From the Nov/Dec, 2025 issue of *Touchstone*

Quodlibet

A Pyrrhic Victory?

by R. V. Young

On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of parents with children in the Montgomery County Schools in Maryland, who claimed that their religious freedom had been violated by the school board’s refusal to allow their children to opt out of lessons that violated their faith by promoting the LGBTQ agenda. Christians have been jubilant about this decision. Writing in the National Catholic Register (July 13, 2025), Andrea Picciotti-Bayer says that the verdict “not only grants Montgomery County public-school parents the right to opt out of gender madness but crucially reaffirms the special protection under the Constitution for the sacred role of parents in the education and formation of their children.”

While it is certainly a blessing that the decision did not go the other way, the fact that such an issue had to be decided by the Supreme Court or, indeed, that it was ever subject to litigation, ought to give us pause. After all, the Montgomery County School Board has a point: it ought to be a very rare occasion when a student is excused from some part of a school’s standard curriculum. A curriculum ought to embody the knowledge and principles that the community it serves thinks its children ought to learn and the skills they ought to master by studying the same material and mastering the same lessons. Excusing some students from class on a regular basis is not only inconvenient but contrary to the entire purpose of a common curriculum.

The problem, of course, is that the officials in charge of public education—in “red” states and in “blue”—have for decades not been teaching children the shared values of the community but have been using the educational system to undermine the traditional values not only of Christians but of ordinary Americans of no strong religious persuasion. Indeed, the “values” espoused by the educational establishment encourage a depth of pernicious moral depravity that would bring a blush to the cheeks of Roman heathens. So even if Christian, Muslim, and Jewish children may now be legally excused from classroom expositions of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, their teachers will still consist, for the most part, of men and women who are willing, if not eager, to teach second- and third-graders about sodomite pseudo-marriage. It would be exceedingly naïve to assume that such “teachers” will not find other ways to indoctrinate primary school children with the LGBTQ ideology and with any other abomination that has won favor among “educators.”

Do you want your children spending several hours a day with such persons? Grace Morrison, who took her daughter out of her local school, perhaps had the most telling comment: “She said she’s not sure if she and her husband will send their daughter back to the public-school system in Montgomery County, saying that their trust in the school system has been shaken.” Indeed.

R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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