Justices Seem Set to Allow Opt-Outs From L.G.B.T.Q. Stories in Schools
The culture wars returned to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, this time in a battle over whether public schools in Maryland must allow parents with religious objections to withdraw their children from classes in which storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed.
In a long, lively and sometimes heated argument that gave close consideration to a handful of books for young readers, questions from members of the court's six-justice conservative majority indicated that the parents were very likely to prevail.
'The plaintiffs here are not asking the school to change its curriculum,' Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said. 'They're just saying, 'Look, we want out.' Why isn't that feasible? What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?'
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh noted that the school board had initially allowed parents to withdraw their children when the books were to be discussed but reversed course.
'I'm not understanding why it's not feasible,' he said, adding, 'They're not asking you to change what's taught in the classroom.'
Lawyers for the school system said the opt-outs were hard to administer, led to absenteeism and risked 'exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.'
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Fast Company
34 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Supreme Court rewrites NEPA rules—changing the game for environmental reviews
Getting federal approval for permits to build bridges, wind farms, highways, and other major infrastructure projects has long been a complicated and time-consuming process. Despite growing calls from both parties for Congress and federal agencies to reform that process, there had been few significant revisions —until now. In one fell swoop, the U.S. Supreme Court has changed a big part of the game. Whether the effects are good or bad depends on the viewer's perspective. Either way, there is a new interpretation in place for the law that is the centerpiece of the debate about permitting—the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, known as NEPA. Taking a big-picture look NEPA requires federal agencies to document and describe the environmental effects of any proposed action, including construction of oil pipelines, renewable energy, and other infrastructure projects. Only after completing that work can the agency make a final decision to approve or deny the project. These reports must evaluate direct effects, such as the destruction of habitat to make way for a new highway, and indirect effects, such as the air pollution from cars using the highway after it is built. Decades of litigation about the scope of indirect effects have widened the required evaluation. As I explain it to my students, that logical and legal progression is reminiscent of the popular children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, in which granting a request for a cookie triggers a seemingly endless series of further requests—for a glass of milk, a napkin, and so on. For the highway example, the arguments went, even if the agency properly assessed the pollution from the cars, it also had to consider the new subdivisions, malls, and jobs the new highway foreseeably could induce. The challenge for federal agencies was knowing how much of that potentially limitless series of indirect effects courts would require them to evaluate. In recent litigation, the question in particular has been how broad a range of effects on and from climate change could be linked to any one specific project and therefore require evaluation. With the court's ruling, federal agencies' days of uncertainty are over. Biggest NEPA case in decades On May 29, 2025, the Supreme Court (minus Justice Neil Gorsuch, who had recused himself) decided the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, the first major NEPA dispute before the court in 20 years. At issue was an 85-mile rail line a group of developers proposed to build in Utah to connect oil wells to the interstate rail network and from there transport waxy crude oil to refineries in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere. The federal Surface Transportation Board reviewed the environmental effects and approved the required license in 2021. The report was 637 pages long, with more than 3,000 pages of appendices containing additional information. It acknowledged but did not give a detailed assessment of the indirect 'upstream' effects of constructing the rail line—such as spurring new oil drilling—and the indirect 'downstream' effects of the ultimate use of the waxy oil in places as far-flung as Louisiana. In February 2022, Eagle County, Colorado, through which trains coming from the new railway would pass, along with the Center for Biological Diversity appealed that decision in federal court, arguing that the board had failed to properly explain why it did not assess those effects. Therefore, the county argued, the report was incomplete and the board license should be vacated. In August 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed and held that the agency had failed to adequately explain why it could not employ 'some degree of forecasting' to identify those impacts and that the board could prevent those effects by exercising its authority to deny the license. The railway developers appealed to the Supreme Court, asking whether NEPA requires a federal agency to look beyond the action being proposed to evaluate indirect effects outside its own jurisdiction. A resounding declaration Writing for a five-justice majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered a ringing, table-pounding lecture about courts run amok. Kavanaugh did not stop to provide specific support for each admonition, describing NEPA as a ' legislative acorn ' that has 'grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development.' He bemoaned the 'delay upon delay' NEPA imposes on projects as so complicated that it bordered 'on the Kafkaesque.' In his view, 'NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents.' He called for 'a course correction . . . to bring judicial review under NEPA back in line with the statutory text and common sense.' His opinion reset the course in three ways. First, despite the Supreme Court having recently reduced the deference courts must give to federal agency decisions in other contexts, Kavanaugh wrote that courts should give agencies strong deference when reviewing an agency's NEPA effects analyses. Because these assessments are 'fact-dependent, context-specific, and policy-laden choices about the depth and breadth of its inquiry . . . (c)ourts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.' Second, Kavanaugh crafted a new rule saying that the review of one project did not need to consider the potential indirect effects of other related projects it could foreseeably induce, such as the rail line encouraging more drilling for oil. This limitation is especially relevant, Kavanaugh emphasized, when the effects are from projects over which the reviewing agency does not have jurisdiction. That applied in this case, because the board does not regulate oil wells or oil drilling. And third, Kavanaugh created something like a 'no harm, no foul' rule, under which 'even if an [environmental impact statement] falls short in some respects, that deficiency may not necessarily require a court to vacate the agency's ultimate approval of a project.' The strong implication is that courts should not overturn an agency decision unless its NEPA assessment has a serious flaw. The upshot for the project at hand was that the Supreme Court deferred to the board's decision that it could not reliably predict the rail line's effects on oil drilling or use of the oil transported. And the fact that the agency had no regulatory power over those separate issues reinforced the idea that those concerns were outside the scope of the board's required review. 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USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
There is no 'reverse discrimination,' people. There is only discrimination.
