The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in a case that involves a smorgasbord of significant issues: education, free speech, religious liberty, parental rights, and the safety of children. Indications are that a majority of justices will get it right, but we’ll see.

A group of Maryland parents — not the illegal alien variety triggering leftist insanity lately — sued the Montgomery County Board of Education for the right to opt out their elementary-school-aged children from proselytization into the left-wing gender cult. The parents are Catholic, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Muslim, and they argue that the lack of a choice violates their religious beliefs and their First Amendment rights.

“In 2022, the county’s school board approved books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum,” according to SCOTUSblog. “One book describes the story of a girl attending her uncle’s same-sex wedding, for example, while another book, Pride Puppy, tells the story of a puppy that gets lost during a Pride parade. The following year, the board announced that it would no longer allow parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks.”

Without the exemption, parents sued. They didn’t ask that the books be removed or “banned.” They only sought to get the school board to allow opting out.

The books are not just available but are a required part of the curriculum for kids as young as five. Teachers are given specific instructions about what to include in discussions about the books. “People make a guess about our gender” when we are born, and “sometimes they’re wrong,” a teacher might tell students. “Our body parts do not decide our gender. Our gender comes from our inside.” The school board said that its reasoning is exposure to new ideas and to “disrupt” the “either/or thinking” about gender and sexuality.

Though several of the justices probed about the extent of the word “exposure,” this is plain old indoctrination by the groomers.

“It’s saying: ‘This is the right view of the world,’” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “This is how we think about things. This is how you should think about things. This is like, 2+2 is 4.”

The Court’s left-wing members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — were more concerned with just how much power parents would gain over all kinds of curriculum or even their choice of teachers. That’s not an entirely invalid consideration given the diversity of views on all kinds of things and the tendency of some parents to cause unproductive trouble. Allowing entire curricula to be held hostage by a busybody minority probably isn’t a great idea.

However, parents are the first and primary trustees of the children’s education, and they have a vested interest in what and how they are taught.

During arguments, Alan Schoenfeld, one of the attorneys the school board has spent more than $1 million taxpayer dollars to hire, inadvertently undermined his own case and belied the objections of the three justices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed that Montgomery County’s rigid position was odd because “every other school board has opt-outs for all sorts of things.” Schoenfeld pushed back, arguing that “dozens of students” were opting out, making arrangements for alternate space and supervision untenable.

Call me crazy, but if dozens of families in a DC suburb are opting out of particular lessons because they’re too radical, maybe those lessons aren’t appropriate for elementary school kids.

The same goes for Jackson, who argued that it “seems pretty infeasible” to have students leaving an English class when this material comes up. Again — hear me out — maybe the material shouldn’t be part of an English class.

Jackson also argued that parents can opt out by homeschooling or sending their kids to private school, which I’m pretty sure Montgomery County does not want to happen. In fact, Jackson might be getting an angry letter from the teachers unions over that one.

“Maryland was founded on religious liberty and religious tolerance, a haven for Catholics escaping from persecution in England going back to 1649,” noted Kavanaugh, himself a “lifelong resident” of Montgomery County. “I guess I’m surprised, given that this is, you know, the hill we’re going to die on in terms of not respecting religious liberty.”

In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in Stone v. Graham, “If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

I believe the Court got that one wrong, but surely by that reasoning, indoctrinating children into the gender cult cannot be permissible under the Establishment Clause. It’s also definitely not desirable as a matter of private devotion. In any case, it should raise red flags for everyone that the groomers are so adamant about getting parents out of the way that they’ll fight all the way to the Supreme Court to keep them from having a choice about their own children.

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(Updated)