Public Schools and the Moral Neutrality Myth

On April 22, Kelly Armstrong, the Republican governor of North Dakota, vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature that would have required public schools (and libraries) to ensure that books containing pornographic and other sexually explicit content are inaccessible to children. In a move that has received favorable coverage from left-leaning media outlets but largely escaped conservative scrutiny, Armstrong alleged that the proposed law would constitute a “misguided attempt to legislate morality through overreach and censorship.”

Meanwhile—on the same day—an interfaith group of parents from Montgomery County, Maryland, were in the Supreme Court challenging an attempt by their local public school district to compel students (in this case, students enrolled in pre-K through fifth grade) to read storybooks and participate in lessons promoting “Pride” parades, same-sex marriage, “non-binary” identity, transgenderism and sex-change procedures, and drag shows. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the parents did not petition the high court to remove the materials, or to require that all students be prevented from accessing them—they asked merely that the court protect parents’ right to opt their children out of participation in public-school activities that promote highly contestable (to say the least) and controversial views about sex, sexuality, sexual morality, “gender identity,” and marriage. 

The Montgomery County school district’s lawyer told the Supreme Court that allowing parents to opt-out their children would risk “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.” Think about that. The attorney admitted that the goal was to substitute in the minds of school children state-approved views over those of parents who, for religious or other reasons, hold different views about sexuality, sexual morality, marriage, and family—say, Christian, Muslim, or Jewish views. There’s a word for what the school district is proposing to do: indoctrination.

Together, these two situations illustrate a dynamic that has been pervasive in America’s culture wars. Progressives demand “neutrality” in a particular area and persuade (or bully) conservatives into yielding to their demands, only to swiftly dismantle the pretense of neutrality and seek to impose their own substantive views once the conservative or traditional position has been swept from the field under the pretext of demands for neutrality. And so, for example, progressives first claim that public schools, as state-sponsored institutions, must be comprehensively “neutral”—they insist that  pornographic and explicit materials be made available to children, and dismiss concerns from parents with traditional moral and religious beliefs as impermissibly moralistic and tantamount to censorship. Before long, though, they are attempting to have their progressive ideological propaganda—often masquerading as value-neutral “information”—about, say, homosexuality or “gender” imposed on everyone.

What explains this pattern? First, conservative and progressive positions on social and cultural issues are largely incommensurable—one cannot simultaneously profess, for example, both the view that sex is an unchangeable, biologically-rooted reality and the view that whether someone is a man or woman depends on self-identification or personal expression. It is one or the other. 

Conservative and progressive worldviews are also, in a certain sense, evangelistic. Because they make (or implicitly rely on) universal claims about human nature, the human good, human dignity, human rights, and, indeed, human destiny, proponents of the competing views quite understandably seek to have the state recognize their ideas as true and deploy power (to varying degrees) on their behalf. So, the notion that the state or its institutions were ever going to be comprehensively “neutral” on these fundamental questions was always spurious. Furthermore, given the dogmatic, illiberal, and militant tendencies of modern social progressivism, it was never going to be enough for them that their views be fairly and respectfully considered alongside the best conservative criticisms; so, inculcation, indoctrination, and coercion—particularly for young people, who are still emotionally and intellectually developing—quickly became the order of the day. 

When supposed conservatives such as Gov. Armstrong surrender to progressive demands that schools teach, include, or facilitate the availability of social progressivism’s catechetical materials—particularly when such materials include sexually explicit and pornographic content—they disgracefully fail in their responsibility to protect our public schools from ideological capture. They open the door to the weaponization of public schools as instruments of a progressive paternalism that usurps the natural right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children (to paraphrase language from the Supreme Court’s historically most important parents’ rights decisions). 

Moreover, claims that protecting young children from explicit and pornographic materials would constitute illegitimate forms of “legislating morality” and “censorship” are laughable—for one, the denial that laws are rightly and necessarily morally-inflected constitutes the acceptance of a now long-exploded myth that liberals themselves can no longer defend with a straight face, and rarely today even go through the motions of trying to do so. While our constitutional order does prescribe some instances of non-preferential governmental treatment (for example, the government cannot endorse a particular religion), no serious constitutional scholar or jurist—right, left, or center—holds that the Constitution requires the strict separation of moral judgments and public policy decisions. For starters, think of our civil rights laws and the rulings of our courts on constitutional and statutory questions pertaining to civil rights. They are shaped—rightly shaped—by a set of moral judgments.

What progressives are trying to do in Montgomery County should serve as a warning of what inevitably comes when conservatives yield to progressive demands, and even—as in the case of Gov. Armstrong—go so far as to adopt progressives’ ideologically-driven rhetoric (for example, that declining to expose small children to pornographic images is “censorship” and “legislating morality”). Conservatives must not back down: Government is not, in fact, obligated to ensure that public schools remain strictly neutral on questions such as whether six-year-olds should be exposed to sexually explicit materials. The left certainly doesn’t believe that—their behavior shows it.