The recent Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor sided with the parents of public school children whose county “introduced a variety of ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ texts into the public school curriculum. Those texts included five ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks approved for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, which have story lines focused on sexuality and gender.” I agree with the court’s decision. And yet, there is an important issue connected to this case (although outside its legal purview), which I have not yet seen sufficiently addressed. Put simply, it involves the quality of books assigned in public schools. This issue takes us out of the realm of content alone, which has been at the center of the case, and leads us to the bigger civilizational question: What is the purpose of books in public education and, by implication, in our society?
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Nadya Williams
Nadya Williams is the Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy. She holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University and is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church; Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity; and Christians Reading Classics (forthcoming Zondervan Academic, 2025). She and her husband Dan joyfully live and homeschool in Ashland, Ohio.
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