Lake Bluff trustees continue discussions about flag policies on village-owned properties
Village trustees met June 23 as the Committee of the Whole, where they discussed current regulations on displays on village property as well as possible changes to village special event permit rules. The meeting occurred two weeks after a pair on contentious meetings where the subject of flying a LGBTQ+ pride flag on village-owned property was hotly debated
Ahead of the June 23 meeting, trustees reviewed a memo from Village Administrator Drew Irvin and Village Attorney Peter Friedman containing suggestion the board could start a 'limited' policy authorizing government flags, displays and holiday decorations and public service announcements on the village flagpoles.
'By adopting its own speech policy, the village puts itself in the best situation should challenges arise,' the memo noted, alluding to free speech issues.
Irvin and Friedman said the other option would be maintaining current policy of only permitting holiday decorations and government flags, without a formal policy.
Trustees also reviewed possible changes to the special events policy program including a establishing a maximum time duration for events and limiting the special events to residents and or local sponsoring organizations.
The overall debate lasted for more than an hour, but the trustees did not find consensus on either proposal. That set the stage for additional discussion in the future.
'I don't think that it makes sense that to do something swiftly and then say we can change it later,' Trustee Taryn Fisher said.
Irvin noted additional changes can be made upon getting additional feedback at future village board meetings.
'We can work with Peter (Friedman) to bring this back once a quarter until we get it right or better,' he said.
The latest conversation served the latest chapter in discussions over whether a LGBTQ + flag can be flown on a village-owned flagpole, which has been a topic under formal village study since 2023.
In May, trustees voted 4-2 against permitting the flying of certain non-governmental commemorative flags including the LGBTQ+ flag on village-owned flagpoles. The majority of trustees feared the village's role in permitting some flags, but not others.
Many residents protested the decision at the June 9 meeting, leading to some acrimony between trustees.
The June 23 meeting featured toned-down rhetoric and only two members of the public spoke.
'We had an emotionally charged, painful, disruptive meeting that was also what government is about,' Fisher reflected. 'We heard from our community and we made a choice. We all need to sit and think about it be thoughtful about our next steps.'
Meanwhile, several residents sponsored a 'Pridefest' celebration on June 22 at the Village Green. Ribbons and bunting from the events on the trees and lamp posts for several days afterward.
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Progressive parents in Oklahoma offer blueprint to mess with MAGA censorship
Justice Samuel Alito may hide behind stuffy robes, but the whiniest member of the Supreme Court can't hide that his personality is best summed up as 'worst parent at your kid's school.' Whether you've had children or were once a child at a public school, you know his type: the loathsome puritan who throws a fit every time he suspects a student might feel a pang of enjoyment during the process of learning. These are the parents who get Halloween costumes banned, demand that the fashionable toys be outlawed from playgrounds and, of course, want any book that threatens to be interesting enough to read banned. Unsurprisingly, Alito authored last week's 6-3 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case granting the most miserable parent in the PTA veto power over the entire school's curriculum. The case involved a school district in Virginia, where right-wing parents were abusing the 'opt-out' system meant to allow parents limited ability to take kids out of class for lessons that conflicted with the parents' religious beliefs. The school had recently added some picture books to the list approved for classroom use that featured LGBTQ characters, mostly for storytelling hours in elementary schools. Under a deluge of propaganda falsely portraying these books as sexual — which they most definitely were not — masses of parents demanded broad 'opt-out' rights of any lesson involving the books. The opt-outs spun out of control, threatening to make reading hour impossible, so the school tried to restrict the policy. But the Supreme Court's conservative majority forced the school to retain broad 'opt-out' rights for parents. Alito, who is as intellectually dishonest as he is self-pitying, tried to pretend the decision was a 'compromise.' He repeatedly misrepresented the content of the books with hysterical language. As legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern explained at Slate, Alito 'reframes these utterly innocent children's books as insidious propaganda designed to brainwash children.' The goal here is not only to reinscribe blatant homophobia into the law, but also to minimize the impact of the decision by implying it only impacts 'gay' books. But it's far broader than that, as Vox legal journalist Ian Millhiser notes. The ruling empowers 'parents who object to any form of classroom instruction on religious grounds' to demand opt-out rights — or the school to censor the material entirely. Stern continues: The problem with this request is that schools cannot possibly know, in advance, which religious