Published March 10, 2025
On March 10, the Ethics and Public Policy Center filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in Mahmoud v. Montgomery County (MD) Board of Education. This case was brought by parents of children enrolled in Montgomery County Public Schools after the School Board denied parents’ request to opt their children out of the Board’s new sexuality and gender curriculum.
The brief, co-authored by EPPC fellows Eric Kniffin and Mary Rice Hasson, argues that the lower courts improperly downplayed the conflict between the curriculum and their religious exercise. It shows that the curriculum does more than teach “diversity” and “inclusion”: it advances gender ideology. Drawing on the work of EPPC’s Person & Identity Project, the brief shows that gender ideology is fundamentally incompatible with Christian anthropology and Catholic teaching:
The Board’s curriculum teaches impressionable elementary school children—those young enough to be read to from a picture book—that if a boy says he is girl, then he is a girl, and if a girl says she is a boy, then she is a boy. As one of the Board’s books says, this moral command must be followed even if it “doesn’t make sense,” because “[n]ot everything needs to make sense. This is about love.” …
Catholic teaching on these matters is diametrically opposed to the affirmations the Board aims to ingrain in Petitioners’ children. The Catholic Church teaches that “to love is to will the good of the other,” and that one does not will the good of the other by affirming or cooperating in something one knows to be harmful and false. Contrary to Board members’ claims and to what its curriculum teaches, these religious convictions are neither hateful nor xenophobic. They reflect deeply held religious convictions about the truth of the human person and, by extension, the best way to love people suffering from gender dysphoria.
The Board is not just promoting inclusion and diversity. It is endeavoring to teach as true an ideological belief system about what it means to be human. The Board’s claims are based on propositions that the Catholic Church has for nearly two thousand years taught as wrong and dangerous. The Board’s decision to compel elementary school students to participate in its instruction on gender and sexuality puts Petitioners to a Hobson’s choice: They must either let the local public system teach their children that what their parents and church say about what it means to be human is false—and bigoted—or else withdraw their children and find an alternative schooling option that will not demonize their convictions. That is not right. The First Amendment demands more.
Click here to read the full brief.
Eric Kniffin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he works on a range of initiatives to protect and strengthen religious liberty as part of EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project.
