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.”
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