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In this case, Marlean Ames, a straight woman, filed a suit against her employer, which she said denied a promotion in favor of a gay woman, and later demoted her in favor of a gay man filling her role. The news media covering this decision has widely referred to it as a 'reverse discrimination' case, but that shows their understanding of discrimination is wrong. The unanimous decision from the court in this case is correct and offers valuable lessons for how the left needs to rethink its group politics. Reverse discrimination isn't a thing. There is only discrimination. The ruling overturns a 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that placed a heightened burden upon a plaintiff who is a member of a "majority group" in discrimination cases, requiring that the plaintiff shows 'background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.' Essentially, the lower court established different criteria for determining whether a single person had a valid discrimination case against an employer, compared with a person who was part of the majority. The Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional, sending the case back to a lower court. Opinion: Trump abandons his most impressive presidential legacy ‒ conservative judges Different rules based on different groups is precisely the kind of discrimination that American law prohibits. This is the spirit of all of American anti-discrimination law, including the relevant statute in this case, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents employment discrimination based on all sorts of characteristics. The only test in cases of discrimination should be if you prove you were discriminated against due to an immutable characteristic. If yes, you have a case. If not, you don't. There is no need to consider whether somebody is even a part of a minority group, or even how their discrimination plays into any sort of broader civil rights struggle. In this case, because the plaintiff was straight, the lower court added an additional burden for her to prove discrimination than if a gay person had filed an identical suit. Title VII provides far more detail on how one proves discrimination than my haphazard framework, but the spirit is the same in that there is no mention of one's group status being a determining factor. 'As a textual matter, Title VII's disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs,' writes Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for the unanimous decision. This case is a promising step, but legal neutrality on characteristics is not a consensus In the decision at issue, the court reached consensus, with all nine justices signing on to Justice Jackson's opinion. While unanimous decisions are not uncommon, what is interesting about this case is that the liberal justices have signed on to an approach typically favored by conservatives. Justice Clarence Thomas has long advocated for constitutional colorblindness, and the reality is that American law treats all characteristics equally in its application of laws. Opinion: Vance is doing his best to help Trump tear down the Supreme Court This very issue divided the nation's highest court into its respective ideological leanings just two years ago, when Students for Fair Admissions won against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, resulting in affirmative action admissions practices being outlawed nationwide. In that very decision, Justice Jackson authored a fiery dissent against the colorblind approach of the majority opinion. While that case deals with race and this one deals with sexual orientation, any protected characteristic should be viewed the same. Decisions like these make Justice Jackson's jurisprudence all the more frustrating. The same principles that demand neutrality of the law in some areas are suddenly thrown out the window when it comes to affirmative action. I hope that the recent case is a genuine change of heart from Justice Jackson and the other liberal justices, but I fear that this case is just another puzzling inconsistency from the court's junior justice. Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
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High court ruling on reverse discrimination a no-brainer: Chuck Rocha
(NewsNation) — The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected legal precedent that people in a majority group have a higher standard for proving discrimination. Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha agrees with the high court decision. 'Discrimination doesn't say, 'Oh, you have to be black,' or, 'You have to be a woman,' or, 'You have to be gay.' … Discrimination means you're treating me different,' he says on 'CUOMO.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
