Supreme Court of the United States seems ready to endorse an extreme plan to eliminate idea of LGBTQ+ people from schools.

On its face, the Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor is about parents who wish to opt their children out of classes featuring storybooks they find objectionable. In reality, the petitioners have a much more sinister motive. Eliminate any mention of homosexuality in the classroom and punish schools that fail to comply. If the Supreme Court rules the way petitioners want – as a majority of conservative Justices seemed to signal during oral argument – they will allow radical groups of religious activists to control public education. This is a dangerous precedent that should be rejected.

One of the books at the center of the case is about marriage. In the story, a young girl is upset that her favorite uncle, Uncle Bobby, is getting married. The girl is worried that Uncle Bobby won’t be able to spend as much time with her and that she will lose her uncle to his new spouse. Her parents try to comfort her by telling her that her favorite uncle won’t love her any less or spend less time with her just because he’s getting married. Marriage is meant to be a happy occasion that should be celebrated, not something to be sad about.

Nothing controversial about that, right? This is the way we’d expect a parent to comfort their child in these circumstances. After all, the wedding industry in the US is worth about $70–100 billion every year. Weddings are celebrations of the love between two people. Objectively, the premise of the book seems harmless.

Well, it just so happens that Uncle Bobby is marrying… a man. Record scratch. According to petitioners, teaching this book is “coercion” – simply acknowledging same-sex marriage in a positive light apparently forces children to accept as fact that same-sex marriage is morally acceptable. Yes, that’s right, teaching children that marriage is to be celebrated is blasphemy – that is, only when it involves a same-sex relationship. Since it involves a same-sex couple, this book is “indoctrination”, since children are told to, as Justice Alito put it, “accept certain moral principles that are highly objectionable to parents.” Never mind that, according to a 2024 Gallup survey, approximately 7.3% of Americans identify as LGBTQ+, and that same-sex marriage is both legal and has been an integral part of society for more than a decade. It’s likely that at least one child in every classroom has an LGBTQ+ family member. Yet, the majority of conservative Justices of the Supreme Court seem to find this book so offensive that they are grappling with whether to allow parents to have their children “opt-out” of classroom instruction where such as this are read to their children – all under the guise of religious freedom.

If the petitioners get what they want, it will open the floodgates to conservative activist parents backed by big-moneyed interests to overwhelm schools with requests to opt their children out of classroom education. Fringe groups will assemble an army of parents to make a coordinated effort to control the education of our children. The effect? Widespread censorship and exclusion of LGBTQ+ people and concepts. Ultimately, schools will elect not to teach students about these subjects because complying with opt-outs will be too burdensome. Young students struggling with their sexuality will once again be shoved back into the closet, plunging society back to a time when being a young gay kid means living in fear of being bullied for being different.

And that’s just the first step. For years, the Roberts court has been gradually chipping away at the separation of church and state. We are a Christian nation after all, aren’t we? With Trump cementing in place the ultra-conservative majority through his three appointments to the high court, they have taken drastic steps to allow religious conservatives to impose their ideology on the rest of us. This case looks like it will be the next domino to fall in a long line of cases shredding the separation between church and state and imposing religious beliefs on the rest of us. Ruling for the petitioners is a slippery slope to banning other ideas and suppressing free speech in favor of religion.