Anti-LGBTQ+ Supreme Court Decision Will Likely Impact K-12 Education in California

Update After SCOTUS Decision

Article originally published in AAUW’s Public Policy Newsletter for June 2025.

By Missy Maceyko

During LGBTQ+ pride month, a decision was issued in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case involving the LGBTQ+ community that was heard by the Supreme Court of the United States during the 2024-2025 term. The outcome of this case may have an impact on the important legislative and on-the-ground work that organizations like American Association of University Women (AAUW) of California (CA) have been doing (via the School Board Project (SBP)) to protect historically accurate, diverse, and inclusive curricula in K-12 education and schools given the likely increase in legal opt-out requests by some parents.

The Mahmoud case began in 2022, when the Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) Board, in Maryland, updated their curriculum with more diverse and inclusive storybooks, working with childhood development experts to select books across the curriculum that would have common childhood themes but a wider array of characters, to make sure all students could see themselves in some of the texts. This included adding a handful of story books with LGBTQ+ characters. 

In response to the addition of the LGBTQ+ story books, a coalition of Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox parents asked for an opt-out provision for any storybooks that included a normative portrayal of LGBTQ+ families, such as Pride Puppy, a rhyming alphabet book that tells the story of a family having a fun day together at a LGBTQ+ pride event, and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a classic children’s book about how to address the anxiety that children feel when their family grows and changes, in this case through marriage. 

While the MCPS school board initially tried to accommodate opt-out requests that arose from parents, the school board received such an influx of requests that course administration became unmanageable. Opt-out policies are expensive, costly for students, schools, and taxpayers. This means that mass opt-outs can put further stress on already stressed logistical systems within financially burdened school districts. 

On top of the logistical and actual costs and administrative struggles created by the mass opt-out requests, the MCPS school board in this case also noted that the influx of requests fundamentally “undermined the schools’ educational obligations toward inclusion, equity, and respect.” Opt-outs can hurt kids whose lives and families are mirrored in the books, in this case explicitly positioning LGBTQ+ families’ experiences as something potentially problematic and harmful to others. It also teaches young people that they can opt out of teachings that encourage being decent to all humans, even those who do not look, think, act, or love in the way that their families do. Lack of access to and understanding of diverse experiences and viewpoints and the inability to engage meaningfully with widespread inclusivity also leaves the opted-out students themselves less well-equipped to move forward to function in a diverse world, a pluralistic democracy, and a global workforce.

After the first year of implementation, MCPS school board ended the opt-out request option.

In response, the parents in the Mahmoud case filed a lawsuit, arguing that requiring their children to engage with story books like Pride Puppy and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, whether independently or via neutral reading lessons created around them, would be a violation of their religious beliefs. Specifically, these parents claimed that lack of an opt-out provision, providing them with the ability to opt their children out of these lessons, was a violation of their First Amendment rights to freely exercise their religion, impeding their ability to instruct their children on faith-based issues related to gender and sexuality and to control when and how these issues are introduced.

Based on a 2008 case in Massachusetts, there was precedent for ruling against these kinds of opt outs because participation in public school instruction that simply exposes a child to ideas that conflict with the religious beliefs of their parents, “does not inhibit the parent from instructing the child differently.” However, on June 27, 2025, the majority of the Supreme Court broke with this precedent, deciding the case in favor of these parents and upholding their constitutional right to make these opt-out requests on religious grounds.

Cover of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding by Sarah S. Brannen, illustrated by Lucia Soto.

The majority decision in the case called parents’ inability to opt their children out of story books like Pride Puppy and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding a “substantial interference” with the religious development of their children as the books and instruction around them were deemed “coercive.”

As such, the ruling gives a great deal of latitude to parents who want to claim a religious exemption from existing public school curricula. This means that we will likely see not only an uptick in opt-out requests for LGBTQ+ material on religious grounds throughout the country, but also an uptick in requests for opt-outs on other topics that parents mark as potentially problematic. Echoing some of these concerns, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elana Kagan gave voice to this issue during oral arguments as well as in their dissent in the case, noting the potentially broad scope of the parents’ position. Historically, Sotomayor and Kagen note, there have also been objections to “biographical material about women who have been recognized for achievement outside their home,” as well as books featuring divorce, interfaith marriage, and immodest dress. 

Because this was a federal decision, the ruling in Mahmoud will likely have an impact on public school curricula and administration in EVERY state. 

For instance, while parents in California already have the ability to opt their children out of some material, perhaps most notably around comprehensive sexual health education, these opt-out provisions have always been limited in scope. However, concerned parents, citizens, and organizations (like AAUW CA) need to now pay close attention to how the decision in Mahmoud may expand opt-out requests far beyond this existing provision: while protections for inclusive curricula remain in place in California, the outcome in favor of the parents in this case is likely to create a wave of costly social and legal challenges, including a call for more expansive opt-out policies, which will have an impact on how organizations continue to engage in meaningful work around this priority area in the future. A possible outcome of this is that many districts will pull back on their DEI materials, setting up a potential collision course with existing CA laws that call for the protection and expansion of historically accurate, diverse, and inclusive curricula in K-12 education in California.