints, she added, noting that the ALA often sees parents from disparate locations object to the same titles in the days after a video or post goes viral online.

In mid-November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to look into “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography” — as legislators also passed legislation tamping down how teachers can approach conversations related to race and gender in the classroom. Amid the fervor, state GOP Rep. Matt Krause reached out directly to superintendents asking whether books on an list could be found on their shelves.

None of the works that the AFT specified it will give to students are on that list, but many do address race and racial identity.

“The titles that we’re distributing today are ensuring that kids have diversity in the books that they’re reading,” Weingarten said. 

Rep. Krause did not respond to requests for comment on the union’s new initiative.

Numerous studies document persistent racial and gender gaps in representation within the youth literature genre. In 2018, , while Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous people led 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of titles, respectively, according to numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

Throughout the rest of December, 20 local AFT affiliates from Puerto Rico to Houston to Indiana will hold literacy events similar to Tuesday’s kick-off in the nation’s capital. In the new year, book-laden buses will distribute volumes to students in harder-to-reach areas.

Books will be reflective of those students’ linguistic and racial background, AFT communications director Leslie Getzinger wrote in an email to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

In addition to distributing books, the 1.7 million-member union also intends to equip teachers and parents with tips for boosting literacy, including providing instructors with information on the science of reading. The approach, long backed by research, emphasizes phonics and decoding words over text recognition through exposure and context. While more and more teacher training programs have adopted the science of reading, there is still dissension at the district and classroom level over how best to teach reading and confront a national epidemic of illiteracy.

Collaboration between schools and families will also be a lynchpin of the new efforts, the AFT said in a .

The union hopes that its campaign will help students catch up on learning they may have missed during the pandemic. The latest research on academic achievement finds that, overall, students are three months behind in reading, and that students at majority-Black schools may be as many as 12 months behind their peers at majority-white schools.

But in addition to making up for academic losses, some officials involved in the literacy effort know that the possibilities extend far beyond the classroom. In the AFT’s release, Weingarten refers to reading as “key to life, to joy—to our very existence,”

From the Malcolm X Elementary School cafeteria, D.C. union President Jacqueline Pogue-Lyons read the young students a quote from their building’s namesake:

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”