“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents,”  Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito writes on behalf of the court’s majority in Mahmoud v. Taylor, “when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”

Consequently, the court ruled, the Montgomery County, Maryland “Public” School System must allow parents to “opt out” of sending their children to classes in which “LGBTQ+-inclusive” stories are read and discussed if those parents claim their religious beliefs, and their “right to direct the religious upbringing of their children,” go against having their children exposed to that content.

I’m personally both “LGBTQ+-positive” AND in favor of the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children — not just where religion is concerned but in every respect that doesn’t constitute physical abuse or neglect.

I have to disagree, however, with fellow libertarian writer James Bovard, who claims that, with its ruling, “SCOTUS Strikes a Blow against Public School Indoctrination of Young Children.” Indoctrination is baked in to “public” education. The court simply weighed in on one particular aspect of that indoctrination while going out of its way to preclude the correct solution for indoctrination in general.

“It is no answer,” the case syllabus claims, “that parents remain free to place their children in private school or to educate them at home. Public education is a public benefit, and the government cannot ‘condition’ its ‘availability’ on parents’ willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise. … Moreover, given that education is compulsory in Maryland, the parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit. They have an obligation — enforceable by fine or imprisonment — to send their children to public school unless they find an adequate substitute they can afford.”

So:

We’re going to set up a system.

We’re going to make you pay for that system.

We’re going to force you to put your kids into that system unless you can ALSO afford to pay for an alternative system.

But then we’re going to allow a heckler’s veto on anything in that system that anyone with the money and friends to get a case before the Supreme Court may happen to dislike.

Because the thing they dislike, THAT’s the problem.

No, the system is the problem.

The right to direct the upbringing of one’s children entails the obligation to bear the costs of bringing up one’s children.

The system itself violates parents’ rights to direct the upbringing of their children AND forces them to bear the costs of that violation, making them less able to afford the costs of whatever upbringing they might prefer.

So long as “public” education — education funded by compulsory taxation — exists, parents will be “burdened” by that system’s “indoctrination” of their children in various ways.

There’s one, and only one, way to solve the problem of school “indoctrination” that this or that sub-set of parents may dislike: Separation of school and state.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY