In 2015, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, enshrining same-sex marriage as a constitutional right in a watershed victory for LGBTQ liberty and equality. Soon after, Donald Trump became President of the United States and remade the Court in his ideological image, solidifying a conservative supermajority through three lifetime appointments.

Newly transformed, emboldened, and empowered, the Court wasted little time in delivering long-sought partisan goals for remaking the U.S. Constitution. Today, gone are concerns about the subordination of sexual minorities that animated the Obergefell decision. Instead, over the last decade, the Court has repeatedly issued rulings favored by White Christian Nationalists—overturning past precedent, manipulating legal doctrine, and creating new rules to blunt civil rights progress and turn the clock back to a more traditional time when liberty and equality were reserved for some but not all. Central to this project of constitutional realignment is the protection and amplification of conservative Christianity. The Court’s contemporary First Amendment jurisprudence reflects this religious solicitude, evident in its dismantling of the remaining wall separating church and state under the Establishment Clause and in its breathtakingly expansive interpretation of individual religious liberty under the Free Exercise Clause. Increasingly pitched religious objections to LGBTQ inclusion in a post-Obergefell world have provided the ideal catalyst for elevating conservative Christians as victims of an over-reaching government and in dire need of constitutional protection.

At the close of its 2024-25 term, the Court issued its decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, marking perhaps the most significant expansion of religious liberty in the modern era. At issue in Mahmoud was a decision by a public board of education to incorporate LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks as part of its K-5 curriculum. A group of religious parents objected to these materials and sought a mechanism for opting out their children. The board denied the parents’ request, determining that an opt-out mechanism could significantly disrupt the classroom. Notably, these storybooks do not depict same-sex sexual acts, nor do they convey technical or medical information about gender transition; instead, the normative messages embodied by each storybook are tolerance and acceptance. These books are radical only in the sense that they make visible people who have long been invisible, and they encourage treating those people with kindness rather than derision. What is radical, however, is how the Court came to its conclusion that religious parents have a constitutional right to the opt-out they seek.

Under usual free exercise rules, laws and policies posing incidental burdens on religious liberty are almost always permissible because they trigger deferential rationality review. By contrast, laws and policies that are neither religiously neutral nor generally applicable are rarely permissible because they trigger strict judicial review. In Mahmoud, evidence indicated that the board’s decision to incorporate LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum was neutral regarding religion, meaning that its expert educational judgment warrants deference. Nevertheless, Justice Alito’s majority opinion departs from this bifurcated approach by applying strict scrutiny based solely on the gravity of the religious burden imposed by this otherwise religiously neutral policy.

It is unclear whether the Court intends to overrule the governing free exercise framework. The Court punted and declined to do so in a recent case, but perhaps that was a move engineered to avoid criticism while awaiting a more suitable vehicle for a stealth departure. At the very least, Mahmoud opens a new free exercise door by inviting claimants to challenge a litany of religiously neutral acts by merely alleging a significant religious burden.

Even more alarming is the Court’s analysis for why these LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks impose a significant burden on the rights of religious parents. According to the Court, it is precisely because they impart normative lessons about LGBTQ inclusion that they carry “a very real threat of undermining” religious beliefs that some parents hope to instil in their children. As the dissenting Justices explain, the Mahmoud majority effectively creates a constitutional right for religious parental opt-outs to children’s “mere exposure” to LGBTQ people and ideas. While the majority rejects this characterization, its protestations do little to cabin the sweeping exclusionary potential of its reasoning. The majority repeatedly stresses that the storybooks convey normative views on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also raises concerns about how teachers will reinforce those views during instruction. Rather than mere exposure, then, this LGBTQ-inclusive instruction is akin to coercive indoctrination.

Does Mahmoud suggest that the Constitution bestows a free exercise right for parents to opt out their children from any instruction possessing normative qualities to which they religiously object? If so, public education may not survive the individualized control that parents may soon exercise over curriculum—an outcome sure to please White Christian Nationalists opposed to secular culture and institutions. Fostering shared values, such as tolerance and acceptance, has long been a core purpose of public K-12 education, and it is difficult to imagine an educational system in which individuals can exercise a constitutional right to dictate which values may be taught.

Alternatively, perhaps Mahmoud more narrowly suggests that LGBTQ representation and positive LGBTQ portrayals in K-12 curriculum uniquely burden religious liberty, given prevailing conservative religious doctrine. If so, this situates conservative over progressive religious beliefs as paramount, rejecting the religious pluralism that once informed the First Amendment’s religion clauses. It also signifies a bleak new reality in which the interests of—and harms to—LGBTQ persons are of no constitutional concern.

Regardless of specific outcomes, Mahmoud undoubtedly offers a powerful new weapon for the right-wing arsenal in efforts to roll back liberty and equality for LGBTQ people. What a difference a decade has made.