A prince vanquishes a dragon and falls in love. A young girl named Violet works up the courage to give her classmate crush a valentine. Another girl fears she won’t get to see her Uncle Bobby as much after he gets married, but after spending a day with him and his fiancé, she realizes she’s just gaining a new member of her family.

All of these stories are found in children’s picture books, and none are particularly unusual. They touch on universal topics like bravery, friendship and family. But since the books feature LGBTQ protagonists — the prince falls in love with his knight, Violet’s classmate is a girl, Uncle Bobby is gay — they’re now at the center of Mahmoud v. Taylor, a Supreme Court case brought by parents who say that the books’ inclusion in public schools violates their parental rights and religious freedom. If, as seems likely, the Court’s conservative supermajority rules in favor of the parents, the case would notch a major win for the so-called “parental rights” movement — a pernicious right-wing crusade to undermine public education, church-state separation and children’s autonomy under the guise of fighting for individual civil liberties.

Though accounts differ on its exact origins, the parental rights movement can be traced back at least to 1925, when a biology teacher came under fire for teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law. Other experts point to when parents used their own rights as a pretext to fight against the prohibition of child labor in the 1920s. (This same argument is cropping up again in 2025 as Florida Republicans push to weaken child labor laws.) And as the Red Scare swept the U.S. and public schools began racial integration in the 1950s, the parental rights argument flared again, with conservative parents monitoring schools for “communist infiltration” or pulling their children out of the desegregated public system.

What you will notice is........

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