In this centennial year of two memorable events in the fraught history of public K-12 education, Montgomery County, a progressive Washington suburb, has kindled another controversy about government power and parental rights.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument concerning whether children can be exempted from instruction that their parents consider contrary to their religious beliefs. The parents say this compulsory instruction violates their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

In November 2022, the county’s board of education mandated for elementary school pupils “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks featuring gender transitions, same-sex playground romance, and questioning “cisnormativity” and “power hierarchies.” The picture book “Pride Puppy!” asks students to search a Pride Parade for “underwear,” “leather,” and a “lip ring.” Another picture book invited kindergarten through fifth-grade readers to ponder what it means to be “nonbinary” and asks “what pronouns fit you?”

Parents were promised school adherence to Maryland’s policy of parental notification and the right to opt their children out when the storybooks were read. But the day after the board reaffirmed this policy in March 2023, it reversed, saying there would be no parental notice or opt-outs concerning the storybooks.

Montgomery is reportedly the nation’s most religiously diverse county, and parents of many faiths, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, are challenging the board’s policy. The policy has survived scrutiny by a district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

The plaintiffs, who are arguing only for notification and opt-out rights, say parents should not be sidelined to facilitate government telling children how they are supposed to think about gender and sexuality. The parents ask: Are there no limits on government schools’ power to impose whatever curriculum it pleases? If so, parents who cannot afford private schools surrender their right to direct their children’s religious upbringing.

Forty-seven states protect parental opt-out or opt-in rights. Three are silent on this. No state bars such accommodations. Montgomery County does in this case by declaring the controversial material part of a curriculum where opt-outs are not permitted.

When parents protested, board members denounced them as “hate”-promoting “white supremacists” and “xenophobes.”

A divided 4th Circuit upheld Montgomery County’s practices, offering the strained argument that they do not “compel” the children of the aggrieved parents to “change” their religious beliefs or conduct. This, even though the Supreme Court has hitherto applauded the traditional reluctance of government to directly force instruction of children “in opposition to the will of the parent.”

It is insufferable that Montgomery County can coerce parents, as a price of access to public education they are paying for, to accept government efforts to control their children’s thinking about sensitive matters. To live their faith, the parents must forgo a public benefit.

The 4th Circuit’s deference to Montgomery County’s policy is a dereliction of the judicial duty to police government excesses. Speaking of which:

In 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, John Scopes, a high school teacher, tested the state’s law against teaching “any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes stressed academic freedom; the prosecution stressed the community’s right to control the curriculum of schools it funded. His guilty conviction (later overturned) involved a $100 fine. But today, Montgomery County is defending not instruction in science but indoctrination about political questions.

Also in 1925, a unanimous Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring parents to send children to public schools. This was, the court said, an unreasonable interference with the “liberty” of parents to “direct the upbringing and education of children.” The Ninth Amendment (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) was not mentioned, but the court affirmed an unenumerated right.

Politics is a uniquely human activity because only humans are opinionated — and egotistical: They think their opinions are superior to others’. A primary purpose of politics is to keep the peace among such turbulent creatures. Government, especially in its schools, should, as much as possible, practice a neighborly neutrality, eschewing the promotion of orthodoxies concerning matters that divide the community.

In 2022, the high tide of bullying wokeism, Montgomery County disdained parents it smeared for objecting to its aggressive agenda, which was to require children to listen to authority figures reading material obviously designed to shame children into thinking a certain way. The Supreme Court should awaken Montgomery County to policies that are more constitutional — and kinder.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.