views are held by which parents, and which books or lessons those parents might find objectionable. In the past, parents have sued school districts objecting, on religious grounds, to lessons that touch on topics as diverse as divorce, interfaith couples and 'immodest dress.' They've objected to books which expose readers to evolution, pacifism, magic, women achieving things outside of the home and 'false views of death.'The 'Harry Potter' books are a frequent target of ire from Alito-esque parents who think fantasy novels literally teach kids how to perform occult magic. Ironically, the author, J.K. Rowling, supports the anti-trans hysteria that helped lead to this decision. But that underscores the Pandora's box of chaos the Supreme Court, in a homophobic fit, has unleashed. Anything can be framed as a 'religious belief,' entitling parents to meddle with what's available in the classroom. In Florida, the 'Don't Say Gay' law that offered similarly broad parental complaint rights led teachers to pull all books from shelves, lest some unhinged parent declare that 'See Spot Run' offended their reading of Genesis 7:2. This was fine by Florida Republicans, who have long suspected reading leads to thinking — and eventually to voting for Democrats. However, mischief can cut in multiple directions, as parents in Oklahoma have figured out. As Judd Legum of Popular Information reported last month, progressives in the state are using a broad 'opt-out' provision to fight back against efforts to use public schools to push right-wing propaganda on students. The Donald Trump-worshipping state superintendent, Ryan Walters, has imposed a social studies curriculum teaching outright lies, such as 'discrepancies' in the 2020 election and that the U.S. was founded as a 'Christian' nation. The state also passed a law in 2024 giving any parent the right to withdraw a child from any lesson they deem 'harmful.' The legislation was intended to give right-wing parents the ability to disrupt lessons in science, history or other subjects that make Christian nationalists grumpy. But a group called We're Oklahoma Education (WOKE) is encouraging parents to use it to pull kids from classes teaching these false views of history or other lessons corrupted by right-wing propaganda. Another group of Oklahomans is also suing to block the new curriculum on the grounds of religious freedom. The lead plaintiff, Rev. Dr. Mitch Randall, explained his views: 'As a Christian, I object to Oklahoma's new social studies standards that require teachers to deceive students by presenting inaccurate information as fact.' I am but a humble journalist, and so I'm not in the business of recommending action to folks on the ground. Still, the Supreme Court's decision has opened the door for parents and activist groups in many states to take similar actions, citing religious objections to efforts by Republicans to inject right-wing propaganda into the classroom. Randall's lawsuit, which is backed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, broadly objects to teaching any religion in schools, claiming such lessons could conflict with religious views taught at home. Similar arguments could be used against states like Texas and Louisiana, which are trying to mandate the Ten Commandments on classroom walls and replace regular reading classes with Bible studies. Multiple states have also introduced 'PragerU' materials in classrooms — including video lessons containing factual inaccuracies, like Frederick Douglass describing slavery as a 'compromise' that benefited the country — even though they are merely right-wing historical revisionism full of disinformation. Lying to kids no doubt violates the religious beliefs of many liberal parents, who just got the green light from the Supreme Court to use that fact to interfere with classroom lessons. Recent history shows that the Supreme Court has regretted hasty decisions rooted in far-right ideology due to the chaos they have unleashed. In 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion restraining governments from gun regulations that weren't 'consistent with' the laws of the 18th century. As people not blinded by NRA propaganda noted, this meant the law could never reflect changes in technology or social structures that have occurred in the past 250 years. Sure enough, disorder followed. Plaintiffs challenged laws restricting wife-beaters from owning guns, because beating your wife was legal in the 18th century. Others claimed they were now allowed to have military-style assault weapons, because they weren't invented in the 18th century, which means they couldn't be banned. Plaintiffs argued children should be able to own guns, like they did in the 18th century. Some argued they have a right to own machine guns. The Supreme Court has been playing clean-up ever since, using convoluted non-logic to argue that the 'no new laws since 1776' logic doesn't apply to domestic abusers or federal laws restricting deadly gun modifications. They have also quietly let states keep restrictions on assault weapons, and kept in place laws allowing federal authorities to prosecute illegal arms dealers. Thomas' fantasy America — where everyone, including junior high school kids, is packing a machine gun — was not as great as he envisioned. There were a lot of radical decisions this term that promise to create similar legal bedlam, especially one that seemingly cleared the way for Trump to deny the plain text of the Constitution granting birthright citizenship. This history of gun control decisions, however, shows the conservative justices are often not prepared to deal with the fallout from problems they create. The justices were so blinded by homophobia that they gave parents broad rights to challenge any book based on vague religious objections, without considering how that power could be used by all manner of people, including those with more progressive views. Maybe nothing will come of it. Or maybe the Supreme Court will come to regret this as one of many half-baked decisions. The post Progressive parents in Oklahoma offer blueprint to mess with MAGA censorship appeared first on
