BREAKING: The three liberal Supreme Court justices release a scathing dissent after the Republican-controlled judges issue an anti-LGBTQ ruling that “ushers in a new reality” that will deny children the “opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society.”
This is only the third time that Sonia Sotomayor has read her dissent from the bench, indicating strong disapproval…
“Exposing students to the ‘message’ that LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, supported by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The ruling was made in favor of a group of parents who want to opt their children out of elementary school lessons that include LGBTQ storybooks. The case will now go back to a lower court for final decision on whether schools must provide such an opt-out option.
Thanks to the Republican justices, school districts must now inform parents in advance of the books being read in class and allow them to pull their children if they choose. For underfunded schools, this additional burden will be too much to bear. It adds administrative costs and distracts teachers who are already struggling to teach overcrowded classrooms. Taken in tandem with the Trump administration’s efforts to completely eliminate the Department of Education, it’s a grim omen of things to come.
Crucially, the decision is a blatant handout to the religious radicals who helped put Donald Trump in power, which in turn tilted the court even more conservative. Such people want to pretend that LGBTQ people don’t even exist.
“Given the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country, countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parent’s religious beliefs. If that is sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny, then little is not,” Sotomayor continued.
She predicted that the decision will cause “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.”
“Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” she continued. “The harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too. Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students’ learning and development.”
“Worse yet, the majority closes its eyes to the inevitable chilling effects of its ruling,” she went on. “Many school districts, and particularly the most resource strapped, cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences. Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections.”
“The Court’s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards,” she added. “Because I cannot countenance the Court’s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.”
Scottie's Playtime 
I feel sorry for the parents of kids who are already ‘out’, or parents themselves who are ‘out’ themselves. Or, and most importantly, children who are strongly leaning a different way. Reading a story about a gay child or a gay family is NOT going to make a kid change his or her sexual identity, no matter what that child identifies as.
It should open doors to discussions that kids need to have, as do many adults.
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Hi Judy. You say that reading a story won’t turn their kid gay, but that is exactly what they think. Especially the fundamentalist religious ones. See they KNOW their god created their children perfectly straight cis angels. Yet as soon as the kids see a gay or trans person on TV, in a movie, or god forbid in a book their teacher read / the kid read, they will instantly have the demon of being gay or trans let into their mind, body, and soul. After all being gay / trans is a choice. They are sure of that because they never felt gay or trans, so of course it is a choice the bad people are making to hurt everyone else. They are divided into two groups, the parents / followers and the wealthy Christian leaders who want to run society via their church doctrine. The parents worry that the things the leaders tell them about gays going to hell, that gays / trans target their kids for sexualization or recruitment. The leaders want to win the culture war and realize that because the gays won acceptance based on personal stories friendships in school, family, and working together showing that being gay was not the evil the haters claimed. So to make sure they don’t lose that trans war they are moving to vilify them and remove protections that allow them to be seen in public as a positive. That is why they are trying to destroy drag queen story hours and family friendly drag events. They don’t want the kids / people to see they are normal people hurting no one. They are desperate to remove tolerance and anti-bullying campaigns that show those who are different are just like everyone else. The haters need the idea that they are horrible evil people to make the hate grow and work. That is why they do not want the discussions that you talked about, they don’t want others having them with their children because they want to tell their children how very evil and dangerous these LGBTQ+ kids / people are. Hugs
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How many US public schools-already underfunded to the point of cutting days and hours of days in classroom-even still have any of these “controversial” books on the shelves? FFS.
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Hi Ali. Erasing the LGBTQ+ from public view is the point. They want no representation or mention of people like me at all. At the same time they are forcing Christian symbols, Christian commandments, Christian holidays on the public. Their view and it seems the view of the SCOTUS is that we must tolerate and accept their pushing their religious views on us but they don’t have to do the same toward us. They get to be seen, we must return to hiding like in the 1980s rural high school I attended and the Christian boarding school after that. Hide and let no one know as it will destroy you. Worse than hiding the abuse was hiding who I really was. Hugs
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