A Massachusetts parent is using the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Mahmoud decision as reason to sue his school district, claiming he should have been able to opt-out his kindergartener before the child’s class read two books that included same-sex parents. It’s the same district that saw a similar case brought in 2008.
The Plaintiff’s Claim
The plaintiff, referred in court documents as Alan L., is the parent of a kindergarten student in Lexington Public Schools. Per his complaint, “He and his family believe that God created people in His image either male or female (see Gen. 1:27) and that human sexuality is a gift to be expressed only within the context of a one-man, one-woman marriage (see Matt. 19:5).”
The complaint alleges that the school “compelled a kindergartner to participate in classroom instruction that promoted sexualized and ideological messages directly contrary to his family’s faith, despite the Plaintiff’s repeated written requests for an exemption.” Remember that part about “sexualized and ideological”; we’ll revisit it below.
The plaintiff had contacted the school before the 2025-26 academic year, his complaint says, and asked to review the curriculum for both health and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) lessons. He met with the teacher and a student support instructor, then asked that his child be opted out of both health class and any DEI curriculum. The school’s director of elementary education told him, per his complaint, that his requests were denied because they did not “clearly identify the specific required curriculum or instructional material at issue,” and “require further clarification as they seek to opt out of broad topics.”
The plaintiff also claims that the district did not fully respond to his public records request for information on health, DEI, and social studies curricula, “releasing only partial information that did not allow Plaintiff to identify specific lessons or content to which he objected.”
A lawyer for the schools, however, per the Boston Globe, “denied the district stalled on fulfilling the parent’s request to remove his child from those instructions, adding that deciding which curriculum materials violate a parents’ religious beliefs can be labor intensive and that the district worked ‘diligently’ to address parent concerns.”
The plaintiff then submitted a written request to the school asking that his child be exempted from “lessons, events, school assemblies or other instructional activities and programs which cover issues of sexual orientation or gender identity,” citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor.
That decision, handed down this past June, said that parents have the right to opt out their children before LGBTQ-inclusive books are read in public school classrooms. It was met with outrage by most LGBTQ advocates and a scathing dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
After some further back and forth with the district to get access to the curriculum, the plaintiff learned that one of the videos shown to his child in health class was a read-aloud of Families, Families, Families, by Suzanne Lang, and that the child was also shown the book All Are Welcome, by Alexandra Penfold, in social studies. Each depicts families with same-sex parents, among others; we’ll dig into them below. The complaint asserts:
Plaintiff has now had to do “damage control,” discussing these sensitive issues with his 5-year-old child much earlier than he ever wanted to. His child’s innocence on these subjects has been compromised…. Plaintiff’s child has also been harmed by receiving conflicting moral messages from his parents on the one hand and school authorities on the other, creating confusion about family values during a critical developmental period.
The plaintiff claims that by failing to provide “prior notice or access to the curriculum,” the district deprived him of his “ability to make informed decisions regarding his child’s education,” violating his freedom of religion and due process rights.
The Ridiculousness
I’ve read the two books in question, and they are the most innocuous, non-sexualized books about different types of families that you could imagine. Their only “ideology,” if we can even call it that, is to convey that families exist which may not look like one’s own.
The 2015 Families, Families, Families! shows anthropomorphic animals in scenes of family life, demonstrating many different family types, including ones with two moms (depicted as two koalas), two dads (depicted as two roosters), single parents, a mom and a dad, and more. It ends (as the complaint notes) with the line, “Whatever it might be, if you love each other, then you are a family.” (It was republished in 2019 with slightly updated illustrations as All Kinds of Families, but it is the older edition that is cited in the complaint.)
The 2018 All Are Welcome shows a group of children, diverse in many ways, as they interact and play during their day at school and hear the affirming message “All are welcome here.” We also see the children’s many different kinds of parents, including ones with two moms and two dads, at the beginning and end of the day.
The idea that these books “[promote] sexualized and ideological messages” or “compromise” a child’s innocence is both laughable and offensive. There is absolutely nothing sexual in these books—but such accusations have long been part of the fearmongering around LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books, as the Mahmoud case showed. I’d also venture to say that a larger percentage of two-mom and two-dad families start their families in ways other than having sex, versus mom-dad families (although there are exceptions on both sides)—so which family type is really more “sexualized”? (The answer is really “neither” here, since the books are not about sex, reproduction, or family building, but simply depict some of the people who may be in a family.)
Additionally, every child born to two moms or two dads is aware from far earlier than 5 years old that there can be such families. Is their innocence also “compromised”? If so, one is really saying that same-sex couples shouldn’t have children (and maybe that’s the point). Furthermore, what would the plaintiff do if one of his child’s classmates had same-sex parents and mentioned going to the park with two moms or having dinner with two dads? Does that similarly “compromise” his child’s innocence? At what point does the other child’s speech become policed or the queer parents told they can’t attend school functions together? As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s not just about the books.
The More Things Change …
If you think you’ve heard this before, you’re right. In 2006, two Lexington couples claimed their children’s elementary school violated their rights by including the picture books King & King, Who’s in a Family?, and Molly’s Family, which each depicted same-sex relationships, in its curriculum. In that case (Parker v. Hurley), the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008 upheld a district court dismissal of the case, writing (PDF):
The mere fact that a child is exposed on occasion in public school to a concept offensive to a parent’s religious belief does not inhibit the parent from instructing the child differently. A parent whose ‘child is exposed to sensitive topics or information [at school] remains free to discuss these matters and to place them in the family’s moral or religious context, or to supplement the information with more appropriate materials.’ . . . There is no free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations….
Requiring a student to read a particular book is generally not coercive of free exercise rights.
Public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, particularly when the school imposes no requirement that the student agree with or affirm those ideas, or even participate in discussions about them.
That remains one of the best responses I’ve ever seen on the topic. The same year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the case.
Yet in the recent Mahmoud decision, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said, “A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”
He used gross misinterpretations of the books in that case (as I have explained here) to assert that, “The storybooks unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage and gender.” Because of that, he concluded, parents’ religious freedom is violated if they can’t opt out their children when the books are used in the classroom.
That interpretation is clearly the prevailing view of the court today. It remains to be seen how lower courts will apply it. And if anti-LGBTQ folks think they can wield it in Massachusetts, which led the nation in marriage equality, how much more emboldened will they be elsewhere?
As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent to Mahmoud:
Today’s ruling threatens the very essence of public education. The Court, in effect, constitutionalizes a parental veto power over curricular choices long left to the democratic process and local administrators. That decision guts our free exercise precedent and strikes at the core premise of public schools: that children may come together to learn not the teachings of a particular faith, but a range of concepts and views that reflect our entire society. Exposure to new ideas has always been a vital part of that project, until now.
The reverberations of the Court’s error will be felt, I fear, for generations.
The Massachusetts case is one such reverberation. Brace for more.