How a Deep Blue Maryland County Hands Republicans a Book Ban Win

It is a matter of weeks, if not days, before new restrictions against American schools and libraries will be delivered by the Supreme Court. With a bench stacked deep with Trumpian appointees and stalwarts for expansive religious practices, legal analysts are expecting a ruling in favor of a coalition of parents suing for the following: religious opt-outs to shield their children from reading schoolbooks containing LGBTQ characters and historical figures. Arguments for Mahmoud vs. Taylor inside the court's chambers were flanked by many residents of Montgomery County, Maryland.

This place happens to be my county of residence. I went to high school here, and currently live and work in one of its municipalities.

Montgomery County, Maryland is an odd duck when it comes to economics, politics and diversity. It's got one of the highest concentrations of PhD holders in the country, since many residents work (or worked, thanks Elon) at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, or other bureaucrat jobs requiring postgrad degrees. Education itself, of course, does not preclude people from holding bigoted views. There were and are plenty of lawyers, professors, academics, artists and business magnates that built and maintain Trump's white nationalist agenda.

Speaking after arguments ended, the lawyer representing the parents said: “We think the court recognized that the schoolbooks are an issue here themselves, even without getting into the separate instruction that was required of the teachers.”

To be clear, most of these books have nothing objectionable or age inapproriate in these books, save for the presence and identification of LGBTQ + characters in text and illustration. You can see some of the materials and guidance on LGBTQ students on the government website here, which includes resources for kids, literature for parents of queer kids and policy for staff. It's worded pretty liberally, and is par for the course for how Democrat-governed language frames LGBTQ education and school policy.

I can't claim to know how the coalition of parents, who have ranged from Christian evangelicals to Maryland chapters of the CAIR ( a national Muslim organization), vote. The numbers certainly haven't swung towards Republicans taking power, and most recent elections had former governor Larry Hogan losing by a landslide to Angela Alsobrooks, who holds the junior Senate seat now. Frankly, it doesn't matter what their party affiliation is; LGBTQ and education policies have danced across political ideologies as something to be leveraged with alarming efficiency.

Acting as a cousin to Moms for Liberty, who are taking aim at racial diversity and history in addition to LGBTQ content in schools, these groups are almost certainly testing the waters for which objectionable content they can designate as content they can opt children out of learning. To these parents, disrespect and religious intolerance is the existence of queer people. Even if they despise Donald Trump on politics and rhetoric or took the Metro into DC weeks ago for "Hands off protests," this current wave of anger and bigotry cannot be unlinked from America's trajectory to defund and deny history and vulnerable parts of our population. I see it on the same spectrum as defunding of the NMAAHC because it talks too much about slavery (and that's before getting into the history of queer Black Marylanders like Bayard Rustin, whose biography is targeted in the opt-out.)

You can see the hatred in some of the statements by the parents here:

“As Christians, we teach our son that gender is a gift from God and a natural, unchanging part of who we are. We cannot, in good conscience, expose our child to materials that contradict these fundamental beliefs,” Roman said. “This forced us to make a decision to take our son out of the public schools, which has come at a great personal and financial cost.” -An Orthodox Christian parent

“No parent should have to choose between preserving their religious beliefs and sending their children to public school today,” Persak said. “Today, we ask the justices to uphold our freedom to raise our children according to our faith and values, free from government interference.”

 Wael Elkoshairi, a leader of the local Family Rights for Religious Freedom advocacy organization and an MCPS parent leading the rally for the plaintiffs, took exception to the MoCo Pride Center rally playing music outside the courthouse. 

“This is just a taste of the disrespect we’ve experienced since we started challenging [MCPS],” he said.

What is consistent in these statements is this unbending rationale that their beliefs cannot inflict harm, and that they can only be harmed. This logic has steered countless religious initiatives across the country, from bakers refusing to make wedding cakes for queer couples to the wave of actions against trans student athletes at all levels of schooling. Whatever harm that these families will in fact inflict on the LGBTQ people of the United States on the basis of their religious beliefs is negligible. They will receive the status quo that satisfies their values, and that's the end of the story.

At the heart of this political shitstorm, for the lack of a better word, are the queer kids, educators, and public education staffers of this county, who didn't ask for the place to make national news or legal arguments. They didn't ask for their existence to be the subject of an opt-out by classmates' parents, and this is all happening as the mental health barrage of anti-trans legislation and bigoted policy marches on worldwide. These queer neighbors will still be here long after the parents opt their children out of recognizing their existence, and they will need our support more than ever.