The Supreme Court is hearing a case that centers around elementary school curriculum, who gets to curate it, and queer visibility. The case is about how the Montgomery County school board in Maryland greenlit the use of five storybooks that contain LGBTQ+ characters, to which some parents objected, citing conflicts with their religious beliefs. Oh the horror! If we read books to children that have queer characters in them then kids will think queer people exist. What’s next? Children’s books with characters from bi-racial families? Enough is enough! OK, on a serious note, what’s at stake here is the ability for parents to opt their children out of classes when they object to certain teaching materials. The Montgomery Country school board initially tried to allow this, but they cited how doing so can lead to logistical difficulties. An interesting layer of this story is that one of the parents suing the school board has a daughter with Down syndrome. This particular parent was unhappy that that there were queer characters represented in one of her 10-year-old daughter’s special needs classes. What happens when parents of able-bodied children who take umbrage at the presence of characters with disabilities in kids’ books start suing their school systems as well? This seems like a very slippery slope. Nina Totenberg, the journalist who covered this story for NPR, provides us with the fun fact that only three of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were educated in public schools, with the others all having graduated from private Catholic schools. Another fun fact that we have noted here at HARD COPY is that Justice Sonia Sotomayor is well-known for having written children’s books of her own, and one of her more popular books is titled Just Ask!: Be Different, Be Brave, Be You. We look forward to hearing how this all plays out.
Queer characters in children’s books causing alarm for some parents
