As we said in our last post, today is the last opinion day of the current Supreme Court term. We suggested in that post that they might announce one more opinion day, for reasons that are more complicated than they are interesting. But as of this writing, opinion day is over and there isn’t going to be any more until next term.
In any case, we already reviewed what is probably the biggest case of the day—the Supreme Court ruling against universal injunctions, in the birthright citizenship case. That strikes a huge blow to a trend that was rapidly turning America into a judicial oligarchy.
But conservatives were not done winning, yet:
...We have our fourth opinion. It is Mahmoud v. Taylor, by Justice Alito. Huge 6-3victory for parental rights over the ability to withdraw their children from LGBTQ lessons. https://t.co/NAjtlAmKhO
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025
We talked about this case in depth when discussing its oral argument, here. If you want a Deep Dive into the legal issues, follow that link. For now, for a breaking story, we will limit ourselves to ‘lawsplaining.’
The short version is that a school district was pushing LGBTQ ideology hard during pride month, promoting books to be read in class for pre-k through fifth grade, including one called Pride Puppy which actually tells kids to go back through the book and find the drag queen. It was clearly indoctrination.
So, a number of parents, including Muslims and Catholics, demanded that their children be allowed to opt out. The school district didn’t allow it, and neither did any of the lower courts, but the Supreme Court just ruled that the school has to allow the opt out. That’s the bottom line ‘who won’ of it.
Turley continues:
...Another sharp exchange between the justices. Alito goes after Sotomayor's characterizations: "We similarly disagree with the dissent’s deliberately blinkered view that these storybooks and related instruction merely “expos[e] students to the ‘message’ that LGBTQ people exist”…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025
Recommended
The cut off text:
‘We similarly disagree with the dissent’s deliberately blinkered view that these storybooks and related instruction merely ‘expos[e] students to the ‘message’ that LGBTQ people exist’ and teach them to treat others with kindness. See post, at 1, 31 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). In making this argument, the dissent ignores what anyone who reads these books can readily see.’
During the oral argument we noted that Justice Gorsuch and Barrett both chastised the lawyer for the school district for misrepresenting what the books actually said. As we wrote:
We also admit that it was pretty funny when Gorsuch said ‘Gosh, I read it.’ As in (paraphrase) ‘don’t try to lie to me about what these books said.’ That is frankly a moment of bad lawyering, because if they can’t trust the lawyer to truthfully represent what they can see with their own eyes, they are not going to trust him on the things they can’t verify for themselves.
That chicken very much seems to have come to roost today. Just bad, bad lawyering.
...For those of us who wanted a robust defense of parental rights, there are some strong lines, including: "We reject this chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children. Yoder and…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025
The cut off text:
Yoder and Barnette embody a very different view of religious liberty, one that comports with the fundamental values of the American people.’
Yoder is Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), which dealt with forcing Amish parents to send their kids to school when it conflicted with their values. Barnette is probably West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), which dealt with school districts trying to force kids to salute the flag and Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing to, because they believed it was inappropriate idol worship. In both cases, the Supreme Court sided with parents and against school indoctrination.
...From Alito: "According to the dissent, parents who send their children to public school must endure any instruction that falls short of direct compulsion or coercion and must try to counteract that teaching at home. The Free Exercise Clause is not so feeble. The parents in…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025
The cut off text:
The parents in Barnette and Yoder were similarly capable of teaching their religious values ‘at home,’ but that made no difference to the First Amendment analysis in those cases.’
This recalls an exchange in oral argument that we covered in that Deep Dive Post when Alito said this:
Well, it's nice that you say that they respect the parents' religious beliefs, but, basically, your answer is it's just too bad. … You've got to send … your children to school. You can't afford to send them to any place except a public school, unlike, you know, most of the lawyers who argue cases here, they can send their children … to private schools, and they think that that's the way most of the world is.
But it's not. It's just too bad.
Back to Turley
...The dissenting justices again raise apocalyptic predictions for the nation by allowing children to opt out of LGBT readings: "The result will be chaos for this Nation’s public schools. Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025
That link in the first post just goes back to the main opinion.
Here's the cut off text in the second post:
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. 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.’
Of course, the truth is that the left wants this as an opportunity to indoctrinate children into the ‘right’ beliefs. We don’t say this speculatively. This author was in the proverbial ‘belly of the beast’ as a graduate of a famously leftist law school and took a course on education and the law. There is a strong faction of the left who love that most children are—through economics and legality—forced to go to public school, because they are concerned that parents might teach their children the 'wrong' lesson in home school or through the selection of a private school. Mind you, they didn’t talk about transgender issues because that was off everyone’s radar back then (we graduated in 2002), but they expressed concern that children might be raised to believe in things that are bigoted, according to them—as if having the state indoctrinate everyone's kids into all believing the exact same thing on all subjects isn’t a bigger problem. The left is fond of saying ‘diversity is our strength’ but doesn’t seem to have very much tolerance for diversity of opinion.
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