Supreme Court Rules Some Americans Have a Constitutional Right to Insist on Theocracy
We are going backwards in our freedoms--and it will be harder and harder to get them back. 
Supreme Court Rules Some Americans Have a Constitutional Right to Insist on Theocracy
By Heidi Li Feldman June 30, 20252:45 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/supreme-court-rules-constitutional-right-theocracy.html?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=traffic&utm_source=article&utm_content=copy_link
There have been any number of awful decisions from the current Supreme Court, but last week marked a clear breaking point for the American rule of law. You need only look to the second-worst decision of Friday, after the court’s devastating decision on nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship case. With its decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court licensed private parties to compel theocratic governmental policies. These will now proliferate, at the command of private actors and with scarcely any overt governmental action. There have been other times in this country’s history when private actors have sought to impose their antidemocratic visions of the United States on the rest of us. Then, Congress passed still-operative laws empowering their victims to sue in court and recover damages for harms they suffered. In our day, the highest federal court in the land has responded by announcing, without any basis in law, that some Americans have a constitutional right to insist on theocracy.
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Mahmoud arose when parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, demanded from the school board that they receive notice and the right to refuse their children’s attendance whenever books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes will be used during classroom instruction. The parents argued that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment entitles them to these accommodations. They posited that any exposure of their children to the books interferes with their right to instruct their children in religion.
The case reached the Supreme Court on the question of whether Montgomery County schools must offer the accommodations demanded—or stop using the books in classroom instruction—while litigation over the underlying issue continues. On Friday, writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito announced the likelihood of the success the plaintiff-parents will eventually have on their substantive claim. The court granted the parents their temporary injunction. Whether the Montgomery County school board continues its legal defense of its policies hardly matters: Alito has told us how it will turn out.
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To reach the conclusion that mere classroom exposure to books that depict LGBTQ+ people living life happily burdens free exercise, Alito had to contort the meaning of canonical Supreme Court doctrine so that he could either ignore established precedent or turn it on its head. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor masterfully exposed Alito’s extralegal interpretive maneuvers. Yet all her eloquence will not and cannot protect America’s pluralistic constitutional democracy from a rogue group of justices who have demonstrated that they will take any opportunity to wreck it. In vain, Sotomayor explains how the Mahmoud majority has rewritten beyond all recognition two foundational free exercise decisions from the court, Wisconsin v. Yoder and West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. She calls Alito out for ignoring other free exercise cases such as Lyng v. Northwestern Cemetery and Bowen v. Kendrick. She properly ridicules Alito:
In the majority’s eyes, reading aloud Uncle Bobby’s Wedding is just “like the compulsory high school education considered in Yoder.” That assertion is remarkable. Reading a storybook that portrays a family as happy at the news of their gay son’s engagement, the majority claims, is equivalent to a law that threatened the very “survival of [the] Amish communit[y]” in the United States. To read that sentence is to refute it.
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