'Bigoted parents' poised to get 'floating veto' to censor teachers: expert

A Supreme Court showdown is brewing in the world of religious freedom that could hand over certain groups and individuals with a staggering set of new control powers over public education in the country, in a key test of the separation of church and state.

That’s according to Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern, who told readers that the high court will hear arguments in a critical First Amendment case on Tuesday that could surrender censorship rights over LGBTQ+ materials in public schools to religious parents.

“It’s essentially giving the most bigoted parents a floating veto to censor what a teacher says,” Stern said on Monday. He added that a constitutional policy analyst made the point “that this essentially smuggles a Florida-style ‘don’t say gay’ rule into the First Amendment.”

Just eight days later, the ultra-conservative Supreme Court will take up a second “massive religious freedom case that asks whether Oklahoma is constitutionally required to approve and fund a Catholic academy run by the church itself,” Stern wrote.

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“Together, these two cases could give religious groups and individuals immense new powers of control over public education in America, bulldozing what remains of the separation of church and state in the process,” Stern said. He added that the cases “are a good reminder that the Supreme Court actually has its own agenda apart from Donald Trump, one that it’s pursuing just as rapidly as we are all distracted by the chaos coming out of the White House.”

The slate legal analyst spoke with University of Michigan professor and author Leah Litman about the upcoming high court battles that he said are among a group of major religious freedom cases that the court will decide this term.

Litman called the case the justices will hear on Tuesday, Mahmoud v. Taylor, “an early challenge” to a Montgomery County School Board inclusive reading list policy. She told Stern that the group of conservative Muslim and Christian parents “challenged that move as an affront to their religious rights as parents to control what is taught in public schools—or, to put it more charitably, to control what their children are exposed to in public school.”

But she added: "The plaintiffs did not develop any allegations to substantiate the idea that these instructional materials are being used in a way that substantially burdens their religion or instructs their children in violation of their religious beliefs. Yet the Supreme Court was like: 'You know what? Let’s take this bad boy and see what we can do with it.'"