Thomas Berg, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas, commented for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and WORLD on a recent Supreme Court case that gives parents more sway over schooling.
From the NPR story:
Finally, the Supreme Court issued a major religion decision about the rights of parents to opt their children out of classes in which material, like schoolbooks with LGBTQ characters, violate their religious beliefs.
At the center of the case was the Montgomery County, Md., school system, the most religiously diverse county in the nation, with 160,000 students of nearly every faith. ...
Professor Thomas Berg of the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota said he sees the decision as a major advance for religious believers who are required by law to send their children to some school and cannot afford private school.
“If the public school’s the only option,” said Berg, school boards must accommodate “people of different views in public schools.”
From the WORLD article:
In a term-ending blockbuster ruling Friday, the Supreme Court delivered a resounding endorsement of religious liberty. The court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor vindicates the right of Maryland parents to pull their elementary-age children out of classes with LGBTQ-themed storybooks that are offensive to parents’ religious beliefs. ...
Thomas Berg, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, co-authored a friend-of-the-court brief with a group of other First Amendment scholars that supported the parents. He said the ruling vindicated important free exercise rights for parents of students and put to rest the argument that parents’ right to choose private education or homeschool made opt-outs unnecessary.
But Berg said the ruling also invited other questions – some suggested by the dissent’s warnings. Some educators may wonder how to affirm all students’ dignity without promoting a particular ideology or lifestyle.
