In his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri—“Of the Divine Master”—Pope Pius XI reflected on the family’s God-given authority in education. The Holy Father defended the natural right of parents in education by adverting to first principles:
The family holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth.
Since the natural right of parents to educate their children is absolutely prior to any claims of the state, it is of such force as to demand recognition in the order of constitutional law, contrary legislation notwithstanding. Hence, the pope went on to quote an example from the United States Supreme Court’s 1925 decision Pierce v. Society of Sisters, in which the Supreme Court struck down Oregon’s compulsory public school attendance law.
This law would have had the effect of shutting down the schools established by the Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, founded by Blessed Marie-Rose Durocher of Quebec in 1843. In 1859, sisters of the order heeded the call to spread education to the Pacific Northwest, with an emphasis on providing for the young, poor, and women. The sisters founded St. Mary’s Academy in Oregon—and its first class of students was made up of three Catholics, two Jews, and an Anglican. Unsurprisingly, the compulsory attendance law was propelled forward by a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, whose white supremacy, nativism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism were well known. The Klan believed that the compulsory public school attendance law would “Americanize” young Oregonians, which for the Klan meant indoctrination and assimilation into its peculiar identitarian vision.
“The Board cannot purport to rescue one group of students from stigma and isolation by stigmatizing and isolating another.”
In Pierce, the Supreme Court ruled that the law was unconstitutional. Pope Pius XI approvingly quoted the Court’s linchpin reasoning to strike down the law: “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty, to educate him and prepare him for the fulfillment of his obligations.” This right, the Court contended, was included in the “fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments of this Union repose.” The Court thus (correctly) characterized the founding American theory of liberty as essentially familistic (in which the fundamental cells of society are families), not atomistic (in which individuals are the fundamental unit, in a contractual relationship with an overweening state). As Pius XI articulated, these ideas are deeply rooted in the natural law philosophy articulated by Thomas Aquinas, who grounded the right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children in the natural law.
While the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in subsequent decades careened into the waters of radical individualism, Pierce has remained a cornerstone of American constitutional law protecting the rights of parents in education. Its legacy of protecting parental rights as deeply intertwined with religious free exercise rights was underscored in the Wisconsin v. Yoder case (1972), in which the Court struck down another compulsory school attendance law as violative of the parental and free exercise rights of Amish families. The essentially Thomistic legacy of Pierce and Yoder was carried forward in a landmark case the Supreme Court handed down in recent weeks, in which the rights of the family were vindicated anew.
Mahmoud v. Taylor featured several Muslim and Catholic plaintiff parents with traditional beliefs about sexuality and marriage who objected to “LGTBQ+-Inclusive” books that became part of the required curriculum for their young children. Muslim parents Tamer Mahmoud and his wife Enas Barakat believe that God created mankind “as male and female” and that “‘gender’ cannot be unwoven from biological ‘sex’”—and they believed it was immoral to expose their young children to teachings that undermined Islamic teaching about sexuality. Similarly, parents Jeff and Svitlana Roman (Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox, respectively) believed that the curriculum threatened to undermine the traditional teachings of the Church and Scripture regarding sexuality and marriage.
Hence, these and other parents sought an opt-out from grade school lessons in which “LGBTQ+-inclusive” books were to be read aloud and discussed. For example, the book Born Ready, about the biological female Penelope who comes to believe she is a boy, suggests it is hateful to oppose medical gender transition procedures. Another book, Prince & Knight, features a prince who rejects various prospective brides, falls in love with a male knight, and climaxes with the kingdom celebrating their gay wedding. According to the Maryland Montgomery County Board of Education, the underlying goal of the books was to “disrupt” “heteronormative” and “cisnormative” power structures.
But the board forbade opt-outs for traditional, religious families—missing such class days would be unexcused absences—and declared they would not inform parents about “LGBTQ+-inclusive” lesson plans. Teachers were instructed to “guide” discussions in a way that would effectively shut down and marginalize perspectives on marriage and sexuality that dissented from the state’s woke dogmas. So, if a child were to say, “Somebody born a boy cannot become a girl,” the teacher is directed to reply, “That comment is hurtful.” Comments skeptical of gay marriage were to be replied by affirming a kind of moral relativism. These guidelines belie the board’s contentions that the materials merely sought to expose students to the fact that LGBTQ+ people “exist.” A curriculum that “disrupts” “heteronormativity” is inescapably normative.
