The Maryland Senate revised a General Assembly bill that would have removed a parental right to opt children out of certain lessons, including sex education and gender identity topics.
The Democrat-led Assembly bill’s original text required “each county board to establish policies, guidelines, and procedures for a parent or guardian to opt out of a certain topic for the parent’s or guardian’s student, subject to a certain prohibition and requirement.” The also Democrat-controlled Senate’s amended version dropped this language entirely, however. The bill requires the state education department to establish “a comprehensive health education framework.”
The final version of the bill passed the Education, Energy and the Environmental Committee with the amendment Wednesday by a 6-3 vote. The legislation also passed both chambers of the state legislature, first by a 33-12 vote in the Senate on Thursday, then a 97-38 vote in the House on Saturday. The updated bill now awaits Democrat Gov. Wes Moore’s signature.
Current Maryland law allows parents to opt children out of such lessons, but an ongoing lawsuit out of Montgomery County alleges the district did not allow such exceptions for lessons that included “‘LGBTQ-inclusive’ storybooks.” The parents represented in the lawsuit, which made its way to the Supreme Court in January, claim the school system violated their right “to protect their children’s innocence and direct their religious upbringing.”
“Support for parental involvement in education is overwhelmingly popular and spans party lines, so it’s a relief that the Maryland legislature finally walked back this erroneous policy,” Parents Defending Education president Nicki Neily told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That being said, I fully and completely expect elected officials to try something similar in the future — because at the end of the day, far too many bureaucrats truly believe that they know better than families do how children should be raised. As the saying goes, ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,’ and this is going to be an important topic to monitor going forward.”
Many states host policies that violate parental rights, including states like California and Maine which allow school officials to keep secrets from parents if their child desires to change their name or pronouns or use opposite-sex facilities. The Trump administration has been cracking down on states pushing radical gender ideology onto children, opening investigations and threatening federal funding from states caught with policies in conflict with Trump’s directives.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) launched a “Title IX Special Investigations Team” to help address complaints relating to school gender ideology programs and the prevalence of biological males competing in female sports.
President Donald Trump has been working to dismantle “Gender Ideology Extremism” in schools since his first day in office for his second term. Trump’s day-one executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” asserted the federal recognition of only “two sexes, male and female,” while acknowledging the biological differences between men and women.
The Maryland Department of Education did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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