The U.S. Supreme Court April 22 heard oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor. The case comes from just down the road from the Court — Montgomery County, Maryland — where the local school board has imposed a family life curriculum throughout elementary and secondary (even pre-) schools. The curriculum is suffused with gender ideology and forbids parental opt-out. A coalition of parents brought suit against Montgomery County as violating their religious rights of “free exercise.” To the degree that oral arguments augur anything, the parents look like winners.

Montgomery County defended itself by insisting they have the right and the responsibility to make young people (including preschoolers) aware of other lifestyles and ways people conduct their lives. Various justices seemed to think that, in such sensitive areas with values spillover, a mandatory curriculum is ideological indoctrination abridging religious free exercise.

As the Court usually does with controversial cases, it will likely decide this one in June. It is standard Court practice to cluster the headline grabbing cases in late June, issuing opinions and judgments and then getting out of Dodge for the summer.

But June 2025 is also an important anniversary. June 1 marks the centennial of the Court’s unanimous ruling in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a decision considered by most Constitutional scholars to be what Nancy Pelosi calls a “super precedent.”

Pierce struck down an Oregon law that made it illegal for parents to send their child to a Catholic school. Oregon insisted children could only comply with the state’s compulsory education law (state laws that require children to go to school between certain ages) by attending a public school. Private and parochial schools were defined as not meeting compulsory education requirements. The usual canards about the “value” of “public education” coupled with less spoken prejudices about Catholic schools and their swelling numbers after the mass immigration of 1880-1920 fueled Oregon’s action. But what is more important about Pierce in my judgment is the criterion by which the Court struck down Oregon’s prejudiced statute. The Court undertook a unanimous and full-throated defense of “parental rights.” Oregon violated those rights not by forbidding them an education that included a religious component but by interfering in the right of parents to direct their child’s education. The Court did not adopt the modern shibboleths about “co-responsibility” between parent and state or the “community’s children.” Pierce in fact is very Catholic: it recognizes the primacy of parents in directing their child’s education.

Catholic thought would affirm that schools are important — parents are not experts in everything — but they remain secondary and subordinate to parents who always are the first teachers of their children. If we accept that principle — both as one of Constitutional jurisprudence as well as Catholic social ethics — Montgomery County is a long way from Pierce. (N.B.: My cursory survey of amici curiae briefs submitted in Mahmoud does not appear to include, at least as a primary filer, the Archdiocese of Washington, in which Montgomery County is located. As of this writing, my query to the Archdiocesan Press Office on whether they were remained unanswered.)

I would like to see a full-throated reaffirmation of Pierce in Mahmoud. In our polarized society, I do not want religious parents painted as sorts of “weird outsiders,” the Constitution’s new Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses. For one, the principle that parents have primacy over a child’s upbringing is not some esoteric religious dogma, like not accepting blood transfusions because it is “drinking blood.” Parental primacy over a child’s upbringing is a basic principle of natural law, i.e., something true of all people, irrespective of their religious affiliations, by virtue of their membership in the human race. For another, the courts likely have indulged the Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses because they are small religious groups whose broader societal impact is limited. I fear such indulgence would not be shown towards Catholics, both because they are at least a fifth of the American population and because of the lingering fact that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable refuge of American bigots.

Taking Pierce’s parental primacy principle seriously also further opens the door to the still-unfinished revolution essential to American education: universal school choice. I defend school choice from two angles. First, if parents are truly the primary educators of their child, then they should be able — without financial penalty — to choose whatever school or educational mode (e.g., home school) that offers a program within which their child best thrives. Second, we need to be logically consequential about our language. If we appropriate money for “education,” then who is educated? Yes, pronouns (including interrogative ones) are important. “Who” is educated is precisely the point. Children are educated. Schools are not “educated.” Schools are merely a venue in which children are educated. So, why do “education” dollars go to places rather than the subjects who are their direct beneficiaries to use where they see fit?

We offer student financial aid to go to college. A student can use that money at Rutgers (state), Princeton (private secular), Seton Hall (private Catholic), or New Brunswick Theological (private Reformed). Why are students in higher education free to choose but those in primary and secondary education — arguably more foundational — financially discriminated against if they or their parents exercise their choice? Why must they remain on the monopoly public school plantation? In the words of a former Vice President, those kids need “fweedom!”

Many things can be said about the Mahmoud case, including the claimed right of the state through its embrace of particular sexual ideologies to groom your kid through promoting the dictatorship of sexual relativism. I am sure those things will be said when Mahmoud is decided. But, in this centenary year of Pierce, let’s stay focused more broadly: what is ultimately at stake is the primacy of parents to raise their children.