Of course, the phrase “LGBTQ+-inclusive” is a word crime and a monstrous mouthful—but it is more than that. It is an Orwellian term that obscures the fact that Montgomery County erected a secular clerisy to teach a set of sacred texts embodying woke dogmas that would be enforced by demeaning traditional Muslim and Catholic beliefs as heresies and punishing the Muslim and Catholic heretics with truancy laws. Hence, while the constituencies and interests of the old and new alphabet groups are doubtless very different, the goals, means, and even underlying philosophy of the KKK-crowd and the LGBTQ+-crowd in compulsory education have an eerie similarity: identity politics–driven ideological conformity through state coercion.
The case thus teaches us that (if we hadn’t learned the lesson already) the virtue of “inclusion” can never be the cardinal, architectonic virtue. This is because any vision of the right and the good is inevitably exclusionary. As the Court put it, “The Board cannot purport to rescue one group of students from stigma and isolation by stigmatizing and isolating another.”
“It is both insulting and legally unsound to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faiths . . .”
The woke dogmatists in this case pretended a patina of respect for traditional American liberty by replying that, if traditional religious parents don’t like it, they can send their kids to private school or homeschool. The problem with this reply is that school attendance in Maryland is mandatory—and only one of the available “options” is a taxpayer-funded “free” benefit. But the Supreme Court has long held that otherwise publicly available benefits cannot be made conditional on a citizen’s willingness to apostatize from his faith. Or, as in this case, the benefit of public schooling cannot be conditioned on bearing the unreasonable burden upon free exercise of religion: a very real threat of undermining one’s children’s religious beliefs by subjecting them to state-sponsored subversion and ridicule, however subtle.
Do only well-off and wealthy religious parents enjoy the right to raise their children according to the self-same religious beliefs that motivated them to incur the burdens of childbearing and rearing? The brute fact is that private and homeschooling is an extraordinary expense of time, treasure, and talent. Hence, the Court correctly concluded:
It is both insulting and legally unsound to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faiths, when alternatives can be prohibitively expensive and they already contribute to financing the public schools.
But none of this was persuasive to the “progressive” dissenters on the Court, whose pretensions to champion “equity” for the less well-off among us don’t seem to apply with the same vigor when traditionally religious families are concerned. According to dissenting Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, religious parents’ rights aren’t burdened because they retain the right to counteract teachings contrary to their faith in the home.
I am reminded of Justice Kagan’s characterization of American citizenship in another case, in which she suggested religious identity should be subordinated to civic identity in the public square. She wrote, “In this country, when citizens go before the government, they go not as Christians or Muslims or Jews (or what have you), but just as Americans.” Yet in Mahmoud—in which Kagan and her fellow progressives sought to defend the government-run public school as the “symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny”—LGBTQ+ identities are so important that, in addition to a series of feast days and months on our calendars, they urgently need to be promoted and celebrated in grade school curricula. Meanwhile, the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish identities are apparently so unimportant that they must be compartmentalized and privatized to give way to civic unity. How can the progressives have it both ways?
In truth, an ordered relationship with our creator is the foundation of good citizenship. This has ever been recognized in our polity, from prayers to invoke God’s aid before legislative sessions to swearing on the Bible to tell the truth before a court of law. In other words, one need not shed one’s Christian identity to be a good citizen—the opposite is the case. Similarly, parental rights in education are grounded in the family’s relationship with God as prior in the orders of being, dignity, and importance to any relationship to our fellow citizens, because parents bear the primary burden to help get their kids to heaven. This duty and right supersedes any just claim the state or one’s fellow citizens can make upon them to the contrary. When Montgomery County acted to obstruct this most fundamental of parental rights, it acted tyrannically—and we should be thankful that the Supreme Court put a stop to it.