Progressive parents in Oklahoma offer blueprint to mess with MAGA censorship

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4 days ago

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.
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