The pending Supreme Court case on LGBTQ-themed books could open the door to a powerful new argument against religious display laws in schools.
At first glance, Mahmoud v. Taylor and the growing wave of Ten Commandments display laws in states like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas seem to come from opposite ends of the culture war. One centers on parents who want to shield their children from LGBTQ-themed books. The others impose religious messages in classrooms over the objections of non-Christian families. But viewed together, they raise an urgent constitutional question: should public schools force children to absorb messages that conflict with their family’s faith or beliefs — or should parents have a right to opt out?
In Mahmoud, the Supreme Court is reviewing whether Montgomery County, Maryland violated the Free Exercise Clause when it revoked a policy allowing religious parents to opt their children out of reading LGBTQ-inclusive books. The parents in that case don’t want to ban the books — just to have notice and the ability to say “no, not for my child.” Their claim rests on religious liberty: the right to guide their child’s moral education without government interference.
The Ten Commandments display laws, by contrast, do not offer any opt-out. Arkansas’s Act 573 and Texas’s S.B. 10 both require every public school classroom to display a large poster of the Ten Commandments and “In God We Trust,” regardless of what parents believe or want. These mandates are already facing legal challenges under the Establishment Clause, and rightly so. But if courts somehow uphold the displays — despite Stone v. Graham (1980) and recent injunctions like Roake v. Brumley — then the Mahmoud framework offers a next step: a constitutional claim for a parental opt-out.
Here’s the symmetry. In Mahmoud, religious parents seek to avoid exposure to what they consider a secular moral teaching that contradicts their beliefs. In Arkansas or Texas, non-Christian or secular parents face a state-imposed religious message they did not choose and cannot decline. If the Court says the First Amendment protects opt-out rights for the former, it should logically do the same for the latter. If religious liberty means anything, it includes the right not to be conscripted — or to have one’s children conscripted — into a state religious narrative.
The Court’s decision in Mahmoud, expected by July, could reshape how courts and legislatures approach parental rights. But its implications may run in unexpected directions. It could empower not just religious conservatives seeking exemptions from diversity programming — but also religious minorities and secular families resisting official displays of faith in public schools. Opt-out, once viewed as a conservative accommodation tool, could become a neutral constitutional principle — available to all.