A court ordered the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland on Thursday to pay $1.5 million in damages to religious parents after the board tried to indoctrinate young school children with LGBTQ+ propaganda.
The school board agreed to the settlement after the Supreme Court sided with religious parents last summer who challenged the board’s refusal to allow K-5 students to opt out of LGBTQ+ curriculum. Under the settlement, the board must provide parents with advance notice about curriculum involving family life and sexuality and provide the option for parents to opt their children out of such instruction, attorneys said.
“Public schools nationwide are on notice: running roughshod over parental rights and religious freedom isn’t just illegal — it’s costly,” said Eric Baxter, senior counsel at Becket and lead attorney for the parents. “This settlement enforces the Supreme Court’s ruling and ensures parents, not government bureaucrats, have the final say in how their children are raised.”
“It took tremendous courage for these parents to stand up to the School Board and take their case all the way to the Supreme Court,” Baxter added. “Their victory reshaped the law and ensured that generations of religious parents will be able to guide their children’s upbringing according to their faith.”
READ MORE: Supreme Court Sides with Religious Maryland Parents over Opt-Outs for LGBTQ+ Books
Montgomery County Public Schools sent a statement to local news outlet 7News, saying:
With the legal process concluded, our focus remains on the steps that we have taken to meet the Court’s mandate. We have implemented proactive measures to ensure compliance and improve responsiveness. This work is ongoing, and we remain dedicated to partnering with our families to guarantee we are moving forward in a way that aligns with the Court’s decision.
These actions include establishing an opt-out process and proactively reporting all curricular materials every quarter via systemwide communications and this website, so families can make decisions concerning instructional material that may substantially interfere with their religious beliefs.
In 2022, the Montgomery County Board of Education announced new “inclusivity” books for K-5 students and took away parental notice and opt-outs for storybooks that discuss topics like “gender” transitions, pride parades, and preferred pronouns. Some of the reading materials included The Pride Puppy, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope.
A group of parents from various faith backgrounds subsequently filed a lawsuit. In 2023, a federal court upheld a lower court decision siding with Maryland’s largest school district, and parents appealed to the Supreme Court.
The High Court issued a 6-3 decision — with the three most liberal-leaning justices dissenting — ruling in June 2025 that the board’s introduction of LGBTQ+ curriculum, along with its decision to withhold opt-outs, “places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion.”
“The parents have therefore shown that they are likely to succeed in their free exercise claims. They have likewise shown entitlement to a preliminary injunction pending the completion of this lawsuit,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority opinion.
“In the absence of an injunction, the parents will continue to be put to a choice: either risk their child’s exposure to burdensome instruction, or pay substantial sums for alternative educational services,” he continued. “As we have explained, that choice unconstitutionally burdens the parents’ religious exercise, and the loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
Alito wrote that the books carry with them “a very real threat of undermining the religious beliefs that the parents wish to instill in their children,” and “impose upon children a set of values and beliefs that are hostile to their parents’ religious beliefs.”
“And the books exert upon children a psychological pressure to conform to their specific viewpoints,” he wrote.
Conservative-leaning Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own concurring opinion “to emphasize an important implication of this decision for schools across the country.”
“The Board may not insulate itself from First Amendment liability by weaving” religiously offensive material throughout its curriculum and thereby significantly increase the difficulty and complexity of remedying parents’ constitutional injuries,” he wrote. “Were it otherwise, the State could nullify parents’ First Amendment rights simply by saturating public schools’ core curricula with material that undermines family decisions in the area of religious training.”
“The ‘Framers intended’ for ‘free exercise of religion to flourish.’ Insofar as schools or boards attempt to employ their curricula to interfere with religious exercise, courts should carefully police such ‘ingenious defiance of the Constitution’ no less than they do in other contexts,” he continued.
The case is Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
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