Breaking: Preliminary Injunction Sought in Lexington Lawsuit After School Teaches LGBTQ Content to Kindergartener, Refuses Opt Out
What's new with the Lexington case, and what your superintendent is being told behind the scenes about your parental rights.
We told you last month about a Christian father of a 5-year-old Lexington Public Schools (LPS) student who sent an opt out letter to the district at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year for certain sensitive subjects that contradict his family’s religious beliefs. If you haven’t seen the LPS’s shocking Kindergarten curriculum, read more here:
Rather than simply honor this father’s request, the district claimed his letter lacked sufficient “specificity,” even though they had not provided the curriculum materials in advance for him to review. Even further, he found out that while the district was busy delaying their responses to his emails, they had taught his child a lesson that contained the very material he had instructed them to avoid.
This was a direct violation of parental rights by LPS – not only were this father’s express wishes disregarded, but his firmly held religious convictions were deemed unsubstantial. These actions threaten to erode the constitutional boundary between state authority and parental autonomy in the Commonwealth and across the country, especially given the recent Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor.
Mahmoud began with several parents of diverse religious backgrounds, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, requesting that their children be excused from class when pro-LGBTQ books were being read to students, as instructing their children with the pro-LGBTQ messages in these books would contradict their religious beliefs about God’s design for marriage, sexuality, and gender and interfere with their rights to direct the religious upbringing of their children. The school board initially agreed to allow such opt-outs, but ultimately reversed course and implemented a no opt-out policy for the LGBTQ-themed texts.
SCOTUS deemed this action unconstitutional and ruled that the religious liberty of these parents was indeed violated, and that the purpose of reading such books to young and impressionable children was to exert a “psychological pressure to conform” to the views that they espoused, rather than the religious views that their parents held.
To read our previous coverage of the Mahmoud decision, see the posts below.
Given the Mahmoud decision, parents have a constitutional right to opt their children out of content in any class that substantially interferes with their right to direct their children’s religious upbringing.
Therefore, LPS clearly violated the constitutional rights of this Lexington father.
In response to this injustice, MFI’s Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center (MLLC) and the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) sent a demand letter to LPS insisting that the district honor the parent’s written opt-out request and provide timely, transparent access to classroom materials and curricula. And if the LPS didn’t act, MLLC and ACLJ made it clear that they were prepared to pursue all available legal remedies – both for this parent, and for other families across Massachusetts who experience similar abuses.
LPS did not take action to correct this, so MLLC and the ACLJ followed through and filed a complaint against the District in federal court.
This case seeks declaratory, injunctive, and compensatory relief to uphold the plaintiff’s constitutional and civil rights to direct the religious and moral upbringing of his child. You can download the full complaint below.
Since then, there has been no resolution between the LPS and the plaintiff. That is why today, November 6th, the MLLC and ACLJ filed a motion for a preliminary injunction. The purpose of the motion is to put a temporary order in place that says that the school can’t expose the plaintiff’s child to any of the objectionable content while the case is pending.
You can download the Motion and Memorandum in Support below.
This may be the first case of its type in the nation post-Mahmoud, so we will be watching closely and will update you with further developments. You can also follow the case online for yourself here.
Religious parents nationwide should be aware of Mahmoud v. Taylor, and the protections it provides. You can’t rely on your local school district to tell you about it, but trust us… they know. The Massachusetts Association for School Committees (MASC) has been talking about it for months, and the NEA filed a brief AGAINST it at the Supreme Court, so we know the teacher’s unions are aware as well (and not happy about it). Another organization in-the-know is the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents (MASS). We couldn’t find anything on the MASS website about Mahmoud, but we have obtained guidance they distributed to superintendents back in September regarding the case If you want to know what MA superintendents are being told about your opt out rights, read on.
You can also download the pdf version of this document here.
See that last line, #12? Parents, when you contact your school with your opt-out request, if it goes beyond the MA sex ed opt out law and requests an opt-out based on your religious objections, you can assume the district is contacting their legal counsel before they even respond to your email.
However, as the author states, “For purposes of this memo, we assume Massachusetts school districts would prefer to avoid being a party to such litigation, while still making sure they meet their obligations to all students.” While that assumption doesn’t appear to be the case in Lexington, where they could have avoided a lawsuit by honoring the reasonable requests of a Christian father, we agree that most other districts would probably rather be about the business of educating children than dealing with attorneys.
With that in mind, we hope that most MA religious parents who submit an opt-out request under Mahmoud v. Taylor will find their district receptive and willing to collaborate in order to protect their rights, and their child. We do believe there are Massachusetts school districts and school committees who respect parental rights and would work to accommodate such a request. However, the Lexington case has shown us that not all districts share this view, and parents need to be vigilant and ready to fight back.
Parents shouldn’t have to drag their school district into court to get them to respect their right to direct the religious upbringing of their child. But sometimes they do.
If you, like this Lexington dad, opted your child out and the school didn’t honor your request, now you know who to call.
Are you a religious parent who is concerned that some of your child’s curriculum might undermine your ability to direct their religious upbringing? If you haven’t opted your child out yet, use the opt out form in the link below today to protect your child.
New Resource Alert! Mahmoud v. Taylor Legal Advisory and Sample Opt Out Letter for MA Parents
We told you last time about Mahmoud v. Taylor, the recent US Supreme Court case brought by Montgomery County, MD parents who had been denied an opportunity to opt their children out of LGBTQ storybook lessons in their local elementary schools. At MIP, we had been watching this case for months because we knew that many MA parents had…
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Godspeed
So it begins!