Sam Whiting of the Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center says the father of a five-year-old kindergartener spent between 20 and 30 hours looking through Lexington Public Schools' content that "depicts or describes LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or activities, or LGBTQ+ political or social advocacy."
"Families, Families, Families," for example, uses cartoon animals to teach kindergarteners that "some children have two mothers" and "some children have two dads."
"Lovely" depicts a man with hairy legs cross-dressing in high heels, and "This Day in June" is a book about a Pride parade that features men in leather bondage gear and drag queens dressed as Catholic nuns.
The school adamantly refused to let him protect his child from those materials.
"We helped him bring a list to the Lexington Public Schools and said he wants his son opted out of these books," Whiting reports.
The school, however decided that the majority of the books did not actually violate his religious beliefs but taught "tolerance."
Considering the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that schools must give notice and an opportunity to opt out of content that threatens to undermine parents' religious beliefs, Whiting says they sought and received a preliminary injunction from a federal judge.
"Under well-established constitutional principles, defendants cannot force plaintiff to choose between foregoing the valuable benefit of having his child attend public kindergarten and exposing his child to materials that would burden his free exercise of religion," the court stated.
"As long as parents can clearly identify the category of content that they object to, this decision indicates that the burden's going to be on the schools to identify that content for them, which we think is a big win," Whiting explains.
In issuing this order, the judge found that the concerned father is likely to succeed on the merits of the claim that Lexington's actions violate his First Amendment rights. The order applies to books that he had already identified as problematic and also forces the school to identify any other materials with LGBTQ+ content.
The judge also likely clarified that schools cannot place the burden on parents to identify every specific material they object to, which was a question left open by Mahmoud.
This injunction only lasts while this lawsuit is still pending, and it remains to be seen whether Lexington will continue to fight this issue.
