As a new school year kicks into gear, a Biden-appointed federal judge is using the legal equivalent of grade inflation to prop up the misguided efforts of a local school board to indoctrinate students with gender ideology. On Aug. 24, the U.S. District Court judge denied a requested injunction from a group of Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox parents to opt their children out of LGBT storybook lessons, exposing the judge’s grave misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s religious freedom jurisprudence.
A stone’s throw from Washington, D.C., Montgomery County Public Schools is one of the largest public school systems in the country, with roughly 70,000 students attending elementary school. Last fall, the Montgomery County Board of Education announced it was adopting a collection of more than 20 “LGBTQ+ inclusive” books for use in pre-K through eighth-grade classrooms.
The collection calls for pre-K students ages 3-5 to read Pride Puppy!, the story of two women who take their children to a “Pride Day” parade. A word list using the letters of the alphabet to show what a child might see includes the words “leather,” “underwear,” and “[drag] queen.”
Fifth graders — typically 10- and 11-year-old children — will read Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, about an elementary school-aged girl who tells her mother, “I don’t feel like a boy. I AM a boy.” Her mother agrees to tell their family “that we know … You are a boy.” But when Penelope’s brother protests, “You can’t become a boy. You have to be born one,” he’s told that “not everything needs to make sense. This is about love.”
Other books include What are Your Words?, a story about a child “figuring out” “their” pronouns, and Intersection Allies: We Make Room For All, a book that offers leftist definitions for “sex,” “gender,” and “transgender” as well as asks readers what pronouns “fit them best.”
When parents initially raised objections to the books, the school board said they could opt their children out of instruction involving the books, as parents can for other parts of the curriculum. By the spring, however, the school board announced parents would not only no longer be notified in advance when the books would be read, they also couldn’t opt their children out of instruction involving the books.