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Liberals Are Going to Keep Losing at the Supreme Court
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Supreme Court delivered a string of major losses for liberal Americans in recent weeks. Two in particular stand out: In United States v. Skrmetti, the Court's conservative majority upheld a state law outlawing minors' access to puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the justices created a new constitutional entitlement for religious parents to shield their children from learning about LGBTQ people in public schools. Defeats like these have become the norm since Donald Trump jolted the Court rightward. For many progressives, the narrative is straightforward: Ambitious, doctrinaire, Republican-appointed justices are systematically dismantling liberal precedents over the impassioned but impotent dissents of their Democratic-appointed colleagues. This account accurately captures the speed, scope, and partisanship of the Court's conservative counterrevolution. Yet it obscures a difficult truth: Progressive lawyers paved the road to these losses. Rulings such as those in Skrmetti and Mahmoud are the predictable consequences of liberal litigation strategies that invite a hostile Court to codify an agenda that the Court's conservative majority was handpicked to establish. The Supreme Court cannot act without cases. It cannot initiate litigation. To reshape doctrine in the ways the justices want, they depend on litigants to bring suits to them. Both of these cases represent unforced errors; liberal lawyers chose to fight for ideas the justices were explicitly appointed to oppose. Poorly chosen liberal challenges are a gift to a conservative majority eager to recast constitutional law. [Paul Rosenzweig: The Supreme Court's inconsistency is very revealing] Progressive lawyers need a strategic recalibration, something I argue in a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article. They need to stop reflexively turning to federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court. Avoiding high-risk, high-profile litigation in inhospitable forums does not mean abandoning constitutional advocacy. It means redirecting that advocacy toward the democratic arenas of constitutional politics, such as legislatures, ballot initiatives, grassroots organizing, and the broader public square. In these spaces, progressives can build popular support, blunt the impact of adverse rulings, and shape the constitutional culture that, over time, influences judicial doctrine itself. The Skrmetti case began in April 2023, when the American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennessee to block the state from banning certain treatments of gender dysphoria for minors. (I'd worked at the ACLU as a legal fellow a year earlier but had no involvement in the case.) After an initial trial-court victory for the liberal plaintiffs, the state appealed the decision to the Sixth Circuit. That court overturned the lower court's decision and upheld the ban. The ACLU could have accepted this regional setback. The Sixth Circuit's decisions bind just four states—Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Although the outcome was surely painful for the plaintiffs, the ruling did not overturn other lower-court decisions protecting transgender rights that had been decided in other states. Declining to appeal need not constitute an endorsement of the decision. Rather, it would have reflected a pragmatic assessment that the Court's conservative justices were more likely to amplify than alleviate harm. Instead, the ACLU (later joined by the Biden administration) petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. The Court's conservative majority obliged and accepted the case for full review in June 2024. The decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts earlier this month, which was joined by all of his fellow Republican appointees, is the unhappy result. In concrete terms, the decision allows states with previously blocked bans to seek their restoration, and emboldens states without bans to enact them, assured of constitutional cover. Yet when the Supreme Court adjudicates, it does more than resolve a dispute between two parties. It shapes the trajectory of constitutional interpretation and political contestation. Its rulings influence not just courts and legislatures but also public discourse and perception. By affirming the result and much of the rationale of the Sixth Circuit—and condoning the open animus toward transgender people voiced by Tennessee lawmakers—the Court didn't merely uphold one type of law. It radiated anti-transgender sentiment in explicit constitutional doctrine and the wider constitutional culture that shapes politics, law, and public dialogue. Legally, Skrmetti deprives transgender advocates of a key sex-discrimination argument and signals to lower courts that the highest court takes a skeptical view of transgender-rights claims made under equal-protection law. Politically, it encourages Republican officials to pursue even more restrictive laws targeting transgender people. