Every year, the College of Education at NC State hosts Dining with Democracy, an event where students participate in controversial topics over a meal. This year, the chosen topics were the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and the Mahmoud v. Taylor case, highlighting whether a public school board in Montgomery County, Maryland had violated parents’ religious rights by introducing books with LGBT characters and themes to elementary school kids without telling their parents or giving them the option to pull their child out of the lesson.
When the case landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, the parents had called for a constitutional review called strict scrutiny, in which “required the school board to show that it advanced a government interest of the highest order and was narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” The Court had ruled that the school board could not satisfy strict scrutiny because “its policy to allow opt outs for other classroom activities undermined the assertion that the eliminating opt outs for the challenged curriculum was necessary to create an appropriate school environment.”
Before the case, the school had previously given parents the right to opt out, which was later eliminated due to concerns of “high student absenteeism, infeasibility of administration, and risk of exposing students to social stigma and isolation.”
According to our source who attended the discussion (and wanted to remain anonymous), “it was a mostly respectful conversation between different viewpoints,” they said. “The college leadership pretty much stayed out of the conversation while us students were given a side we had to defend, whether or not we agreed. After that, we had an open discussion of our personal views.”
The event organizers gave handouts to the participants that helped guide the discussion. According to the images provided by our source, the event organizers had used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to “reduce the reading level to 12th grade” to explain the First Amendment, the strict scrutiny review, the case background, and the supporting evidence for both sides of the argument. They posed this question to the audience: Should parents be allowed to opt out of certain educational materials for religious reasons?
The AI in the image had stated that “one way to prove the government violated the Free Exercise Clause is to show they used coercion. Coercion means someone was forced or pressured to change their religious beliefs or practices.” A simplified version of the concept which in truth is not as narrow and has broader meanings, such as “indirect coercion or penalties on the free exercise of religion, not just outright prohibitions.”
According to the source, there was a “mix of views” and “it was very respectful.”
Yet according to them, some of the opinions from the would-be teachers were alarming. “It is scary to hear some of the opinions of our future teachers and what they want to bring in the classrooms in public schools.”
When asked to elaborate, the source said that some of the future teachers said they know best how to educate the children in their room.
“So, when it comes down to reading books to their students, if the book contains lgbtq+ characters they do not feel the need to inform parents and that parents do not have the right to opt their children out of reading those books. Their main argument was that exposure does not equal coercion.”
