Maryland Lawsuit Against LGBTQ Indoctrination in Schools Cites Historical Precedent

Lawyer Eric Baxter argued Wednesday that his defense of Maryland parents seeking to opt their kids out of LGBTQ+ classroom discussions in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor could be a generational opportunity to reaffirm parental rights in education.

Baxter, senior counsel at Becket, a nonprofit religious liberty law firm, spoke to an audience at The Heritage Foundation celebrating the forthcoming 100th anniversary of the Pierce v. Society of Sisters Supreme Court case that enshrined the rights of parents to educate their children outside of public schools.

He explained how the Montgomery County, Maryland, parents he represents are not allowed to make decisions about their children’s education in their public school system.

The children “learn in alphabetical order all these different things that you might find in a Pride Parade,” Baxter explained when discussing how “Pride Puppy” was required reading for the Maryland schoolchildren—“including things like drag queen, drag king, leather, lip ring.”

Baxter also argued the school’s insistence on teaching children about LGBTQ+ content was at odds with the religious diversity of the county.

“Montgomery County has been ranked the most religiously diverse county in the nation for the last several years,” he said.

There were large populations of Muslim parents and Ethiopian Orthodox parents “who really led the fight in saying this is outrageous and going to school board meetings and being told by school board members that these parents were aligning themselves with xenophobes and white supremacists,” he said.

In Baxter’s view, the Mahmoud case currently under consideration by the Supreme Court has striking parallels to the 9-0 unanimous June 1, 1925, ruling in Pierce, which protected the rights of Catholic parents to educate their children outside of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant-dominated sphere of public education. 

At the time, Oregon required all parents to send their children to public schools. Pierce struck that law down.

“Pierce arose at a period of high Catholic immigration. It was really pushed by the Ku Klux Klan—the legislation that led to Pierce—really pushing this idea that we have immigrants in this country [and] we have to make sure that they all become uniform,” said Baxter.

“And you have that very same dynamic here,” Pierce said of the Mahmoud case, adding: “You have parents … some of them openly say we came here to kind of exercise a more liberal view of our religious beliefs, and now we’re being told that we have to adopt this very extreme view in the United States.”

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