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump-administration figures praised the ruling and vowed to escalate their crackdown on transgender rights, including access to gender-affirming care treatments for minors in blue states. Justice Amy Coney Barrett's Skrmetti concurrence—joined in full by Justice Clarence Thomas and substantively endorsed by Justice Samuel Alito—goes further in inviting discrimination against transgender people. Before oral argument, some progressives had hoped that Barrett would serve as a swing vote to strike down the law. Instead, she staked out a position even more extreme than the majority opinion, writing that transgender people do not qualify as a suspect or quasi-suspect class under the equal-protection clause. Her reasoning, if embraced by lower courts, would uphold sweeping discriminatory policies targeting transgender adults—such as bans on receiving gender-affirming care and using public facilities—under the guise of 'legitimate regulatory policy.' And it telegraphs to lawmakers agitating for more aggressive attacks on transgender people that the Court will not stand in their way. Advocates should know that this is a risk they are taking. Supreme Court justices have little stopping them from addressing unraised issues and disturbing unrelated precedent. The Roberts Court has made something of a habit of doing so, with its conservative justices frequently reaching to decide questions not before them. In Skrmetti, instead of merely applying precedent on the appropriate standard for evaluating Tennessee's law and then remanding to the Sixth Circuit for further proceedings, the conservative majority decided the law's constitutionality outright—an aggressive and unnecessary move. That this was totally avoidable underscores that liberal advocates would be wise to refrain from channeling long-shot cases to unsympathetic courts—not just the Supreme Court but many federal appellate courts as well, which are filled with ideologically vetted conservative judges from the previous Trump term. Even if liberals do occasionally win at appellate courts, those victories can prove Pyrrhic, setting up conservatives with a fast track to the Supreme Court. Mahmoud v. Taylor offers a cautionary tale of initial liberal wins turning into bigger defeats. After adding books with LGBTQ characters and themes to elementary curricula, the public-school district in Montgomery County, Maryland, created a notice and opt-out system for parents who wanted to withdraw their kids from instruction with the materials. The district later removed the opt-out system following protests from LGBTQ families that found it stigmatizing and discriminatory. Then a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents with young children objected to the removal. By all accounts, these parents were sincere in their religious convictions. They sought accommodations that neighboring school districts had given similarly situated parents; none wanted to ban the books entirely from the school. Many of the objecting parents were comfortable with their kids reading the books at more advanced ages. Yet the district refused to compromise, dismissing hundreds of parental complaints requesting a restoration of the opt-out. What could have been resolved through negotiation transformed into a culture-war flash point and a lawsuit. From the outset of litigation, the school district should have seen the warning signs. The Becket Fund, a powerhouse religious-liberty organization that has won eight (and lost zero) Supreme Court cases in the past decade, represented the parents in their suit, and conservative media outlets regularly covered even routine procedural developments. That should have alerted the district that the stakes were far greater than local policy. A strategic retreat—restoring the opt-out and pursuing legal maneuvers to moot the case, including after the Court granted certiorari—would have shown prudence, not capitulation. Instead, the district pressed on. Its temporary wins at the trial and appellate stages then teed up the Supreme Court reversal that has now reshaped constitutional doctrine nationwide. In ruling for the parents, the Roberts Court extended a nearly unbroken streak of favoring free-exercise claimants, largely conservative Christians. Mahmoud imposes a rigid, nationwide rule that sharply limits schools' ability to balance inclusion with parental concerns. Discovering a new constitutional right for parents to opt out of teaching 'subtle' themes that conflict with their religious beliefs, the decision strips locally elected school boards of the power to make nuanced curricular judgments and hands it to federal judges. It saddles schools with new administrative burdens, inhibits the development of pluralistic curricula, and invites ideological censorship masquerading as religious accommodation. Ironically, a local effort to affirm LGBTQ dignity in a county of 1 million residents led the Supreme Court to inflict a blow to that dignity across a nation of 340 million. Much was lost in the crossfire. