RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/education-battles-get-national-attention/

Two critical education issues have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. One involves Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest school districts. A group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents is arguing that the Maryland school district violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom when it refused to allow them to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed lessons.

The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, illustrates the growing tension between sex-obsessed schools and the rights of religious parents, who are  challenging the Montgomery County School Board’s decision in 2022 to approve more than 22 LGBTQ+ books for classroom use, including works like “Pride Puppy,” “Intersection Allies,” and “What Are Your Words.”

According to court documents, one of the books, Pride Puppy, is a “picture book directed to three and four-year-olds that describes a Pride parade and what a child might find there.” The book invites students to search for various images, including “underwear, leather, lip ring, drag king, and drag queen.”

Other books adopted by the Montgomery County School Board promote pride parades and gender transitioning while advocating for a “child-knows-best” approach to social transitioning. The books tell students that their decision to transition to another gender doesn’t have to “make sense,” and unbelievably, that physicians in the delivery room guess newborn babies’ sexual identity.

Montgomery County argues that if families choose to attend public schools, they “are not cognizably coerced by their children’s exposure there to religiously objectionable ideas.” If the First Amendment gives parents a right to pick and choose from the curriculum, the county says there’s “no discernible limit,” and it would work the same in science or history classes. Public schools “simply cannot accommodate” these exceptions.

Ultimately, the case is really about parental rights, as it also applies to nonreligious parents. As Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, writes, “When I told my father, who is secular and a staunch Democrat, about this case, he said that you don’t have to be religious to object to telling 3-year-olds that doctors only ‘guess’ a baby’s sex at birth or giving them a ‘Pride Puppy’ storybook instructing them to search for images of things they would find at a pride parade, such as a drag queen, leather and an intersex flag. He thinks that parents having the right to opt their children out of such indoctrination is just common sense.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-administration-wants-colleges-to-reveal-foreign-donors/

The Trump administration is not letting up in its determination to make American colleges and universities shape up and fly right. First, it has asked the universities to supply the administration with information on what they have been doing to record, punish, and prevent antisemitic acts on their campuses. Second, the administration has asked them to furnish the government with information on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs that are enforced at the schools, so that their observance of the law, or failure to do so — the law as set out in the 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down Affirmative Action programs for college admissions — can be judged. And now the Trump administration wants colleges and universities to reveal what foreign money they have accepted, with particular attention to moneys coming from China and Qatar, two countries that do not share our values, and are, indeed, hostile to us.

More on this request for more information on foreign “influencers” of American universities can be found here: “Trump order will prevent Qatari, Chinese influence at schools, ed. sec. says,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, April 24, 2025:

A Wednesday executive order from US President Donald Trump will require transparency in foreign university funding, with Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon emphasizing that the order would address the problem of Chinese and Qatari influence in American academic institutions.

Trump’s order called for McMahon to take all appropriate action to enforce preexisting laws on foreign funding to universities and to demand the disclosure of more details about the donations, their sources, and purposes.