Progressive parents in Oklahoma offer blueprint to mess with MAGA censorship

Progressive parents in Oklahoma offer blueprint to mess with MAGA censorship
Opt-out policies are being used to attack far-right propaganda in the classroom

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published July 2, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Justice Samuel Alito may hide behind stuffy robes, but the whiniest member of the Supreme Court can’t hide that his personality is best summed up as “worst parent at your kid’s school.” Whether you’ve had children or were once a child at a public school, you know his type: the loathsome puritan who throws a fit every time he suspects a student might feel a pang of enjoyment during the process of learning. These are the parents who get Halloween costumes banned, demand that the fashionable toys be outlawed from playgrounds and, of course, want any book that threatens to be interesting enough to read banned. Unsurprisingly, Alito authored last week’s 6-3 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case granting the most miserable parent in the PTA veto power over the entire school’s curriculum.

The case involved a school district in Virginia, where right-wing parents were abusing the “opt-out” system meant to allow parents limited ability to take kids out of class for lessons that conflicted with the parents’ religious beliefs. The school had recently added some picture books to the list approved for classroom use that featured LGBTQ characters, mostly for storytelling hours in elementary schools. Under a deluge of propaganda falsely portraying these books as sexual — which they most definitely were not — masses of parents demanded broad “opt-out” rights of any lesson involving the books. The opt-outs spun out of control, threatening to make reading hour impossible, so the school tried to restrict the policy. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority forced the school to retain broad “opt-out” rights for parents.

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The “Harry Potter” books are a frequent target of ire from Alito-esque parents who think fantasy novels literally teach kids how to perform occult magic. Ironically, the author, J.K. Rowling, supports the anti-trans hysteria that helped lead to this decision. But that underscores the Pandora’s box of chaos the Supreme Court, in a homophobic fit, has unleashed. Anything can be framed as a “religious belief,” entitling parents to meddle with what’s available in the classroom. In Florida, the “Don’t Say Gay” law that offered similarly broad parental complaint rights led teachers to pull all books from shelves, lest some unhinged parent declare that “See Spot Run” offended their reading of Genesis 7:2. This was fine by Florida Republicans, who have long suspected reading leads to thinking — and eventually to voting for Democrats.

However, mischief can cut in multiple directions, as parents in Oklahoma have figured out. As Judd Legum of Popular Information reported last month, progressives in the state are using a broad “opt-out” provision to fight back against efforts to use public schools to push right-wing propaganda on students. The Donald Trump-worshipping state superintendent, Ryan Walters, has imposed a social studies curriculum teaching outright lies, such as “discrepancies” in the 2020 election and that the U.S. was founded as a “Christian” nation. The state also passed a law in 2024 giving any parent the right to withdraw a child from any lesson they deem “harmful.” ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/02/progressive-parents-in-oklahoma-offer-blueprint-to-mess-with-maga-censorship/