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, Mahmoud threatens the 'very essence' of American public education and democracy. For advocates in the progressive legal world, deprioritizing litigation will require a theoretical shift, a move away from the court-centric constitutional vision that has defined progressive legal thought since the Warren and early Burger Courts and has been sustained by occasional liberal victories in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. It will necessitate recognizing that the Court is not the sole or even primary engine of constitutional interpretation. The Court's pronouncements on constitutional law are important, of course. But other institutions and spaces—legislatures, referenda, classrooms, workplaces, media, even group chats and other parts of the public square—have a role to play in the articulation of constitutional ideas. De-emphasizing the courts as sources of legal interpretation and policy change can allow progressives to correctly conceptualize constitutional politics as a participatory, democratic project with institutional and noninstitutional dimensions, not a top-down one outsourced to nine people on the Supreme Court. The public's views should matter a great deal. No Court, however reactionary, operates in a vacuum or with impunity. Justices are shaped by the same gravitational social and political forces as everyone else. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo observed in 1921, 'The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.' Polling shows that most Americans, including four out of every five Republicans, support restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. Even in liberal Maryland, two-thirds of voters oppose LGBTQ-focused curricula for young students. Asking a conservative court to override that sentiment—to go where many Democratic voters have yet to go—was never viable. Without public opinion on their side, liberal litigators had little leverage or hope of winning. I saw this disconnect up close at the ACLU. My colleagues were smart and dedicated, carrying the immense emotional weight of fighting for the fundamental dignity of vulnerable people in a climate of growing prejudice and political attack. But many treated any doubts about transgender rights as simple bigotry. Although this approach foregrounded empathy for transgender people, it often failed to genuinely engage with the majority of Americans, who had questions about athletic competition and medical decisions for minors. [Leah Litman: The archaic sex-discrimination case the Supreme Court is reviving] Rather than speak directly to these concerns, liberal litigators sometimes scorned public opinion, confident in the righteousness of their views. As a recent New York Times Magazine feature revealed, the legal advocates behind Skrmetti operated from academic and activist theories of sex and gender that were out of the mainstream. While public support for transgender rights and the medical consensus on treatments for minors' gender dysphoria fractured, advocates such as the ACLU doubled down on rhetorical purity rather than persuasion. In one widely shared post, the ACLU declared, 'Men who get their periods are men. Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.' Another post dismissed as a 'MYTH' the near–universally held view that 'sex is binary, apparent at birth.' This kind of messaging garners engagement in insular, algorithm-driven online spaces but does not create a cultural foundation that moves skeptical voters and conservative judges. A political and legal strategy anchored in Judith Butler is not going to convince Brett Kavanaugh. This recalibration doesn't mean giving up on litigation altogether. But it does mean approaching it with greater realism, aiming for incremental change, not sweeping wins. It requires reading the judicial landscape honestly, studying conservative legal thinking carefully, recognizing when legal action may do more harm than good, and accepting some losses in order to preempt even bigger ones. For example, the Sixth Circuit's Skrmetti opinion, written by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, clearly foreshadowed where Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were likely to land, given Sutton's influence on contemporary conservative legal thought and the intellectual proximity of his approach and their own. Ditto for Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee to the Fourth Circuit who dissented in Mahmoud. There's a revealing paradox in contemporary liberal legal advocacy at the Supreme Court. Many progressives describe the current Court as dangerously rogue and reactionary. Yet their actions suggest a lingering faith in the Court's legitimacy and potentiality as an agent of progressive change. This dissonance surfaces when an ACLU lawyer who calls the Supreme Court a 'vile institution' is the same person who brought Skrmetti to it. Ultimately, a Court that cannot be trusted to protect rights should not be empowered to undermine them. The path forward lies in organizing, legislating, and persuading, not in supplicating before an antipathetic bench. If they take this new path, progressives may find that they can cultivate constitutional power in places the Court cannot reach. Article originally published at The Atlantic
USA Today
3 hours ago
- USA Today
They battled for parental rights decades ago. How they now view a big Supreme Court ruling
More than three decades ago, these parents battled unsuccessfully in the courts for parental rights in their public schools. Now, they weigh the high court's ruling in a key Maryland case. On April 8, 1992, Suzanne Brown asked her son, Jason Mesiti, about his day at school. 'He said, 'probably the worst in my life,'' Brown recalled. While she said the remark was 'somewhat dramatic,' she, too, was disturbed by what her son, a high school sophomore at the time, described. Mesiti had to attend an assembly about sex and AIDS prevention at his school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. He described the program's use of 'profane, lewd and lascivious language' and how at one point a demonstration included a female student pulling a condom over a male student's head. Mesiti said such actions made it feel 'like you were being Punk'd,' and Brown said she was 'totally shocked' upon reviewing a transcript of the program. His family unsuccessfully sued, with the religious beliefs of parents a key part of the case. Brown said she should have been notified about the content of that program and had the opportunity to opt out. Now, more than three decades later, parents have that right, thanks to a June 27 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with a group of Maryland parents who wanted to opt their children out of English language arts curriculum with LBGTQ+ characters. Montgomery County Public Schools initially allowed opt-outs but later ended such accommodations because they threatened to cause 'significant disruptions.' A group of parents sued, and the case before the high court was one of the most high profile this year with sweeping ramifications for public school districts across the nation. In the 6-3 decision, the court said the school district violated the parents' First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion by not allowing them to opt out from having their children read books with LGBTQ themes at school. Justice Samuel Alito said parents have an established right to direct their children's religious upbringing. The books in the Maryland case, he said, "unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage and gender." The three liberal justices disagreed. Public schools have the 'core premise' of introducing students to a 'range of concepts and views that reflect our entire society,' Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote. 'Exposure to new ideas has always been a vital part of that project, until now,' she wrote. Sotomayor said the ruling could result in 'chaos' for the public school system and have a chilling effect on disadvantaged public schools that may be wary of introducing curriculum with the potential to invite lawsuits or create logistical challenges. Looking at things now, Brown said she doesn't believe allowing parents to opt out places an 'overwhelming' burden on schools. 'If the parents don't care ... that's up to them, but if a parent does have beliefs and truths they want to stick to for their children, I think they should have the right to do that,' Brown said. Opt-outs may only provide 'myth of control,' defendant says Suzi Landolphi, who created the program Mesiti attended and was named in the lawsuit that followed, acknowledged that her tactics were unorthodox and could even be 'traumatizing' for some students. But she said school officials wanted students to attend the program given the AIDS epidemic that was, at that time, killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. She said schools could have decided whether to require parent permission for students to attend her program but that Chelmsford High School opted not to do so. USA TODAY reached out to the school for comment. Though she 'would've absolutely preferred" students to have parental permission to attend her program, Landolphi moved forward with the goal of using humor and theatricality to spread awareness of serious issues among high school students. 'The last thing in the world I want to do is stand up there and lecture and, first of all, not have any young people come in to the performance or to the presentation, and then I don't want them to tune out, because this is important, life-saving information,' she said. Landolphi, who now works as a therapist, said she has 'no trouble' with parents wanting to prevent their children from being exposed to certain content. But she said that such measures may only support the 'myth of control." Parents can't expect to shield their children from everything they find objectionable in the age of smartphones and social media, she said. Brown described her family as Christ followers but said her objection to Landolphi's program more than three decades ago was driven primarily by 'common sense.' A district court dismissed her lawsuit in 1995. The decision was later upheld by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Landolphi told USA TODAY there have been times when she disagreed with her children's curriculum. Those occasions prompted conversations that "allowed for deeper understanding and connection," but she said she "never felt burdened" by such incidents. Mesiti, like his mother, told USA TODAY that parents 'have a right to do what they want' as it relates to their children. At the same time, he disagrees with book bans and thinks students benefit from exposure to diverse beliefs and lifestyles. "I believe schools should distinguish between potentially harmful, age-inappropriate content and lawful, necessary civil-rights education," Mesiti said. "The former may justify opt-outs, and the latter should remain mandatory for informed citizenship and workplace readiness." But Mesiti said he is concerned about public schools "playing it safe" in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Maryland case, and "limiting essential, factual curriculum." Likewise, Zach Schurin, an attorney with expertise in education law, echoed Sotomayor's concerns. Public school districts may now 'think very long and hard about including curriculum that is controversial in nature,' he said. Based on the court's ruling, a school that still seeks to mandate such material without allowing opt-outs must prove that it has a compelling interest in doing so that overrides the burden on parents' free exercise of religion, he said. But he said the details of the ruling suggest it 'would be hard to meet that standard.' Tennessee case was a 'proxy war' in the 80s The multitude of perspectives on parents' rights speaks to the "fundamental, touchy nature" of public education, said Stephen Bates, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor and author of the book 'Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right and the Struggle for Control of our Classrooms.' The book is based on Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education, a 1987 case in Tennessee that has parallels to the recent Maryland case. It involved a group of evangelical parents who felt that requiring students to read material that conflicted with their religious beliefs was a violation of their First Amendment rights. A judge ruled in 1986 that the parents had a right to opt their children out of the district's reading program 'with appropriate provisions for home instruction' while still having them attend public school for other subjects. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling the following year and sent the case back to the lower court with 'directions to dismiss the complaint.' It was ultimately a 'political story,' Bates said. Though the case originated as a local issue, it attracted attention from national groups and became 'kind of a proxy war." The parents were backed by Concerned Women for America, for example, while the civil liberties group People for the American Way supported the school on the grounds that a ruling in the parents' favor 'could have caused chaos in public education across the country.' The Maryland case has similarly involved national players. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty represented the Maryland parents, who also had support from the Southeastern Legal Foundation and Regent University's Robertson Center for Constitutional Law. The school district, however, had backing from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and GLAAD. Bates supported the Supreme Court's ruling and said classrooms benefit from accommodating students from a variety of perspectives. 'The public school is one of the last places in American life where people from different backgrounds mix,' he said. 'In our polarized times, that kind of exposure matters.' He noted that some families left Montgomery County Public Schools over the ban on opt-outs, meaning a 'curriculum designed to promote diversity ended up making the schools less diverse.' 'Behind every case are families doing their best' Corky Leebaert was in seventh grade when his father, Turk Leebaert, objected to his mandatory health class in 1998. The course covered topics including drugs, alcohol and sex. Though a Connecticut law allowed parents to opt their children out of lessons related to family life, such as sexuality and family planning, Turk Leebaert sought to remove his son from the course altogether. Corky Leebaert failed the course due to lack of attendance. His father later sued school officials and the town of Fairfield, Connecticut in 2002 on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds. 'I believe that God has empowered human beings with the right to bring their children up with correct moral principles in dealing with the issues taught in this course, not the school system,' Turk Leebaert wrote in an affidavit referenced in the lawsuit. Corky Leebaert told USA TODAY he didn't 'fully grasp the legal significance of what was happening' at the time given his young age but felt a 'quiet tension' from faculty and staff. 'I wouldn't describe it as overt mistreatment, but there was definitely a sense that I was 'part of something' that made people uncomfortable,' he said. 'It was subtle – hesitations in conversation, brief looks – but it was there.' He didn't have a personal objection to the material but respected his father's beliefs and decision to pursue legal action. Though he said he understands schools "have an obligation to provide consistent education," which was among a district court judge's reasons for ruling against his father, he also believes parents should have a right to opt their children out of curriculum they find 'unethical or morally inappropriate.' In cases like the one in Maryland, he supports schools having inclusive books in the curriculum but allowing parents to opt out. If the majority do, he said the school should find alternative material. At the same time, he's 'cautious about broad opt-out rights.' 'If we allow opt-outs for every issue that makes someone uncomfortable, we risk eroding the integrity of public education,' he said. Now a father himself, Leebaert said he keeps tabs on his children's curriculum, 'not because I'm looking for things to reject, but because I believe engagement is part of responsible parenting.' He ultimately thinks students are best served when parents and schools build a partnership in which there is room for 'flexibility and accommodation.' 'Leebaert v. Harrington taught me that legal systems often move impersonally, but behind every case are families doing their best to navigate difficult questions,' he said. BrieAnna Frank is a First Amendment Reporting Fellow at USA TODAY. Reach her at bjfrank@ USA TODAY's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
